February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Stepdancers pranced in front of the ticket counter. The airport’s ground workers greeted incoming Flight 133 with a giant water display. And Aer Lingus staff sliced a giant birthday cake into hundreds of pieces for the crew, airport staff and international travelers passing through Terminal E.
The festive occasion underscored the Irish airline’s strength in the Boston market, as it announced it was increasing winter service out of Logan by 33 percent over last year, scheduling 10 non-stop flights to Ireland a week, according to Aer Lingus spokeswoman Rosemarie Curran. In addition, Aer Lingus’ current offer of $99 each way from Boston to Shannon, available on its website, www.aerlingus.com, keeps pace with the airline industry’s efforts to stay apace of a changing industry.
Aer Lingus sales manager Patrick O’Connell and station manager Pauline Vaughan greeted some of their key travel agents in the region, including Jimmy Kelly of Crystal Travel, Dot O’Callaghan of Abbey Travel and Paddy Moroney of Medway Travel.
Phil Orlandella of Massport, the agency that runs the airport, presented proclamations in praise of Aer Lingus from the governor, mayor, city council and state senate.
The praise by local officials evoked the first Aer Lingus flight on Oct. 5, 1958, when Lt. Gov. Robert Murphy and Mayor John Hynes boarded a plane christened St. Brendan’s and headed for Shannon Airport. Four days later, the Bostonians returned, with Irish officials Sean Lemass, the minister for industry and commerce, and Robert Briscoe, the lord mayor of Dublin, in tow.
It was Lemass who envisioned the potential for aviation to help modernize Ireland after it broke away from the British Commonwealth in 1948. Lemass had been trying for a decade to organize a trans-Atlantic route, envisioning a “shamrock-pattern service plying from Shannon to New York and Boston,” wrote Irish journalist Seamus Malin, reporting for the Boston Globe. The first part of the shamrock was etched in the air on April 28, 1958, when Aer Lingus went from Shannon to New York. The Boston flight on Oct. 5, 1958, completed the pattern. Aer Lingus’ entry into the Boston market 45 years ago carried a symbolic significance too. TWA and Pan Am were already flying the Boston-Ireland route, but the arrival of Ireland’s national airline captured the imagination of Boston’s Irish-American population, which accounted for nearly a third of all residents. Most had never been to Ireland, and Aer Lingus, with its distinctive green shamrock logo on every plane, inspired many of them to make the journey.
Aer Lingus started with two flights a week out of Logan and flight time was about 12 hours, twice as long as today’s flights. A one-way ticket cost about $200.
Lemass saw the potential bonanza of tapping into a vast Irish Diaspora and developing a national tourism industry. He promised the Irish government that if it could provide “well-equipped hotels, properly developed holiday resorts, well-built tourist roads and easily accessible shrines of historic and religious significance, [tourism] would continue to grow.”
He was right. Since the 1950s, Ireland has become one of the most recognizable destination brands in the world. Today tourism is Ireland’s third largest industry, accounting for $36 billion per year, according to Tourism Ireland, the government agency that markets the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in North America.
Last year Aer Lingus carried 138,800 passengers out of Logan Airport, a marked increase over its first year of trans-Atlantic flight, when it transported 14,781 passengers from Boston and New York combined. The next milestone comes in 2008, when the well-traveled route across the ocean celebrates half a century.