Food in the Air and Space

by Richard Foss

  According to the Reuters Aeronautical News column on July 22, 1922,

  Excellent provision is made for the carriage of goods and the comfort of passengers has also received careful attention. In this latter respect it may be stated that a small folding table fitted in front of each seat in the passengers’ cabin so that the uniformed Daimler stewards are enabled to serve light refreshments during the air journey while sporting passengers with a gambling propensity indulge in the latest fascinating game known as “put and take.”3

  Food storage was not well thought out in the early days; when KLM designed a wooden cupboard to contain the alcohol and glasses served aboard their Fokker2 aircraft in 1921, they used screws to hold it to the bulkhead. The vibration of the aircraft shook the screws loose after only about fifteen minutes of flight, and the box fell into the lap of a surprised passenger.4

  There are only two known pictures of Jack Sanderson, the man who served the first inflight meals aboard Daimler Airways. In this 1920 shot he greets passengers who are about to board a De Havilland 34 with glasses of juice.

  Image provided by Graham Simons

  Passengers apparently didn’t entirely trust the airline to provide sufficient food and drink, as the Aeronautical News column carried by Reuters in October of 1923 refers to passengers on a flight to Cologne boarding a flight carrying their coats and flasks.5 The contemporary references to service of light refreshments onboard might be taken in more than one way, since there was great attention to the weight of everything. Passengers were allowed only ten pounds of baggage, and wicker was used for seats, meal hampers, and baggage racks to save weight. On one early transatlantic flight, from Ireland to New York in 1928, a newspaper account noted, “An indication of the care in loading at the last minute was the decision to reduce (pilot) Huehnefeld’s dozen oranges by half. The remainder of the food consisted of bananas, coffee, water, and chocolate.”6 There was a particular obsession with saving weight on long over-water flights; when Spanish aviators Ignacio Jiménez and Francisco Iglesias flew the 2,400 miles from Seville to Rio de Janeiro in 1929, they carried only a chocolate bar and water as refreshments.

  This undated Imperial Airways beverage menu is probably from about 1926 and shows the towns passengers might be expected to see out the window during the flight. It is interesting to note that of all the brands named on the menu, only Perrier managed to get their logo included.

  Image provided by Graham Simons

  The amenities weren’t the point on the first European air services—speed of travel trumped other considerations, and passengers put up with whatever they were offered. It didn’t take long, however, for the airlines that flew sophisticated travelers on business trips to start competing on the basis of service. A wave of consolidations had created four large carriers in Western Europe by 1925, when the British company Imperial Airways and the French Air Union decided to launch upscale services. Imperial used the “Silver Wing” name for those flights that featured a steward and included food and beverage, while Air Union called theirs “Rayon d’Or” (Golden Ray). Air Union’s advertisements referred to the plane as a “flying restaurant,” a bit of hyperbole that would surface many times in airline ads. It was a piece of marketing genius, because newspapers all over the world picked up the term. A 1925 article in the Daily Record of Morris County, New Jersey, gushed, “The first aerial restaurant car in the world is now engaged on the regular London-Paris airway service. A uniformed steward, the first aerial waiter, is in attendance, and passengers on the aeroplane can obtain hot and cold meals while flying thousands of feet in the air.”7

  The meal was described as consisting of hors d’oeuvres, lobster salad, cold chicken and ham, nicoise salad, ice cream, and cheese and fruit. Beverages were also offered with the meal and consisted of Champagne, wine, whiskey, mineral water, and coffee. Both services involved fine china set on linen-clad tables. This was problematic because nobody had thought to put raised edges on the tables, so plates and cups slid off in turbulent weather.

  In April 1928 Lufthansa upped the ante, offering both the first hot meals and the first culinary professional, as opposed to someone who also helped passengers board and carried their luggage. The meals were loaded warm in sealed thermos bottles and served by Arthur Hofe, who had been a waiter at upscale German hotels. He was allowed to focus on food service while a “luftboy” took care of nonculinary duties.

  Elsewhere in Europe, the Czech airline CSA and Belgian SABENA were flying international flights using French Farman Goliaths. KLM was flying once a week to what is now Indonesia in three-engined Fokker monoplanes, but little food was served aboard. All meals on the six-day trip were taken on the ground, probably because of the obsession with saving weight on a flight that traversed oceans and deserts. The aircraft had been fitted with extra fuel tanks, but still could only hold five passengers in a passenger compartment designed for twelve. Dutch airline historian Paul van Weezepoel stated that “the flight engineers in the early days also had the role of ‘steward.’ In the Fokker’s cabin was a closet or cupboard in the front which could be opened, containing tea, refreshments and some bread.”8

  This was the typical pattern worldwide, for the aircraft to stop for meals whenever possible, with all passengers deplaning to dine while the aircraft was refueled and serviced. Inflight meals were available on short services as an option, and only included on long journeys over water, mountains, and other inhospitable territory.

  In Europe, a densely populated continent with cities within short reach almost anywhere, this was easily accomplished. Pioneer air services in the United States and Canada were not so lucky, and some routes took detours in order to make meal stops at airports where no passengers were expected to board or depart. The unreliability of early aircraft and lack of weather forecasting technology meant that some flights ended in cornfields or on country roads, and until the mid-1930s airline personnel always carried railroad timetables so that if an aircraft was disabled the passengers could keep traveling.

  Though meal service came later to the United States than it did to Europe, flying there received a boost with the introduction of the first American-designed passenger aircraft, the Ford Trimotor. The aircraft was advanced for its time and could carry nine passengers along with a pilot and copilot (sometimes called a first officer). The aircraft’s range of 550 miles made long journeys conceivable, and its speed of 150 miles an hour was fast for its day. Articles praising the Trimotor’s all-metal construction and high reliability whetted the public appetite for air travel, and an airline called Transcontinental Air Transport (later to become TWA) was formed as a response. When the carrier started flying in 1926, the first officers were required to serve meals when not engaged in helping to navigate the airplane. As they had flying experience but had never served drinks before, they were taught to kneel in the aisle rather than bending over while pouring to minimize the risk of dousing passengers.

  Though the airline had the word Transcontinental in its name, less than half of the mileage across the country was actually flown. Passengers took a night train from New York to Columbus, Ohio; flew to Waynoka, Oklahoma, during daylight; traveled overnight by rail to Clovis, New Mexico; and then took another aircraft to Los Angeles.

  Stout Air Services, which started flying in 1926 with a much less ambitious route between Grand Rapids, Detroit, and Cleveland, was the first American airline to hire a cabin attendant, who was called an “air courier.” TAT followed shortly, calling their cabin attendants “couriers”—most were the children of the investors who financed the airline. Their duties included picking up the food from the local caterer, delivering it to the airport, and stowing it aboard the aircraft. Service was advanced for the era—hot bullion was served at breakfast with bread and butter sandwiches, and at lunch passengers were offered boiled chicken that had been kept hot in Thermos containers. The chicken was served with salad, fruit, coffee, and milk. In the afternoon,
tea was served along with cold sliced meats and fancy sandwiches; there were no evening meals because all flights were on the ground by dusk even during winter.

  In 1929 you could fly from coast to coast with fourteen stops or take a combination of aircraft and trains with only six.

  From the collections of Henry Ford

  According to the book Howard Hughes’ Airline: An Informal History of TWA, aboard a 1926 flight that left Columbus at 8:15 a.m., lunch consisted of cold meats, sandwiches, and coffee between St. Louis and Kansas City. Both that book and Frank Taylor’s High Horizons, a history of United Airlines, mentioned that aboard some of TAT’s early flights lunches were served on gold plates with lavender tablecloths and napkins.9

  TAT boasted that food service was catered by the Fred Harvey Company, a chain of restaurants that provided meals at railroad stations in the western United States. The Fred Harvey Company’s experience with catering for the railroads, which required attractive meals that were made en masse for passengers based on a train schedule, gave them unique experience in catering, and their locations in train stations were ideal for services in which trains made connections to aircraft. Since there were railheads next to airports across the country, the company already had facilities where they were needed and were ready for an expansion of air service. According to the Harvey House Cookbook, the venture with Transcontinental Air Transport was so successful and profitable that the restaurant chain was inspired to become the first airline catering specialist.10 They don’t quite deserve the name, since the company never made any special meals with inflight service in mind and didn’t open any locations in airports as opposed to railroad stations, but they did cater at other locations where there was both a train station and an airport.

  The managers of TAT understood the value of articles about their service, and frequently carried journalists who turned in glowing reports. In 1929, New York Times writer T. J. C. Martin wrote about service between Los Angeles and Clovis, New Mexico.

  The plane is fitted with ten comfortable chairs with adjustable reclining backs. Walls are decorated in gray and burnt orange with gay curtains at the windows. . . . Two hours after starting a steward served lemonade and cookies while the plane was flying high above the sweltering desert. At 1 o’clock small tables were fitted over the passengers’ knees and luncheon was served. The tables were draped with mauve linen. The food consisted of cold bits, salad, piping hot coffee, dessert and fruit. A packet of chewing gum rounded off the repast. In mid-afternoon tea and cookies were served. The company provides each passenger with a narrow map of the course on one side of which is a signed certificate that the passenger has made a transcontinental flight.11

  Similar service was offered aboard Western Air Express, which began flying between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1928. Northbound flights were catered by the Pig & Whistle restaurant in Hollywood and were served by steward Miles Davis (not the trumpeter). Unfortunately no known photographs of inflight meals survive, and the service folded after two years of operation.

  One of TAT’s main rivals was Boeing Air Transport, an airline owned by the aircraft manufacturer that flew routes from Chicago to the west. They used Boeing 80-A Trimotor biplanes, which were slower and had a shorter range than the Ford Trimotors but could carry up to eighteen passengers. These aircraft originally were supplied with a table with one supporting leg that fit into a hole on the floor with two clips to attach it to the side of the cabin. This worked very poorly, because plates routinely vibrated off the tables. Once the airlines started hiring stewardesses in 1930, a solution was found for this problem. The first women hired were all former nurses; they knew an old trick from hospitals, putting a pillow in passengers’ laps and serving the food there instead of setting up the tables.

  Boeing Air Transport developed a reputation for decent but monotonous food; pioneer stewardess Inez Keller Fuite, who flew the multistop run from Oakland to Cheyenne, Wyoming, recalled that “Regardless of the time of day, we served the same meal of coffee or tea, fruit cocktail, fried chicken, and rolls.”12 Boeing’s meals from Chicago were loaded by the famous Palmer House hotel and were generally regarded as the best food in the air on any American airline. Boeing’s management showed a high level of practicality compared to other carriers—they began with modernistic china and glasses, but so much of it was broken during turbulent flights that they eventually substituted paper plates, the first carrier to do so.

  All carriers flying inside the United States during this era had to deal with the laws regarding Prohibition. Alcohol was never officially served, but a cat-and-mouse game developed with nervous passengers who needed a little liquid courage and brought flasks and bottles in their coats. In stewardess Harriet Gleeson’s article in the excellent anthology Footsteps in the Sky, she recalled that Boeing aircrew had to watch for passengers who carried cough syrup bottles that had been refilled with whiskey.13

  Though early flights were oriented toward businessmen, organized air tourism was in flower by 1928, when London travel company Thomas Cook operated the first “air cruise,” a pioneering development in group travel. The Daily News of Perth, Australia, covered the announcement in their Overseas Aviation column as follows:

  The announcement, of the first air pleasure cruise organised by the Imperial Airways, Ltd., and Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son, Ltd., marks another step in the development of luxurious and rapid travel. For this pioneer air pleasure cruise, which will leave London on January 31, 1928, the Imperial Airways, Limited, will use one of the largest types of the famous “Silver-Wing” triple-engined aeroplanes. It has accommodation for 20 passengers, but the members of the cruise will be limited to 12. The crew will consist of the pilot, the pilot-engineer, and a steward, the latter in charge of a plentiful supply of refreshments, which will be obtainable at all times. Luncheon will be served ‘in the air’ on several of the long “hops.”14

  It is a measure of how much the technology of aviation and the expectations of passengers had changed that within a decade of the introduction of commercial air service aboard converted bombers, the word luxury could be used in connection with an inflight meal. It was a trend that would peak in the next decade with what is sometimes regarded as the most romantic era of travel, when a network of piston airliners and flying boats linked the world in a way that had never been done before.

  chapter 4

  The Technology of Heat in Flight before 1940

  The earliest food in the air was served cold, and though it was an improvement over eating nothing at all, the hot coffee that accompanied it was certainly welcome. Aircraft in those days were unheated, and even bundling up in overcoats and furs wasn’t enough to completely banish the chill. Passengers relished warm beverages, even if they had been made hours before and brought aboard in a thermos.

  As flights became longer, aeronautical engineers started to work on the problem of how to heat things in flight. Two technologies were obvious contenders, but each had their drawback. Zeppelins had electric stoves in their kitchens, but those flying passenger liners had a much more plentiful supply of electricity. The giant Maybach twelve-cylinder engines that pushed the zeppelin through the sky had plenty of spare horsepower to run generators; with the gas providing the lift, there was leftover energy for lighting and heating. Fixed-wing aircraft were in an entirely different situation, and there was great concern about diverting power away from propellers for passenger comfort. As a result, even though electric heating was a proven technology, it was rarely used.

  The alternative to electricity was to use some kind of fuel in a stove, and according to History of Flight Catering, by Peter Jones, at one time experiments were made using charcoal in an inflight oven. We can guess how successful that was by the fact that all subsequent methods involved liquid fuel. Though there were obvious safety concerns about any flaming liquids in an aircraft, the first food heating systems in aircraft used this method. The British Supermar
ine Southampton flying boat, built in 1929, was first to have a built-in stove that burned “methylated spirit”—otherwise known as denatured alcohol.1 (Flying boats were more likely than other aircraft to have a stove aboard, because they flew some very long routes and occasionally landed on lakes and bays far from civilization.) The Southampton was a military aircraft, and the first definite evidence of the use of an alcohol stove while in flight on a civilian aircraft was not until 1934.

  Alcohol was chosen over other fuels such as butane or kerosene because it is the most lightweight fuel, the least explosive, and creates no strong odor when cooking. It has the disadvantage of giving off about half the heat output per ounce compared to those fuels, and alcohol stoves are slightly harder to light in a cold environment.2 As a result, those stoves were primarily used for warming premade foods rather than doing serious cooking. The danger of any open flame aboard an aircraft was obvious, and the stove must have been used for the briefest period possible. In later aircraft this type of heating would be less practical due to the buildup of exhaust gases in an enclosed cabin, but on these early craft the windows could be opened and there were adjustable vents in the kitchen area.

  Aircraft manufacturers who were constantly trying to eke out better performance experimented with various other ways of heating food. Engineers at both De Havilland and the Boeing Company considered running the hot exhaust pipes from the engines inside the aircraft and channeling the heat around an oven. When this was tried, the disadvantages immediately became apparent; along with the heat, this design brought in deafening engine noise. There was the additional danger that after the pipes heated and cooled repeatedly they might crack, which could fill the cabin of the aircraft with exhaust. Another idea—bringing the high-temperature propylene glycol liquid engine coolant into the cabin instead of the engine exhaust—was tried on the Boeing 314 and at least one De Havilland variant and found to be no more practical.