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Joining jet set came with hefty price tag

antas's first Boeing 707 turbo-fan V Jet to visit Perth Airport in 1963. Picture: Laurie Worth

Fifty years ago was the dawn of the pure jet age for domestic travellers in Australia, with the arrival of the 131-seat Boeing 727.

Suddenly, travel times were slashed and Perth was only four hours from Sydney and even less from Melbourne.

The Boeing 727 streaked along at 900km/h - 300km/h faster than the turbo-prop Lockheed Electra it replaced and almost double the speed of the piston- engine DC-6Bs that still plied the route.

There was no in-flight entertainment; coffee and sandwiches were the only sustenance.

But it didn't matter . . . you were part of the jet set. It was the thing to do, if you could afford it.

The cost of a return flight to Sydney would set you back $210 - about six weeks salary.

Fast forward 50 years and if airlines charged you six weeks salary today to fly to Sydney return it would set you back $9342.

Government-owned Trans Australian Airlines called its 727s Whispering T-Jets and Ansett-ANA the System of the Golden Jets.

Both touted the whisper-quiet interiors made possible by the engines being mounted in the tail.

All the noise - and there was plenty of it - was left behind for airport residents to bear.

Up until the advent of jet travel, first-class was at the rear of the cabin away from the noisy piston engines. Jet travel changed that, with first-class moved to the front of the cabin.

And the ride was silky smooth, above most of the weather.

Not only were passengers swept away by the flash new jets but there was also an equally flash new terminal built for the 1962 Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth.

Before boarding, passengers and their friends could wander the gardens and sit beside a delightful ornamental lake with black swans.

And the terminal had tranquillity about it, with only about 200,000 passengers a year travelling through the airport.

Today, Perth Airport handles that many every five days.

If you were flying to London, there were three services a week on Qantas and Air India.

The routing varied by the day but Saturday's Flight QF741 to London on a Boeing 707 operated via Singapore, Bangkok, New Delhi, Tehran, Istanbul and Rome.

Competition on domestic routes was almost non-existent, with Ansett-ANA and TAA heavily regulated by the Federal Government's "two-airline policy", which dictated that both airlines bought the same planes and flew identical schedules.

In fact, it was so regulated that even the delivery from Boeing - or Douglas, with the DC-9s that followed a few years later - had to be on the same day.

The first to arrive into Melbourne, where both domestic airlines were based, was done on the flick of a coin.