Stories from the “jet age”How Flying Has Changed the World

31 January 2025, by Christina Krätzig

Photo: Fraport archive

When flying was something special: travelers check in at a new reception area at the Frankfurt Airport in 1974. This is the year that 12 million passengers took to the skies. Today, 60 to 70 million travel by plane. 

Photo: Fraport archive

In the midst of controversy over the runway west: security checks at the Frankfurt Airport, 1980

Photo: Fraport archive

Police patrolling at the Frankfurt Airport, 1979

Photo: Fraport archive

Reclining seats for passengers, Frankfurt, 1974. In this year, according to a contemporary report, the largest German airport had passengers and freight “reaching dimensions that only the large airports in America, Paris, or London” normally see. 

Photo: Fraport archive

A flight attendant welcoming passengers in 1955; this was the first time that an airplane in the publicly owned German Lufthansa flew directly from Frankfurt to New York, with 64 passengers on board. 

One rejects flying while the other takes a private jet from Hamburg to Sylt. Lauren Stokes, professor of German history at Northwestern University in the United States, explores the economic, social, and political dimensions of flying. The advanced fellow is currently living and researching at Universität Hamburg—University of Excellence.

Prof. Stokes, for the book you are planning, you are looking at the effects of the so-called “jet age” in Europe by focusing on 7 figures. These include business travelers, refugees, and even hijackers. Are you interviewing real people?

No, that would also be tricky because one figure isn’t even a person, it’s a freight container. These are archetypes that I use to represent changes in specific areas of the aerospace industry. For example, I look at a brief period in the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands tried to apply for asylum in western European countries. So-called “airport visas” became part of the enormous machinery and in the destination countries, airport clergy locked horns with the authorities because they were supporting immigrants. A few of these people lived for weeks, months, or even years in transit lounges, until new laws prohibited this kind of immigration. So now people in boats have once again come to symbolize refugees—hearkening back to pre-jet days.

Do you have a favorite figure among the archetypes you’ve chosen?

They all reveal significant changes or turning points in history. Some, for example hijackers, are quite exotic. Personally, however, I find the much more mundane business traveler the most interesting. For him—and in fact it is usually a “him”—flying is even more routine than it is for tourists. Taking him as an example, I trace, among other things, the meteoric rise of the private jet industry: a sector that hardly existed until well into the 1980s. Today we still know little about this, even though airlines like the Hamburg–Sylt connection or the Paris–Nice connection count among the most frequented stretches Europe. They are almost exclusively the province of private jets.

In the book you are planning, you contrast these frequent flyers with 2 non-flyers, correct?

Yes. On the one hand, I look at the heterogeneous and in some cases quite anarchistic group of anti-airport activists. Their protests, for example in Frankfurt or Nantes, have also changed our world. Not only did they try to prevent the expansion or construction of airports but even in the 1980s they were already publicly pointing out some of the problematic environmental issues related to the aerospace industry. This led, for example, to the prohibition on nighttime flights at most European airports, as well as to the emergence of my second non-flying archetype: the people who reject flying. They forgo flying in order to reduce their personal CO2 footprint.

What do you think personally about this?

I know people in the United States and in Germany who no longer fly. For me personally, it would be difficult: as an American who does research in Europe, I am among the 2 percent of the world’s population that regularly flies internationally, even though I do not count amount the one percent responsible for half of all global airplane emissions. But the protests from young environmental activists have inspired this book project. By exploring the changes that the jet age has wrought, I also look more closely at the question of what a world without airplane travel would look like.

The Advanced Fellowships Program is giving you an opportunity to work on your book without disruption for one year. How are you using the time?

Above all, it is great to be able to do such concentrated writing outside the normal day. Furthermore, a lot of European archives are reachable from Hamburg. Recently, for example, I visited the Frankfurt Airport archive, which was very fruitful. And I get inspired by the city. Ports like the Hamburg Harbor were, of course, models for airports. Hamburg’s free port was even the prototype for the first duty-free airport in the world, which opened in Ireland in 1947. I can write about these things best when I am sitting with my laptop in a café with a view of the harbor.