Swissair for ever

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

 

Every now and again a book comes into the offices of the TLS that makes this job worth while. Swissair Souvenirs is just such a book. Published by the ETH-Bibliothek in Zurich, it’s a compilation of images, taken from its archives, that chronicle the airline that, surprisingly and “to the dismay of the Swiss people”, went bankrupt in 2001. It’s suggested that Switzerland’s non-membership of the European Union may have been a contributing factor to its demise.

Among the things I learn from this book is that the airline became known as the “flying bank” and that in 1970 it flew to 75 cities. Its reach was hugely disproportionate to the country’s size.

When I was a child we moved around a lot as a family, by ship or plane. I became familiar with several airlines, such as the precursor to British Airways, BOAC (commonly known as Better On A Camel), the Portuguese carrier TAP (Take Another Plane), TWA (Try Walking Across), or the Belgian national carrier Sabena (Such A Bad Experience, Never Again). Not absolute thigh-slappers perhaps, but the tags stuck. Swissair’s name resisted such ribbing, and it was always my favourite airline; maybe it had the best chocolate, or perhaps it was the most punctual. It certainly had a pretty logo, and flying over the Alps (below) was an added attraction.

Some early flights look like they were best avoided (below). Such photos are passed off without comment, but it's surely to the airline's credit that they are shown.

Along with technical specifications - there are photos of aircraft workshops and the like - most aspects of the airline’s activities were photographed, from food preparation . . .

 

to on-board catering:

Plane-spotting was clearly a popular national pastime too (below). Happy days.

Comments

[liz winter]

When did they take the propellors off?? Lizx

[Gigi Santow]

What a charming book you describe!

I have long been fascinated by the facts that travelling by plane used to be so much dearer than travelling by ship; and that plane travel (or should that be " 'plane travel"?) took so very long. From Europe to the Antipodes could take a week, passengers disembarking each evening to spend the night in a hotel (or even an hotel). KLM pioneered early flights down here: you did not mention a rude interpretation of their initials: perhaps there wasn't one.

My grandmother, who came to Australia in 1947, wrote a little piece about her experience of emigrating and settling that was published in a Hungarian magazine. She wrote (in translation): "The trip itself was unforgettable: within days we travelled from one side of the world to the other. Our first night stop was Cairo. Next came Bahrain, Karachi, Rangoon, Singapore, Surabaya, Port Darwin, and at last, on the eighth day there was below us the enormous metropolis of Sydney." My father, whom she and my aunt were joining, had flown to Sydney before the War. Either the route had changed or his trip was even longer: I am sure he told me that he had spent a night in Kupang (then Koepang, Dutch East Indies).

Just a few years later my mother flew to and from the United States. She saved a United Airlines brochure, not that "brochure" is an adequate descriptor: it is page after page of detailed maps (of bits of the U.S.) filled with cartoon characters briskly and cheerfully engaged in the activities characteristic of each town or city that had an aerodrome. Something seems to have been happening with this newfangled notion of flying. Could it be catching on?