Story here.
Of course it's not the same. EAL has been dead for nearly a quarter-century. Maybe this time around, Frank Lorenzo won't gut it the way that he gutted the original.
I have some fond memories of the Eastern Shuttle. But that was back before you had to buy tickets in advance and show up at the airport two hours before a flight. I remember the flight attendants coming down the aisle of that 727 with a credit-card embosser to collect fares, in flight. And if there were 200 people going to DCA and the airplane held 180, they'd drag out another airplane. For a long while, the back up was an Electra, though I never got to ride in one.
Sadly, it won't be remotely the same. You alluded to it with the "two hours before", etc.
ReplyDeleteBecause of my close association with aviation, and growing up in South Florida (MIA was Eastern's home base) I had an affinity for EAL. Moreover, as life events turned out, and some time after I had retired, my daughter married a fellow whose father was a former EAL captain. He was a Lorenzo victim and that name is not uttered kindly in that household.
I recently read a book, From the Captain to the Colonel, which lays out what was right about EAL and what was wrong. Surprisingly, while Lorenzo was last and worst of the bad actors, even The Captain laid some cancerous groundwork.
I never cared for the Colonel, either, and to this day, I avoid driving I-80/90 in Indiana which they named after him.
Good luck to them, but they'll be unrecognizable to us old timers.
LRod
ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired
I'm 68 and flew at age 10 or so, by myself, from SDF to Pittsburgh on a Connie and then over the mountains in an Agony Air DC-3 to McKean Regional to get to Bradford. Barf bags were essential on that last leg.
ReplyDeleteAnd I remember the Eastern Airlines paint jobs of the Great Silver Fleet as a sort of art. Most of the plane bare aluminum but then the logo and much else picked out in polychrome.
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-martin-404-eastern-airlines-lee-dos-santos.html
A distant nod to the WWII nose art.
And I flew in Electra (but, of course, never saw the wings flutter and fall off). And transited through the Saarinen TWAterminal at JFK, when it was still a cathedral to airflight, before it became a grungy holding pen. And flew the Atlantic in '64 with Icelandic Air...and was served meals on china with real flatware in tourist class.
Travel may be dirt cheap these days ($100 EWR DEN) but I miss the days when the flights had a certain ease and there were always plenty of seats.