Business traveller? Check out this retro advert for City Airport from the 90s
As Londoners head to the polling stations to choose their next mayor, the fate of City Airport hangs in the balance.
While planners and politicians to and fro over London airport expansion, Green party candidate Sian Berry has other ideas, and pledges to demolish the whole thing if she wins the race for City Hall.
Hoping for the best and fearing the worst, an air traffic engineer at the airport has unearthed a very retro promotional film dating all the way back to 1993.
The nostalgic advert was rediscovered by Air Traffic Engineer Vic Abbott this week – who found a VHS tape of it buried in his attic.
It compares the journeys of two business travellers making their way from Zurich for a meeting on Fleet Street in London, and includes everything from an ultra-cool jet-skiier to some travel-appropriate guitar music to show the city's high flying finance workers from days gone by how easy it is to travel for business.
One such business traveller is Elizabeth, described as “someone who is in a hurry, but wants air travel to be the best” who “needs to be in the centre of London, ready to do business, without drama, without delay.”
Just look at those glasses.
Her journey from Zurich on Crossair, a predecessor of Swiss Airlines, is followed by a black taxi ride into central London, with the film pre-dating the Docklands Light Railway extension to the airport which was introduced 12 years later.
Meanwhile Geoffrey Campbell, “an optimist”, arrives into Heathrow allowing himself just one hour to get to his important central London meeting. The narrator quips, “some still haven’t learnt the best way to reach the City.”