Flights Australia – Visit Australia today.
Distances from other population centers are so vast that it is imperative for Australia to have a well-functioning flight infrastructure, both for in-country and outside-the-country flight trajectories. Flights to Australia began in the 1930’s with the advent of the “flying boats" of Pan American World Airways, the pioneer in Pacific travel. These airplanes famously took off from San Francisco Harbor, generally landing in Sidney or Melbourne more than 24 hours later, after several stops in relatively small places, including Tahiti, Fiji and Samoa.
These flights of the 1930’s were real adventures, complete with flight nurses, well-dressed passengers (it was not uncommon to find the men passengers in tuxedos and the ladies in ball gowns), along with their retinue of retainers, servants, hairdressers and other lackeys who were always there to do their bidding.
Flights to Australia were therefore very expensive, particularly when one counted the entire retinue of people who accompanied the passengers. Although wages were cheap, and the general level of prices were falling in the 1930’s, the flights to Australia from the United States during that decade cost the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars, round-trip, per person in today’s dollars. It would be impossible to find many passengers today who would be willing to pay such high prices for such a trip, even if it were non-stop and done in a modern plane like the 777 or 747, which do most of the flying today.
Of course, today flights to Australia are offered by many airlines. Pioneer Pan Am ushered in the flight era, but the 747 and other long-range aircraft made Australia reachable in a way that it couldn’t be reached in the past. When the first 747’s came out in 1970, they were able to make it from the West Coast of the US to Australia with only one stop, usually in Hawaii. That gave way in the 1980’s to non-stop 747 flights from the West Coast, which took as many as 14 hours, but did not extend the trip more than that due to the need for refueling stops.
Interesting to think of how flights to Australia have improved over the decades, isn’t it!