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Comment by bigDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

Commercial aviation in the 60's was quite safe. Of course there were plenty of issues but the truly dangerous era was the preceding decades. The 747 dates from the very late 60's for example and that's an extremely safe plane. Conversely the 50's was a much scarier decade as commercial jet engines were in a fairly experimental decade.

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The 60s is hardly the birth of passenger aviation.

Just among currently operating airlines… KLM 1919, Qantas 1920 Aeroflot (and several other European flag carriers) 1923, Delta 1925

Like, this is what the actual early days of the airlines looked like; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/St...

What a beautiful picture, thank you.

Fair enough. I was thinking purely of the jet era, since that's what we're still in, of course, and where the most passengers could be disturbed by smokers. Since you meant the real early days of aviation, I would of course agree that the concerns of passengers back then were much greater than someone smoking.

I believe in the 50s, commercial flights were propeller planes.

The first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, debuted in 1952, though it was retired shortly after due to mulltiple airframe losses due to structural fatigue.

The Boeing 707 entered service in 1957, and is probably most associated with the start of the jet age.

Most commercial flights were likely propeller-driven aircraft through the 1950s, but some jet travel had begun by the end of the decade.

Edit: I've spent some time trying to find stats on flights / passenger miles by aircraft type for the 1950s & 1960s without luck. That'd be an interesting add to this thread if anyone has the information.

I do find total passenger and freight data here: <https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transpo...>

As of 1960, both categories were effectively nil. Passenger travel hit 1,000 billion passenger-km around 1980, the pre-2020 peak was about 8,500 billion passenger-km. Data based on IATA.

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