Have you seen this vintage United Airlines Caravelle safety card?

The French Sud Aviation Caravelle was one of the very first jet airliners to enter service back in 1959. I recently came across a Caravelle safety card from United Airlines and it is quite interesting for a number of reasons.

Between 1963 and 1970, United operated flights called “The Executive” which were for men only. These primarily operated between New York and Chicago, with services added later to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Caravelle was frequently used for these flights.

Caravelle Safety Card

Some elements have not changed, such as the turbulence instruction. “Rough air (turbulence) at high altitudes, although infrequent, can be severe. When seat belt sign is lighted in-flight, please comply with the sign to prevent possible injury. Experienced air travelers usually leave their seat belts fastened all the time and pull them up snug when the seat belt sign is lighted.”

What is quite fun about the Caravelle safety card is this line of text. “Jet aircraft fly at high altitude and the cabin is pressurized for your comfort. If cabin pressure ever was lost, you would be breathing high altitude ‘thin’ air… so it is imperative that cigars and cigarettes be extinguished immediately and oxygen masks put on as shown below.” The other thing to note is just how much palaver there is around the exit doors and slides. Some you need to pull a slide bar down to the floor, hook it in to brackets and then people have to hold the thing as people use it. Even worse is the rear door, where you need to undo zippers, push knobs and pump handles – and then if it doesn’t work, turn around and try elsewhere. Not as simple as todays automated doors by any means!

Overall Thoughts

In some respects, safety has largely remained the same. Announcements are made to keep seat belts loosely fastened during flight to this day. The whole oxygen mask thing is also the same, pull on it, breathe normally, don’t panic.

Where the Caravelle safety card differs from today is mainly around the operation of the doors. Everything is much more manual and quite frankly you’d probably need to be holding and reading the safety card as you operated the exit, particularly for the rear door. Things have progressed there quite a bit.

What do you think of this Caravelle safety card? Did you ever fly in this era of cigars and cigarettes? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

Like planes? See my “Does anyone remember” series.
Flight reviews your thing? Mine are all indexed here.
Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Featured image by Jon Proctor via Wikimedia Commons.
Safety card via Facebook.