Originally Posted by
Doors To Manuel
Maybe it is all children on this post, but those who might remember the late 70s would recall the perfectly legal transatlantic standby tickets. It was a reaction by the legacy carriers (at the time BA, TWA and Pan Am) to thwart the startup Laker Skytrain. You paid your money and then stood in an overnight queue outside the London town terminal and when these places opened around 0700 you either got confirmed or rejected.
A further development was the famous TWA 'Budget' flight,
Not quite children, because not only do I recall those standby tickets, or actually refer to their commercial downsides in my post just above, but I actually used them on multiple occasions on BA to Los Angeles in 1978-80. It had just changed over from the leased Air New Zealand DC-10 to the new BA 747-200B, plus a daily BA flight had been started at the same time to San Francisco, so there was plenty of capacity to California.
About £200 return. Not only that from London, but from any other BA domestic station as well by connection, so I once got an inclusive sector on the One-Eleven down from Manchester, buying the ticket at the BA counter at Ringway. On another occasion I walked mid-morning into the old BA overseas ground terminal at Victoria, there was a nice display board with the status of all standby destinations that day; all had space except Washington, marked "flight full".
Overnight queues were a feature of the Laker operation, and only on key dates anyway, such as all the US college students returning at the end of the summer.
I then joined a major worldwide corporate, whose UK office was near Heathrow. Headquarters in Detroit, and the MD was from there; there was of course a lot of travel to and fro. The MD had a Daimler plus chauffeur provided, old Reg who had the job for years and had seen many an MD come and go. One day we all got yet another memo about cost-cutting; this one was saying that travel costs to Detroit were to be reduced by using standby from now on, as in "his experience" there's always room. He was an accounting cheapskate, even he went economy. This was of course a significant nuisance as you now had to go to a BA office at 8 am to get the ticket for the afternoon flight.
We had a branch office in Newcastle, and the manager there came down to the London office one day on the first BA domestic. Walking out of Terminal 1, who does he see standing in the ticket counter queue but Reg the chauffeur. "Hello Reg, what are you doing here ?". "Oh, Mr X is going to Detroit this afternoon, so I've just come down for his standby ticket. Hang on a few minutes and I'll give you a lift back to the office ...".
I don't recall those TWA tickets at all, at least not from London.