The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world.
Airline glamour never promised anything as mundane as elbow room, much less a flat bed, a massage, or an arugula salad. It promised a better world. Service and dress reflected the more formal era, but no one expected air travel to be comfortable. It was amazing just to have hot food above the clouds.
One of the few luxuries left is travel. And the aspect of travel that is luxurious is not the movement, but the being there.
'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler.
The sensation of flying is incredible, and it's such a miraculous notion to go into the air and see the world without delineation.
Because it's cheaper and easier to fly than ever before, air travel is becoming democratized.
'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.
Aviation - and space travel, in particular - have always been especially captivating.
But I don't think the popularity of flying has diminished a bit.
There's something just magical about flight. Period.