![]() Various accounts give that credit not only to O’Hare, but to LAX, New York’s LaGuardia Airport, what is now Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International and to San Francisco International Airport. ![]() ![]() Still, van der Linden says a jet bridge or Jetway (the trademarked brand name now often used to describe all passenger boarding bridges, in the same way Kleenex is used for tissues) was a “brilliant idea.”Īnd although wording on an exhibit panel about early air travel at the Air & Space Museum credits Chicago O’Hare International Airport with introducing the first ‘air bridges,” van der Linden admits that this detail of aviation history is “hard to pin down.” “The idea was to protect the passenger and get things moving more quickly,” said Bob van der Linden, curator in the Aeronautics Department at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, but the new passenger boarding bridge also meant air travelers began being isolated “from the romance and the excitement of air travel” in part because “they stopped seeing the airplanes they were boarding.” That was fine when the weather was good and all passengers were agile, and is still how it’s done at many small airports and for flights at larger airports that arrive and depart on smaller jets.īut sometime in the late 1950s, moveable, enclosed metal walkways offering a sheltered pathway between terminals and airplanes began sprouting up at U.S. ![]() In the glamorous “golden age” of air travel, entering or exiting an airplane involved a walk across the tarmac and a climb up or down a flight of moveable stairs. ![]()
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