The Jet Engine and Leisure Air Travel :: essays research papers

The Jet Engine and Leisure Air moveAir transport for European tourists got off to a shaky kill in the late 1920s.But it was to be thirty geezerhood before waste air travel was to appeal to anyone but the rich and adventurous. High cost, business organisation of flying and the absence of toilets in early air laners (an unfortunate combination) were the main deterrents the unpressurized aircraft of the inter-war years were noisy, slow and not especially comfortable despite the efforts of some airlines to turn aircraft cabins resemble the first-class state-rooms of an ocean liner. This changed fundamentally after 1958 with the cosmos into airline service of the Boeing 707, the Douglas DC-8 and the de Havilland Comet 4, aircraft were capable of flying fast, high and with hitherto vague smoothness. The kibibyte age had arrived. This paper considers this age and its impact on tourism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that while the r maturation in European waste air travel that took place in these years was obviously the yield of affectionate and economic change (more disposable income, a greater appositeness to take foreign holidays and the entry of new capital into the independent airline industriousness), there was also a critical additional factor. Thiswas the breakthrough in transport technology represented by the jet engine and it is on this aeronautical artifact that the papers main focus entrust lie. 1Technological change was crucial to the process of economic and social modernisation in both the 19th and 20 th centuries. New technologies of power generation, manufacturing, transport and communications changed the world and shrunk time and space. What is by and large termed Fordism grew kayoed of the mass production of automobiles to encompass a whole multitude of practices and institutions that now underpin modern Western society2. In the wake of Fordist mass production, a Fordist lifestyle of mass consumption rig in after 1950 and this i ncluded the international tourist industry, the single largest and fastest-growing industry in the world3. The technological change that triggered and accompanied this flare-up in tourist activity was the introduction of the jet engine. Indeed the jet engine has been as vital a part of social modernisation as mass tourism itself. The jet engines evolution and dominance in aerospace propulsion since 1950 is traditionally described in footing of the transfer of technology from military to well-bredian usage the turbo-jet grew out of the Second World War and the preparation for it, and was later installed in civil