Today’s Poster.

There are many ways of advertising airline flights, and safety, ease and secure comparisons are popular. Here’s one from Iberia, the ‘Lineas Aereas Españolas’, and the Spanish text reads “Vuele confiado come si pasara el ocean sobre un solid puente – garantia de seguridad”. A rough translation would be ‘Fly with confidence, crossing the ocean is like travelling on a solid bridge – guaranteed security’.

The idea of a bridge across the ocean is a good one, but the execution (by artist Olcina) is not so strong, with the airliner a Douglas DC-4, looking somewhat stuck to a bridge that has piers at either end that are impossible to climb!

One reason for the clumsy bridge design is to highlight the flags of the Latin American Spanish nations that Spain’s Iberia airline was connecting to, and the Spanish flag at the other end. One of the fascinating sidelines of this blogging project is the social history that’s unavoidable. From Spain, the South American nations are the important and connected part of the Americas, not the more northerly nations of the Anglosphere. It does depend on where you start, and where you are going to connect to as a result. Further, when this poster was made, in the late forties, early fifties, Spain was still under the fascist dictatorship of Franco, and in many ways isolated from European neighbours and many other nations, making this reach to ‘friendly’ Spanish aligned nations even more precious to the poster’s readership.

James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer.

This website gives the poster as 1955, but I think it’s earlier. Multiple online versions can be found of varying quality.