Tourist flights

Tourist (aircoach) flights "have no round-trip discounts or "family plans" (when on certain days all members of a family except one may ride for half fare); they also have limited stopover privileges, and there is no sleeper service provided. There is only one steward or stewardess instead of the usual two. If you make a tourist reservation you do not have the privileges of late pickup of ticket and last-minute cancellation that you do on first-class reservations. One first-class service plane even has a bar.

First-class service is offered only by the scheduled airlines. Tourist or aircoach service is offered by both the scheduled and nonscheduled airlines. The difference between these two types of airline is just what their names say. The CAA (Civil Aeronautics Administration ) authorizes the scheduled airlines to land and take off at certain airports, to fly certain routes, and to have prearranged regular schedules for taking off, just like a railroad's. The nonscheduled airlines, or nonskeds, as they are called, are not allowed to provide regular service. They must wait until they have a planeload of passengers for a particular destination and then take off. Non skeds usually operate between places that are fairly far apart; for instance, from coast to coast, with one stop in the middle, or the length of a coast, as from New York to Miami.

Some people believe that the nonskeds are not as safe as the scheduled airlines. This is only partially true and only then as to some of the smaller nonskeds. The larger and wealthier nonskeds are in some cases even larger than the smallest of the scheduled airlines. The CAA requires all airlines, scheduled or nonscheduled, to maintain certain minimum standards as to the pilot qualifications, plane maintenance or repair, the load the plane may carry, and the weather conditions under which they may fly. But the airlines with large amounts of capital go far beyond these standards set by the CAA, because it helps them to give better service and maintain a better safety record.

For financial reasons the smaller airlines— mostly nonskeds—are sometimes not able to go so far. They must, of course, comply with the minimum standards. The cost of first-class service is fairly low—about on a par with first-class railroad fares. In some cases it is even lower. Reservations for all air travel, unlike railroad travel, the rule is that the passenger must make a reservation in advance. Airplanes have few seats and cannot accept any more passengers when full. (The largest airliner in use in 1953 carried only 88 passengers.) Whereas trains may have empty cars for last-minute passengers and pull empty cars and still make money, the airlines cannot fly empty airplanes and make a profit.