Jet age turns 50 for Qantas 

Source: ONE News

Qantas has celebrated a 50-year jet age anniversary with cup cakes at Sydney airport and a reminder that international air fares once cost over two years salary.

Passengers were served 1950s-style iced cakes before boarding QF73 to San Francisco, half a century to the day after Qantas operated the world's first jet passenger service across the Pacific, via Nadi and Honolulu.

"It was like going from black and white television to colour, from terrace to skyscraper, from analogue to digital," said Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce.

"Those Boeing 707s changed the way the industry operated, and what we provided to customers," he said.

The cost, however, was prohibitive to most.

In 1935 an air fare to the UK, for example, cost 120 times the average weekly salary.

Thirty years later, the 707 had reduced that to 21 weeks salary.

The latest A380s do the same trip for two weeks salary.

"I look back in envy," Joyce smiled.

"I would love to be able to get those air fares today."

In 1935, however, it took 12 days to get to the UK.

The same trip had been reduced to 63 hours by the 1950s, then 33 hours with the first jets and now 23 hours.

Retired Qantas pilot Val St Leon, 88, from Sydney, flew both the 707s and the aircraft they superseded, the propeller-driven, piston-engined Lockheed Constellation, which were limited to around 6,000 metres in altitude and a cruising speed of 540km/h, often in turbulent conditions.

"The first jets increased productivity tremendously, and reliability," he said.

"I only ever had one engine failure on the (four-engined) 707s," he said.

To find a Boeing 707 today, however, you would have to visit the Qantas museum in Longreach, Queensland.