Food in the Air and Space

by Richard Foss

  Don Magarell’s sophisticated kitchens allowed varied meals, including special selections for holidays. We can only wish a color photo of this St. Patrick’s meal had survived—every item but the lamb stew and crackers was almost certainly green.

  Image from NYPL online menu collection

  After years of having superior service aboard inferior aircraft, United suddenly had an unbeatable product, and revenues soared. Other carriers scurried to catch up, not by establishing their own kitchens but by contracting with outside caterers and demanding that they expand their offerings. They did so at high speed—in 1938 Grace Turner of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Mrs. G. Thomas French about the extensive food service operation that had recently opened at Newark Airport.18

  It takes rather a large staff and a very efficiently directed kitchen to supply food for several meals a day, to four airlines, each with its own timetable. Mrs. French’s husband and her mother both have an active part in the business. There are ten girls in the kitchen (including two cooks), and six boys who help with the commissary work. There is also a baker who takes possession of the kitchen after the day-force leaves, and works there alone all night. “Except for the sandwich bread, we do all our own baking—pies, tarts, pastries, creamroll desserts, breads, and muffins.” She pointed to the day’s supply—orange bread, date-and-nut bread, and rolled cinnamon bread, all very delicious. . . . Our airplane service special features . . . are particularly important. “And we also make a great deal of our salads,” . . . “They “constitute a part of the meal that you can dress up to look particularly attractive.”

  . . . Mrs. French is guided by the commuters. “We get to know them,” she explains, “and to expect them regularly on the same days. So we are careful not to plan the same dish for successive Mondays—or whatever the day may be.” Yet the fact that the food must be cooked in advance and kept palatable until it is served makes a real problem. This is a difficulty, however, that Mrs. French considers a challenge. The roast meats—turkey, beef, or lamb, for example—are the simplest to plan. Beef-steak-and-mushroom pie is also good. . . . Baked stuffed lamb chops are also very delicious and they bear up well under delay.”19

  Marriott expanded both the number of airports they served and the variety of their offerings, but some people were still critical about airline food, one person so much so that he started a catering operation to compete with the established entrants. In 1941 entrepreneur William K. Dobbs took several flights around the country to check the operations of his Toddle House restaurants. Annoyed by the low standard of food inflight, he started Dobbs International Services to open catering operations inside airports. His principal innovation was to completely standardize the recipes from location to location, which gave the airlines a more consistent product.20

  The meals all these enterprises planned for their customers offered variety and beautiful presentation when service elsewhere in the world was still stuck in the late 1920s. Even on long flights within Europe and South America, inflight food was generally monotonous, and most airlines still stopped to allow passengers to deplane for meals. This lack of progress may probably be attributed to the fact that most non-US airlines were money-losing monopolies; there was no economic reason to compete. As budgets tightened in the deepening Depression, and as nations prepared for war, neither airlines nor aircraft designers were thinking very much about how to deliver enticing meals to every seat.

  The exception as regards aircraft design was in Russia, where Soviet ideology demanded that state industries do everything that their Western counterparts did, if possible on a larger scale. The Tupolev ANT-20 aircraft certainly fit that description; when it flew for the first time in 1934 it was twice the size and capacity of any other land-based aircraft in the world. The gigantic and luxurious airliner had the wingspan of a modern 747, carried seventy-five passengers, and had the first dedicated galley on a land-based craft at which flight attendants had space to prepare and plate meals and clean used dishes. They needed the space, since those flight attendants boarded carrying cases of cutlery that were only sufficient to serve seven or eight people at a time. Since the aircraft had insufficient water to wash everything, all items were cleaned with a cloth soaked in water between each use.21 On short flights, meals were loaded already packed in cardboard boxes; usually these consisted of cheese, sausage, bread, an apple or orange, pastry, and chocolate. Tea was served in traditional-style glass cups held in metal frames called “podstakanniki,” an almost comically inconvenient method for airline service, and in this case too there were never enough for all passengers to be served at once.

  The quality of food on board was fairly high even though the serving staff were tasked with buying food just before each flight from restaurants in or near the airports. Since anybody who was flying inside Russia in that era was a party member or other important person, airports had a priority and got luxury items even in these times of severe food shortages.

  That first ANT-20 crashed after only a year of use when a fighter pilot’s unauthorized stunt at a Moscow airshow caused a midair collision. A sister aircraft served until 1942, when another instance of pilot error doomed that plane. Several others were under construction when the outbreak of war caused the Soviet aircraft industry to switch to building fighters and bombers.

  Most flights within Europe were flown aboard Fokker, Farman, or Junkers aircraft that were distinctly more modest in ambition. The sole exception was the Focke-Wulf 200 Condor, an aircraft that was designed with flights over water in mind. The four reliable engines could take twenty-six passengers to ten thousand feet, as high as a nonpressurized aircraft could ascend, and it was the first to fly between Berlin and New York nonstop. The power of those engines was so ample and the new generators so efficient that electricity could be diverted to boil water for coffee and soup, though apparently it was not used to heat solid meals. For a brief time, this was the fastest, longest-range, and technologically most advanced passenger aircraft in the world.

  It’s cocktail time aboard AB Aero’s Fokker F12 trimotor above Scandinavia in 1936. Modern airline passengers will envy the headroom and legroom as much as they do the white-coated cabin attendant.

  Image provided by historian Lennart Andersson

  A memoir of service aboard the Condors was captured by historian Rob Mulder, who interviewed two stewardesses who served before the war. In 1938, DDL Airways of Denmark (later merged with other carriers to become SAS) hired stewardess Doris Jensen, who remembered,

  There were spacious tables, very nice in stainless steel and the top was also crème-coloured in the same colour as the walls. They were easy to clean, when somebody spilled a drink. On the back of the single seats a table could be pulled down, while the smoking cabin and the first four seats in the non-smoking cabin had a table between the seats. There was sufficient space for cutlery and glasses. Once in the air and above the clouds and the sun shining through the cabin windows, it became really cosy and the stewardess had enough space to walk around, serve and help or converse with the passengers. The galley was situated in front of the aircraft right behind the cockpit, and here too we had plenty of space. There was a sink, and practically designed cabinets for glass, china and drinks. On board, sandwiches from the Kastrup Airport’s Restaurant Hammers were offered, served in nice boxes.22

  Fellow stewardess Hanne Hansen recalled,

  There was also a cabinet with cups and glasses, an electric water boiler and a small sink. Also a small cabinet with duty free product like cigarettes and whisky, gin and beer could be found here. It was nothing compared with today’s pantries in modern aircraft, but at that time the challenges were not as big either. If one could get a sandwich with ham or cheese, a glass of beer or a cup of coffee and a Danish pastry, the passenger was content. We had more time to look after the passengers, and that was needed as well.

  The British and French aircraft industries, which had led the way with la
rge aircraft in the 1920s, fell behind in the 1930s and produced no successful large, land-based transports. With most European aircraft manufacturers moving toward war production even before hostilities broke out, it was once again an American company that made a technological leap in passenger aircraft.

  Boeing had no aircraft to compete with the DC-3 for years because they had put all their effort into the model 314 flying boat, but when they reentered the land-based airliner market they did so with an aircraft that had major technological advances. The four-engined Boeing model 307 Stratoliner began service in 1940 as the first pressurized passenger aircraft. It was able to fly to 20,000 feet, twice as high as the Focke-Wulf Condor, and though it couldn’t fly quite as far, it could carry thirty-eight passengers while doing so, compared to the Condor’s twenty-six. At that height the Stratoliner could fly high above weather systems that other aircraft had to fly through. The fact that Pan Am, an airline that flew almost exclusively over water, had ordered them meant that the flying boat’s days were numbered. Like the seaplanes that Boeing had so much experience building, the Stratoliner had a large galley with electrical burners and water boilers—the first land-based aircraft built outside Russia to do so.23 The galley had an ample work space that was well laid out so that stewardesses could plate and serve food faster.

  Boeing actively collaborated with several airlines in the design of the Stratoliner, and at least once they sent senior engineers to fly aboard DC-3s and Stratoliners to make a comparison of the food and service. While researching this book, I found the handwritten notes from three flights taken in 1941 in Boeing’s archives and transcribed them. They make both amusing and instructive reading and are included after this chapter.

  The Stratoliners were in service for less than a year before the outbreak of war forced the cancellation of passenger service first to Europe, then to South America. The Stratoliner was the civilian version of an aircraft that became much better known in its military role—the B-17 bomber. Once the United States entered World War II, the passenger aircraft that were under construction were converted into C-75 military transports or B-17s. When the war was over, new aircraft that could fly higher and farther had the technological edge, and now that pioneering airliner is nearly forgotten. In its brief heyday it had previewed the technologies that would bring new sophistication to every aspect of flight, including aerial dining.

  chapter 7

  A Window into the Design Process

  People who use many products sometimes wonder if the designers ever had actually tried using them to see how they work in practice. This is true in aviation just as it is elsewhere. In most of the world, the people who designed aircraft and the crews who worked in them did indeed have little contact with each other. In the United States, however, longstanding relationships developed between aircraft manufacturing companies and airlines.

  The earliest was between Boeing and United, logical because the Seattle-based company started an airline as a market for their products, only selling it when a law made it illegal for manufacturers to own carriers. There was still a close tie between the two, and Boeing executives occasionally took flights to study how their designs worked in practice and try to come up with ways that things could be improved.

  The notes from one very important journey have been preserved in Boeing’s archives, and they show the way that the engineers pondered every aspect of the experience. On November 22, 1941, engineers John A. Herlihy, William W. Davies, and William C. Mentzer departed Seattle on an overnight flight that made six stops on the way to Chicago. The three men spent part of one day there before taking a TWA flight to Los Angeles, and then immediately hopped a flight back to Seattle. The first flight was on a United DC-3 configured as a sleeper flight, the second on a TWA Stratoliner, and the third on a DC-3 in daytime configuration. The engineers made notes about minute details of the experience, all writing in the same notebook. Since I can’t tell whose handwriting should be associated with which person, it is impossible to attribute any given comment, but all three studied every detail from the seat comfort to the way that trays fitted into the armrests. They estimated the relative weight of the luggage carried by women as compared with men, timed the steward who made up their sleeping berths, and compared the legroom of window and aisle seats. The first to make notes jotted terse comments about their meals aboard the overnight DC-3:

  Dinner beetleware cup—saucer—plate—food served in pottery (retain warmth) Juice cocktl. turkey-dress, asparagus, coffee.

  (severe vibration of coffee & table for two brief periods)

  Salad—small bowl, small cream cheese and crackers.

  Table not hard to set up, 2-spring pin attachments @ wall, Single leg inboard set in recess disk in floor.

  Two napkins for cloth clipped to table edge. Light silverware.

  Drink water tastes slightly & is a bit warm

  Before landing dressed for breakfast. This meal loaded at Omaha consisted of coffee, sweet roll, fruit juice, scrambled eggs, small piece ham and two l.p. sausages. Service was on table in compt. next to galley.

  On the second flight, someone who had a more chatty style of writing took over, with occasional interjections by someone whose spelling was decidedly eccentric:

  The appointments are very convenient except the TWA drinking cup is jigger-size which may be to avoid possibility of encouraging air sickness from drinking too much water. It tastes better than UAL.

  Breakfast: Seated in left hand reclining chair #7. A stewardess took my order and within 5 minutes returned with a pressed plywood tray (no attachments) which rested with ½” upset border bearing on inside edges of armrests. It had sufficient spare width to compensate for corner compression of arm rest & still not slip.

  Back to the subject of breakfast: this service consisted of fruit juice, toast, sweet roll, jelley [sic] and cream in jigger-size wax cups, 2 patties [sic] butter, coffee in tall cup with silver loop-frame bangle (Beetleware cup insert type), silverware in celophane [sic] envelope, scrambled eggs and two l.p. sausages. Others had breakfast foods. Very tastey [sic].

  Two different hands were also involved in writing about the flight back to Seattle:

  Lunch service is in a deep tray with removable lid. The depth for the purpose of bring [sic] the food close to the table level. Tables are also available. The tray lid is provided with openings in which are inserted coffee cup, salad, dessert, juice cocktail, salt & pepper in cardbd capsuls [sic], cream, jelley [sic], butter, roll, main serving beef & corn in pottery dish, silverware, candy mints, sugar cubes, & napkins. Galley isn’t quite convenient, similar but better than DST while stewardess remarks the 247 type is very different from which to serve.

  Though the engineers had a typically analytical attitude toward the service, they were not entirely immune to the mystique of flight. Just after an observation about the design of the armrests, a note reads, “On the prairie below a passenger train energetically scuttles along at a snail’s pace,” and after observing the outside temperature, there is an aggrieved interjection about the fact that the pilot has pointed out the famous meteor crater, but it can’t be seen from the writer’s seat.

  Two of the three men, Herlihy and Mentzer, would have long and successful careers with United, rising to senior management positions and influencing the design of aircraft for decades. They can’t have suspected that their little notebook full of analysis and unguarded thoughts would survive to be read over seventy years later. That document gives a valuable look at the spirit of collaboration that was to bring the world the finest passenger aircraft ever built.

  chapter 8

  World War II and the Postwar Bonanza

  (1941–1950)

  As the skies of the world became battlefields, civilian aviation around the world shut down and aircraft designed for luxury were repurposed for bombers and troop transports. Commercial flights in Europe and Asia ceased, and thou
gh they continued inside the United States, soldiers with orders could bump civilian passengers from flights. Business travelers with confirmed reservations were stranded across America, and most resorted to train travel even though it was much slower. The only continent that was relatively unaffected was South America, but even here the war had consequences—most airlines there used Junkers aircraft, and as spare parts became unobtainable due to the blockade of Germany, the reliability of flights suffered.

  Since the United States’ principal theater of action was in the Pacific, the government requisitioned all aircraft capable of flying there, most of which belonged to Pan Am. That airline was involved in the war almost as soon as it started; on December 8, 1941, only one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombed the Pan Am flying boat base at Wake Island. Operations manager John B. Cooke hid in a shallow ditch with two other staff members as Japanese aircraft roared overhead, bombing and strafing the island. When he emerged, he saw that the training the staff received had stayed with them even in this most unexpected of emergencies—Pan Am personnel were rushing into the flaming hotel to get the airline’s precious dishes to safety.1

  Pan Am’s staff were the most experienced in the Pacific, and they were put into service not only on Pan Am’s own craft, but on PBM Mariners and other military flying boats. Steward Sam Toaramina remembered that the PBM’s galley was nothing like the aircraft he was used to—they used paper plates and cups, and one steward served as many as thirty-five passengers. Toaramina remembers a rare moment of levity in the middle of the war, an incident that showed that even generals and admirals had no control over turbulent weather.