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Early airline posters raised the airplane to an icon of mythic proportions throwing its huge shadow across the land (see Figure 1). From the 1920s to the 1950s, the airplane was portrayed as the central poster image. Airline advertising followed the advertising patterns of the times. For example, early posters equated airline travel with being chic. Those in vogue who could afford travel in these colorful machines were featured waving at the airplane itself (see Figure 2), even after arriving at the playgrounds of the rich and fashionable. The airplane became a ticket to the playground of the world or romantic Eden (see Figure 3). Even into the 1940s and early 1950s, the airplane itself dominated poster scenes or was the ticket to leisure.
The coming of the jets in the 1950s changed all of that. The long awaited magic of jets—huge jets dwarfing the early propeller-driven planes—could have resulted in a greater domination of the poster image or space; instead, the airplane usually appeared in the 1950s and 1960s as a smaller abstract image or not al all.
Why? Several things. The love affair people had with jets and rockets in the 1950s and 1960s was true. It certainly showed in interest in viewing the earth from space. It showed up in the Oldsmobile 88 and its rocket logo, in parabolic contrail designs in everything from butterfly chairs to freeway ramp design, in airscoops on Mustangs, and in chrome Dagmar bumper projections on the front of Cadillacs. All depended on a dream of high performance jets or rockets with razor fins, coke bottle designs, stiletto noses, bubble canopies, and pods—and not on rather blunt-nosed, boring flying cylinders of commercial airliners.
The Boeing company hired industrial designer Walter Darwin Teague to make a speed design for the exterior of the 707 since it was so slow and boring compared to all those sleek jets setting new speed records in the public eye. Teague came up with a brown and gold paint scheme featuring a number of jagged lines and gentle curves meeting at acute angles to make our first commercial jet more like the jet of dreams, but paint alone wore thin.
When the exterior disguise did not really work, it was necessary to stress interior design, comfort, and service—to bring Eden or the garden inside, or elements of non-commercial jet design. Therefore, scooped window recesses became the norm along with bellbottom or coke-bottle trousers and long hair. JAL even featured a 747 “Garden” jet replete with hanging greenery in the lounge.
Women wearing see-through mini-skirts featured in Playboy ascended spiraling staircase lines to these inflight “lounges.” In these rare, interior poster scenes, the airplane receded into the background as people come forward. A few airlines even began to show racially mixed groups of passengers to match the changing consciousness of the times. Again the jet became background at best. And no wonder. As Joseph Corn said in The Winged Gospel, for the first half of this century the airplane served as the promise of progress. This technology would make it possible to dream of the day when the airplane would relocate everyone in Jeffersonian harmony with nature—living in the country and quickly flying to the city, thus reducing traffic congestion and gritty industrial cities. It would put everyone everywhere in touch like the informational superhighway, thus creating increased individual mobility, civilization, knowledge, understanding, and, in the end, peace. Such was the dream.
Instead, the cold war and Korean Conflict in 1950 revealed the airplane as a tool—just a tool—not a winged messiah. Later air bombings and Vietnam would confirm this even more. People began to live with fear from the air. They had to be convinced that their skies, as the new United Air Lines poster slogans said, were “friendly” and that jets at least were “friend ships,” places resembling a neighborhood cocktail party (or air-lounge) where friendships between people could blossom even if danger lurked outside the airplane.
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