March 17, 2024.   Crowd Pleasers.

I have this old Avianca Airlines postcard from the 1970s. You can see it above. It’s a picture of the first Boeing 747 to land at Medellin, Colobmbia. What makes the photo so striking are the spectators crowding the roadway at the edge of the airport — a great jumble of cars and people. Hundreds showed up to watch the jet come in.

On Instagram I discovered a similar photo of the first 747 to land in Japan. The caption says that ten thousand people jammed the observation decks at Haneda Airport for the occasion.

And so on. You can find any number of pics like these.

Imagine, today, ten thousand people making their way to an airport just to look at an airplane. It wouldn’t happen, of course. Not even the A380, when it made its debut, got anywhere close to the attention of the Comet, the 747 or the Concorde.

As maybe we should expect. So goes the evolution of technology, no? Jetliners were once a novelty; they aren’t any more. Not even the biggest ones.

Still, we’ve lost something. Beautiful machines that carry hundreds of people around the world at tremendous speeds, and it’s nothing to us. What a strange thing to take for granted.

 

Photo: Avianca Airlines, from the author’s postcard collection.

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