I don't disagree but prior to ww2's investment into R&D, infrastructure and labor force the economics of the industry were fundamentally different. The 1950s and early 1960s were to airlines what the 1990s were for computing.

I also wonder how much WW2 forcing people into planes helped to kill some of the fear of it.

I doubt flying in planes doing WW2 decreased fear of flying

The fear you speak of doesn’t come from the flying bit. It definitely let people know the flying tech is fairly safe.

Go read about Pan Am in the 1920s and 1930s & you will think differently. They were busy building global transportation routes with whatever technology they could get their hands on.

There's a really good docudrama on Amazon, Across the Pacific, that covers the early days of Pan Am:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0888MFZR2/

(Using a smile link while I still can... Change it to www if it doesn't work in the future.)

Yes, commercial flight goes back before the 60s. And sure there were the flying boats and so on. But that era of commercial flight was very limited, it was expensive, there were very limited schedules and so on.

Today I can get a flight to pretty much anywhere in the world, with maybe a day's lead time, and perhaps 36 hours of travel. Anywhere. In the world.

So, I think we can say air travel is no longer in "startup" phase. It is heavily regulated and very organised. (there are still startups in aviation, but they need a hook different to flying-you-there)

In the same way computers existed before 1960,and PCs were available in the 70's,but arguably its not till Windows 95 that it goes "main stream", and its not until the iPhone/Android era that "everyone has a computing device".

So my point is that the era of commercial aviation aimed at the masses kicks off in the 60s,not that the 60s is the first instance of commercial aviation.

You're confusing "air travel" with "jet travel". Jet travel was obviously a startup in the 60s.

No, he's right. Air travel was a luxury thing and super expensive until the 60s.

Only a very small percentage of the population in rich countries would do it.

Now people from Cambodia can fly for a large amount of money for them, but still, they are able to. In the past they just wouldn't be able to afford any kind of flight. Or even worse, they just wouldn't have flights or a publicly accessible airport.

Pan American Airlines built out a huge amount of infrastructure before WW2 to fly across the Pacific to Australia. They had fueling stops at Wake Island, Guam, Midway, and of course Hawaii. And they also pioneered routes to Latin America. The power and prestige PanAm had is really remarkable.

Remember Odyssey 2001? The Orion III Space Clipper to the rotating space station had a PanAm logo on it.

There was some commercial air travel prior to the ... 1980s ... but it was niche. Prior to 1960 was effectively nil.

Really, widespread air travel is that recent:

<https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transpo...>

1980: ~1,000 billion passenger/km.

2019: ~8,500 billion passenger/km.

Global population's increased, but by less than 2x.

If you go back to 1960, the chart is stuck to the floor.

I've had a call out for further stats with no responses yet:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34499787>