'GOLDEN AGE' OF FLYING: FOREVER IN THE PAST?

Dressing nicely won't bring back the 1950s plane experience, despite the Transportation secretary’s PSA, experts say

- By Gavin J. Quinton

Found Image Holdings

A PSA by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy leans into nostalgia for a mid-20th century flight experience.

Apparently nostalgic for the Champagne, pillbox hats and soft-lit glamour that characterized the skies in the 1950s and ’60s, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy urged airline passengers to dress nicely and mind their manners ahead of the year’s busiest travel week.

“Are you dressing with respect?” he asked in an online video. “Are you saying please and thank you?”

Doing so, Duffy suggested, would help to usher in a new “golden age of travel” — a phrase that harks back to the mid-20th century flight experience. The video was part of a Department of Transportation “civility campaign” that aims to tamp down on in-flight fighting and other “unruly passenger behavior.”

The public service announcement leans hard into earlier-era romance. It opens with Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me” layered over grainy airport clips as a narrator proclaims that “air travel is a miracle of American ingenuity. ... We respected the dignity of air travel. ... Flying was a bastion of civility.” Moments later, the footage jumps to passengers brawling in terminals and shouting at flight attendants before Duffy appears on screen urging travelers to bring bygone civility back to air travel.

Duffy’s call to action didn’t land smoothly. The video was mocked over social media and on “The Daily Show” last weekend, when host Ronny Chieng asked, “Are manners the most important thing for the FAA to be dealing with right now?”

According to historians and industry analysts, not really.