When I was seventeen years old I took my first trip to Europe, a British Airways itinerary leaving from Detroit’s old international airport, connecting in London and then finally arriving in Paris some 15 hours later. Drunk on the fumes of international travel, I asked if I could visit the pilot when we boarded our second flight, and to my surprise, the flight attendants came back and brought us up to the cockpit while we were somewhere over the English Channel.
Sadly, I was one of the last civilians to see the inside of a cockpit during a commercial flight — it’s just too dangerous to give tours in this new destructive world.
In my fifteen years of travel I’ve seen the industry shaken up like a bag of scrabble chips a dozen times, from crazy TSA edicts to airlines that went bankrupt before even flying to blogger flight attendants writing books about the lives that they live. Perhaps that’s why I enjoy the art of travel so much — because it’s always full of surprises.
Today at Gadling we’re taking a special theme day to talk about travel old and new — to take a look back at the way travel used to be and how it compares to the crazy world that we live in today. We hope that you can join us and our partners at AOL travel for the journey, we’ll be publishing articles throughout the theme all day, and you can follow along at this link.