Flying PSA Airlines from San Diego to Las Vegas in 1978


Although I'm actually old enough to have taken a PSA flight, I never did, so I thought that it would be fun to it in my imagination with you today. And this is all inspired by an image that I just found on the Duke University website, ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions). They have a scholarly attitude towards all of this, and I'm just doing this for fun. Let's time-travel to 1978.


The first thing that I want to do, before we start talking about our flight, is to look at the cars. I'm assuming that's your Capri, and of course that's my Mustang. I don't know who owns the VW bus, or the Maverick.


I lived in California in the 1980s and I definitely remember the planes with the smiles painted on them, but I had to look up what PSA meant, it's Pacific Southwest Airlines. There's a PSA airlines nowadays, but it's not the same one. This one went out of business in 1988.

Ready to board? Smoking or non-smoking section? I'm not kidding, they had people who smoked sit in one part of the plane and us non-smokers sit in another part. Of course the cabin just filled up with smoke. I wonder if a meal will be served on such a short flight? That's OK, here comes the stewardess with the drink cart. Yes, they were called stewardesses in those days, not flight attendants. Part of the glamor of flying is that pretty girls were chosen for the job, the same way that pretty girls work at Hooters nowadays. Seems silly, but there it is.

Security? X-Ray machines? No, we just hope that everything will be OK. And if the flight is hijacked, we'll get to go to Cuba. Should be an interesting flight! Stewardess! A gin-and-tonic for me. What's yours?
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