by Richard Foss
Admiral Nimitz was on my plane when we had a downdraft, just when I was serving him coffee. That coffee went up to the ceiling, like a black ball, and it hung there for a minute and then all came down on his nice clean white uniform. He laughed like hell, like that was the funniest thing he’d seen in his life.2
Qantas performed the same function, transporting military personnel both in flying boats and in converted Liberator bombers. The latter were used to fly the longest unbroken passenger flights in history—twenty-seven hours from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Perth, Australia. No stewards were on board to pamper them—passengers prepared their own meals and coffee while in the air for over a day. On arrival they were presented with a certificate enrolling them in the “Order of the Double Sunrise”—an attempt by the crew to celebrate flight even in the midst of the war.3
The crews aboard bombers and submarine chasers who endured flights nearly as long did so in even less luxury, though there were differences in the British and American military. Some of the long-distance bombers operated by the RAF had stoves aboard, and it became the duty of crew who were only busy during actual combat to prepare meals. Archivist Peter Elliott of the RAF Museum was once told by the commanding officer of the Operational Training Unit that “the main reason rear gunners failed the course was that they couldn’t cook!”4 Meal preparation on these aircraft was limited to heating canned food on a hot plate, so their inability to do so says a lot about the domestic skills of Englishmen during this period. Elliott noted that the British military apparently didn’t think that hot and appetizing crew meals were very important, then or later, and wrote, “Bomber crews in the Second World War certainly had to rely on sandwiches and coffee. . . . Even the Vulcan, which continued in service until 1983, seemed only to have facilities for heating cans of soup or similar food.”
American aircrews were pampered by comparison, motivated by studies that suggested that morale and combat readiness were enhanced by good hot meals. The US military studied the problems of inflight food for aircrews and passengers, and in 1944 produced a document called the Flight Feeding Manual that detailed the various strategies they had tried.5 These were the first trials of frozen food for inflight catering, so the report is a landmark in the field. The meals were created at the request of the Naval Air Transport Service by the W. L. Maxson Corporation of New York, and included either ham, veal cutlets, or beef stew along with two vegetables, all partially cooked and then quick-frozen so they could be finished in flight. They were cooked in a special appliance called the Maxson Whirlwind oven, the first convection oven that used heat circulated by fans. The whirlwind ovens didn’t get very hot, only about two hundred degrees, but they cooked six meals at a time in fifteen minutes while a conventional oven would have taken thirty. The resulting meals were called “Strato-Plates” and were judged superior to canned food.6
The other contender for hot inflight food was the final iteration of the quicklime chemical heaters invented in the ballooning era, called “hotcans.” Preparation simply involved puncturing the chemical seals on the cans, and they could be activated anywhere in a large aircraft so nobody needed to leave their duty station. The principal drawback was that they did not get very hot, a crucial flaw in the unheated aircraft at altitudes where the temperature could be below freezing. They also had to be activated and opened with two hands, and pilots complained that this couldn’t be accomplished at all while wearing the flight gloves that were mandatory at high altitudes.
The other types of meals that were tested included so-called packet meals, which were cold snack packs containing “one can of meat, one of fruit, one dessert unit with cookies and confections, and one B-unit can with five round crackers.” These packet meals were manufactured to a spec called “Food Packet, Individual, Combat, In-Flight (IF-2),” and were designed so they could be opened with one hand by a person wearing gloves. The effort in developing these packets was not wasted, since they were repurposed into the emergency rations that are still used today.7 Though these studies were carried out during wartime, the technologies developed for storing, packaging, and serving frozen food had far-reaching consequences in postwar civilian flight.
Conflict always is a spur to technology, and often items developed for military use have peaceful applications. The flight characteristics of new aircraft in 1945 were vastly superior to those of 1940, but the technology of cooking and serving food aloft was right where it had been. With the exception of those studies late in the war by the US Air Force, considerations about the flavor of inflight meals had been ignored.
The first airliners to debut in 1946 did have many new features, but all had been designed before the war. The DC-4 was actually developed in 1938, in a unique collaboration between the aircraft manufacturer and several airlines. Douglas Aircraft solicited design ideas from engineers and executives from United, American, Eastern, Pan Am, and TWA while in the planning process, and the resulting craft was far easier to work in than anything that came before it. The galley had been moved to the center of the aircraft instead of being located in the tail section, which made it easier and faster to load and serve meals. United’s Don Magarell is generally given credit for this innovation.8 (Delta Airlines’ chief engineer, J. F. Nycum,9 created a variant on the design that was used on converted military aircraft.) The move sped up inflight service immensely because stewardesses had to walk only half as far over the course of the flight, and it was copied on almost all future airliners.
The DC-4 set a new standard for passenger comfort, and for the first time food was served in the compartmented trays that are now standard. The passengers aboard this flight in 1947 are all enjoying Portuguese wine with their meals.
Image provided by TAP Portuguese Airways museum
This change was important because the speed of the aircraft had increased and would continue to do so. Though the DC-4 could only fly at 215 miles per hour, barely better than the DC-3, other new airliners flew far faster. The Lockheed Constellation, also a prewar design but one that had been improved in light of new technology, carried 95 passengers at 320 miles an hour, and when the DC-6 first went into commercial service in 1946 it was capable of carrying 102 passengers at the same speed. The result was that flight staff had to serve twice the number of people in two-thirds as much time. Instead of leisurely meals being a way to interrupt the boredom of a long flight, there was pressure to serve food and beverages before trays had to be taken away for landing. Food had become expected on every journey—an Eastern Airlines stewardess remembered that in 1946, even on a flight from Washington, DC, to Richmond, Virginia, that took only twenty minutes, sandwiches and drinks were served.10
The speed of the Lockheed Constellation allowed airlines to boast of the brevity of flights, and Capital Airlines was one of many that boasted about the elegance of the experience on board. This ad enthused about the “Cloud Club” lounge aboard their flights.
Airline bankrupt 1959
These new aircraft, as well as those that would come from other manufacturers in coming years, faced formidable competition in the American market: thousands of war surplus transports were sold very cheaply at the end of hostilities. These, along with prewar passenger planes, ended up in the hands of pilots who started new airlines to compete with the major carriers. The new entrants operated their obsolete, slow planes with few amenities on what was technically a charter basis, to avoid the regulations of the scheduled airlines. They came to be called “nonscheduled services” or “non-skeds,” and were a major irritant to conventional airlines. These companies arranged flights that literally operated without any schedule—the carrier would announce a flight between two cities, and whenever enough passengers showed up, the aircraft would take off. Carriers like California Eastern Airlines, Peninsula Air Transport, and Blatz Airlines charged little more than the railroads, and their unpredictable arrivals and departures caused traffic jams at airports across America. The tie-ups harmed the sche
duled carriers more than the non-skeds, since passengers who paid a fraction of the price were willing to put up with the inconvenience, but passengers booked seats on scheduled flights with an expectation that they would actually arrive on schedule.
The non-sked carriers couldn’t afford flight kitchens with their shoestring budgets and had such irregular operations that major caterers weren’t interested in their business. Faced with the need to provide some kind of food on their longer flights, some returned to a catering model not practiced since the early 1920s—charging for meals. This was documented in a 1948 book on the theory and practice of the industry called simply Airline Operations, by R. Dixon Speas.11
Food service in a transportation service can be administered in three ways each of which is applicable to airline service as follows:
1. Complementary (sic) (usual airline service feature). Food service prepared either by the airline or a caterer and placed on board in sufficient quantity for total passenger and crew.
2. Charge. Same as complementary except quantity placed on board for passengers according to their orders. The food is then delivered on a cash or food ticket basis. Has been practiced in the past by some airlines.
3. Concession. Food service is provided by concessionaire who gains sufficient profit in sales to passengers to pay fees to the transportation company for servicing privileges. In the instances of Airlines the concessionaire principle can reduce operating cost for low-cost service by elimination of cabin attendant expense (Concessionaire would have responsibility of providing qualified attendants), and increase revenues by concession fees.
The third option is the most surprising; this is the only instance I have found of non-airline employees serving aboard airlines as service staff while not paid by the carrier. We can only guess about how well this worked from the fact that it was never tried again.
Implementation of new traffic control technology soon improved the on-time reliability of the American airline system, and the scheduled carriers fought the non-skeds in the area they knew best: service. An article in the Christian Science Monitor in 1948 called “Food and Fun Are Free” (the title of which pointedly contrasts the non-skeds’ pattern of charging for meals and the spartan nature of their cabins) included a paean to the new world of airline food.
Those tasty meals you eat on flights from Boston to points around the world have become so much a part of flying—an anticipated treat by travelers taking the air route—that airline heads here see little danger of aeronauts having to bring along their own victuals for a sky hop anytime in the near future. Hundreds of meals, ranging from short snacks for “short hoppers” to full course meals for overseas and transcontinental trips, are prepared by three catering houses at Boston’s big air terminal. At Sky Chefs, Boston unit of a nation-wide chain of airline caterers, cooks, salad makers and bakers work almost around-the-clock to provide meals on some 50 flights a day . . . the Sky Chefs staff starts to work at midnight to prepare meals for “breakfast flights” that leave Logan Airport between 6 and 8 a.m. . . . Typical breakfast on an hour hop from Boston to New York offers fresh fruit, sweet rolls, hot drinks or milk, but there’s more substantial fare for the morning traveler who soars off for far points. Long trip breakfasts also include scrambled eggs and ham. Dinner on a long flight like a jaunt from Boston to London includes soup, olives and celery, filet mignon, fried chicken, or pork chops, vegetables and salad, hot rolls, hot drinks or milk. . . . Sky Chefs first cook the food as short a time as possible before the flights leave; then place the cooked meals in an electric oven till plane time, when the food is rushed to the skyliner and given more electric heating at the same voltage used in the kitchen. As a result, sky meals do not suffer from being dry, mushy, lukewarm or cold. . . . The caterer works on a deadline like a newspaper man, too, for planes don’t wait for tardy cooks and the caterer’s men must stow their food aboard the liner 15 minutes before it leaves. . . . Faster airline speeds, incidentally, are greatly complicating the caterer’s problems. Where there was formerly time to serve a meal between New York and Boston, it’s about all a stewardess can do now to just hand around cookies and a beverage.12
As enthusiastic as this article was about the quality of inflight meals, the next phase of innovation was on the way even as it was written. TWA was the first carrier to intensively study the use of frozen food, building on the work of the Naval Air Transport Service during the war. They experimented with the degree to which meats and vegetables should be separately cooked before placing them in the trays, the percentage of water in stocks so they would be tasty at high altitude, and made the first systematic study of how spices were perceived at high altitude. The next section of this book deals with their findings in detail; suffice it to say that they set a standard for airlines worldwide.
TWA had just obtained their first international routes, and they and Pan Am both introduced frozen food to their overseas operations in 1947, with mixed results. The book Inflight Catering Management notes that “some catering chefs believed that frozen food was a threat to their job security”13—it is not hard to believe that they may have deliberately tried to sabotage the system. The same source notes that
many of the early products that appeared on the market were of inferior quality and gave the system a bad reputation. . . . The problem was not the system, but the quality of food products being prepared for the system. . . . These concerns with meal quality caused Pan American to seriously consider eliminating this frozen meal concept in 1948. . . . However, to revert to locally prepared meals at that time would have meant the development of flight kitchens in such areas as Damascus, Syria; New Delhi and Calcutta, India; Bangkok, Thailand; and Johannesburg, South Africa. At the same time, they were in need of new aircraft to expand their fleet; so funding and development of inflight kitchens in these rather remote areas was not economically feasible.
Another reason frozen food caught on with airline management was that it eliminated a certain kind of wastage: when a fresh meal was made but a flight was canceled, the food made for that flight could not be held for later. Every frozen meal that was made was eventually used, and the savings was substantial. The only people who were unhappy with the change were the workers at the local caterers who had been taking unused airline meals home with them as a perk of their job.
Pan Am and TWA developed their own flight kitchens in New York and Paris to supply meals on their flights, and these were shipped around the world to supply their aircraft. It was the first international distribution of prepackaged airline meals, and other airlines would eventually adopt this model. Pan Am’s adoption of this technology had another effect on the ground. In 1953, an American food salesman named Gerry Thomas visited Pan Am’s flight kitchens in Pittsburgh and was struck by the aluminum tray that was used to hold meals. He requested a sample of the container and took it back to his company, Swanson Foods, which was at that time trying to figure out a use for 520,000 pounds of turkey that they had bought in the expectation of robust Thanksgiving sales. Thomas bent the tray into three compartments and suggested to his company that the turkey be placed in one section, mashed potatoes and peas in the other two, and it should be sold to the public rather than airlines. The world’s first TV dinner had been created, and fast meals would never be the same.14
British Overseas Airways Corporation, the successor to Imperial Airlines, also explored using frozen food on a large scale, recognizing that their existing catering system was behind the times and delivering a substandard product. They spent two years studying the subject, but were strangely slow to implement it, so the honor went to Qantas. In his book Wings to the World, a history of Qantas, Sir Wilmot Hudson Fysh noted that
Lyon’s of London were the leaders in the early days of frozen food catering. In their factory outside London they erected a mockup where quick frozen meals were served to potential customers who incredulously handled solid bricks of soup which quickly turned into pipi
ng hot liquids steaming up from the plate.15
A letter from the Qantas archives captures their findings succinctly. Sent to the managing director from the catering superintendent (signed only “R. Edwards”), dated September 30, 1947, it reads:
Recently I have had the opportunity of studying a concise and confidential report of BOAC on quick frozen food after they had experimented for nearly 2 years, attached is a list of facts at the conclusion of the report.
1.Only the best quality foods should be cooked for freezing.
2.Food having a highly liquid content requires a stabilizer such as pectin.
3.The use of wine in sauces is recommended.
4.Food for freezing should be slightly undercooked.
5.Packaged food must be handled with the greatest care.
6.The best temperature for freezing precooked food is -29°F.
7.Food, when cooked must be cooled as fast as possible.
8.Precooked food must not be thawed, but heated straight away.
9.Food once removed from the freezer must never be refrozen.
10.Food when heated must be served at once.
11.Piecrust should be frozen and separately treated.
12.Cream and custard should not be frozen.
13.Dishes containing salt pork will keep much better if cured pork is used instead.
The response to this letter included a warning to keep things confidential, and noted that “QEA are first in the field in the aviation sphere to adopt this new principle for the storage of food and we should use every item of publicity . . . to retain leadership in this regard.”
It is possible that the person who wrote this letter did not know that the ideas had been developed by TWA and BOAC, though Qantas may have been the first to actually use this technology rather than merely research it.16 Whoever served frozen food in the air first, these letters showed that Qantas was aggressively pursuing leadership in food quality. Some of their other attempts may seem comical to modern connoisseurs, as in this exchange of letters from 1947 between the managing director and catering superintendent.
