Adventures in economy class

This week sees the 50th anniversary of the first budget flight. Simon Calder reports from the no-frills front line, on cleaning the meal trays and queueing for the 07:00 to Friedrichshafen

The destination on the boarding pass of the person who is scaling barriers like a weary hurdler, his face an angry scarlet, reads "AAR". "The transport system in this country is completely screwed up," he pants, thrusting his way to the front of the queue for security at Stansted airport. The four-times-an-hour Stansted Express has degenerated into an every-40-minutes-all-stations-to-oblivion mystery tour, jeopardising his flight to Aarhus in Denmark.

"EIN". Here comes another one, more politely this time, a Dutch woman asking if anyone would mind if she went to the front of the line. Go ahead, lady – we've all been there. Been late for planes, that is, not been to EIN. That's Eindhoven, Holland – one of the 40 new no-frills routes opening from Britain in the first half of this year.

Don't try to hurry the security staff, mind. When I used to frisk people at Gatwick (as a job, not a hobby), the rule was: the hastier the passenger, the slower the search. But Ryanair flight 2001, destination Friedrichshafen, is running late, so I'm in no rush to get through the checks.

All sorts of people are flying these days: one in 20 of Stansted's passengers is classified by BAA as belonging to socioeconomic class DE. One in 10 is classed C2. One in five is a business traveller. And one in the 15 million passengers who will use the Essex airport this year is Mike Reid, alias Frank Butcher in EastEnders.

Seven years ago, when no-frills flying was unknown in Europe, passengers might make unkind inferences if they found themselves flying to Malaga in the same aircraft cabin as a soap actor – had he fallen on hard times? But today, with soccer stars sharing armrests with students, one size fits all.

Fifty years ago this week, a now-defunct US airline did the world a favour when it introduced the original two-class system. Prior to 1 May 1952, only first class was on offer. One size fitted very few: flying was for the glamorous, famous and wealthy. The trouble was, there were not always enough of them to go around. So Trans World Airways took the then-revolutionary step of trying to lure the non-filthy rich on board by cutting fares to the level where you needed to be only moderately well-heeled.

TWA coined the term "tourist class" for the second-rate space behind the curtain. The name was telling; then, as now, the word "tourist" had a faintly pejorative tone, with the implication that any serious starlet or executive would never condescend to travel in anything but first. Partly because of the demon it had released – cheap seats for all – TWA eventually went into financial freefall. A year ago, the pioneering airline was taken over by the world's largest carrier, American Airlines, which has now extinguished the brand. TWA is dead; long live tourist class. We're all tourists now.

Coincidentally, the day after TWA's bold move, the jet age began – at Heathrow airport. On 2 May 1952, the Comet took off for Johannesburg. Passengers could fly twice as fast and high as before. The first civil jet was a heroic failure; one year after that first take-off, hidden metal fatigue led to three fatal crashes in 12 months. The designers of the Boeing 707 learned from the experience to build a bigger, safer plane with plenty of room at the back. The term "economy" was brought in to describe us penny-pinching passengers.

Even so, the market was not exactly flooded with bargains. Airlines were mostly run by governments for the benefit of national prestige, foreign policy and staff. High fares prevailed. With the state coffers obliged to meet any deficit, there was little incentive for efficiency. A web of anti-competitive restrictions meant that the private sector struggled to survive.

I began working at Gatwick airport in the Seventies as a cleaner, tidying planes for everyone from Laker Airways (collapsed 1982) to Dan-Air (ditto, 1992). At the time, 60 pence an hour was a fair wage for cleaning Sir Freddie Laker's gigantic DC10 Skytrains. The job had its compensations. No two days were the same – the things people leave in the seat pocket are remarkable – and I would occasionally sit in one of the orange seats and imagine what it would be like to fly the Atlantic. A quarter-century ago, daydreaming was all a boy could do. A return flight to New York, even with Laker, cost £118 – five weeks' hard labour polishing tray-tables on DC10s.

Laker spent seven years fighting a series of legal battles to get Skytrain aloft, to break the assumption that aviation was for the wealthy. Yet even after Sir Freddie revealed the public appetite for fair fares, the airline cartel endured. To make sure no one spoiled the party by cutting prices to stimulate business, fares were tightly regulated, which meant the budget traveller had to learn a few tricks of the trade.

London-Paris? Fly on Gulf Air or Aerolineas Argentinas. New York? Air India or Kuwait Airways. To cut the cost of flying, I have done all of the following: stayed on board for one stop longer than I should have; bought return tickets with no intention of returning; used a student card 10 years after leaving college, at the suggestion of the travel agent; and pretended to own property in Italy to circumvent rules designed to protect scheduled carriers from charter airlines selling seat-only deals.

All that palaver, thank goodness, is over. Whether your destination is AAR, EIN or, in my case, FDH, anyone with access to the internet can pay a reasonable fare for a European journey without all these ludicrous conditions. Or can we? Hanging above the reception area at easyLand in Luton – the prefabricated warehouse that serves as global headquarters for Britain's most successful no-frills airline, easyJet – is a tent. It's a two-person job, recently returned from a hillside in Catalonia. When easyJet began flying between Switzerland and Barcelona, the arcane rules that constrained air travel were invoked by Swissair. Legally, the airline could not sell cheap seats alone. It had to sell packages that included accommodation. The no-frills lodging comprised this very easyTent, planted on rocky soil miles from the Catalan capital. Thousands of people virtually slept there – a picture of the tent in situ appeared on the website – but the airline is not aware that any customers went to the trouble of fulfilling the conditions of their "package holiday". Swissair is no more, and the tent adorns easyLand in the manner of a corporate scalp.

Since 11 September, airport security has become tougher, which explains the 10-minute wait in the queue to be searched. Yet even with the stutter in business following those terrorist attacks, Stansted's passenger numbers have grown by 15 per cent in a year. Leisure and business travellers are migrating in their millions to no-frills airlines. "We're getting plenty of business travellers now," says Kell Ryan of Ryanair – manager of corporate accounts for the Irish airline, and brother of its founder, Dr Tony Ryan. "Their companies are seeing our fares, seeing it's an efficient service, and insisting that they fly with us." He shows me round the airline's new offices.

When Ryanair reassessed its costs following 11 September, it decided staff could make do with less room. So Kell Ryan and his team moved out of Stansted's well-appointed Enterprise House and into a compact space best summed up by its postal address: The Departure Lounge, Stansted Airport, Essex CM24 1SB. The staff for 75 routes are squeezed into an area barely big enough to swing a bag of duty-frees.

Across at Enterprise House, where Go still has its HQ, a champagne celebration is taking place. Not because staff no longer have to look across the atrium at the Ryanair offices, but because Barbara Cassani, the world's only female airline chief executive, has just been selected as the Veuve Clicquot businesswoman of the year.

Five years ago, Cassani was anointed by Bob Ayling, then boss of British Airways, to set up BA's no-frills outfit. He had witnessed the success of easyJet and Ryanair, and decided BA should have a slice of the low-cost market. But unlike numerous airlines that have tried unsuccessfully to establish a cheap offshoot, Ayling insisted it should stand alone. Cassani, a BA manager, designed Go on a sheet of paper, with the back-up of £25m from the parent airline. Once it was flying, Go started winning awards – though not from its rivals, who accused it of being a "spoiler" operation from the UK's most powerful airline.

Soon after Go began flying to Scotland, Stansted's most loyal customer, KLM UK, abandoned its Anglo-Scottish routes. It has since set up its own low-fare brand, Buzz, which is still struggling to find an identity. This summer's plan comprises nine new routes to destinations in France that some would be hard-pressed to place on a map, among them Bergerac, Limoges, Grenoble.

Ayling was ousted by the BA board in 2000, and succeeded by Rod Eddington. He promptly sold Go. Within three days of the £100m deal, Go launched a campaign knocking BA. No-frills flying is a no-gloves sport. Cassani would never seek special treatment because of her gender – just as well, really, given the scraps to which Go seems prone. Last year, the airline decided to park its 737s on Ryanair's lawn, starting flights from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Dublin. The Irish carrier's pockets are deep enough to sustain a fares war; after a few months of passengers paying a fiver each way, Go retired hurt. Flights for virtually nothing are still available between Scotland and Belfast, where Go is taking on easyJet for supremacy of the low-cost market.

A less self-confident woman than Cassani might feel persecuted. Her announcement of a new Go base at East Midlands was quickly followed by the airport's home team, BMI, announcing its own low-fare airline, Bmibaby, with a curiously similar route network. Suddenly, the people of Loughborough have found that their hitherto moribund local airport is offering 11 cheap flights a week to Prague.

This is not the strangest new route of the year so far. That prize goes to the Dorset-Hunsrück flight, which Ryanair started on Valentine's Day. It connects the old RAF station at Bournemouth with a former US Air Force base at Hahn, high above the Moselle Valley in Germany. In the Ryanair atlas, this airport is known as Frankfurt – a city 90 minutes away by bus. But within 10 weeks, the route has attracted so many passengers away from BA's established service between Southampton and (real) Frankfurt that BA cut the link in its latest cull of routes.

Forty-five minutes late, flight 2001 is ready for boarding. Air traffic control in Norway is blamed for the delay; the Boeing 737 has already been to Torp ("Oslo" on planet Ryanair) and back. With only 25 minutes allowed between arrival and departure, there is little scope for making up time.

Some passengers are already lined up at the gate, keen to get one of the prized seats: the front row, or the extra legroom at emergency exits. On Ryanair and easyJet, everyone has a seat reserved; you just don't know which it is until you get on. I sit down in seat 22 B, and soon spread out to A and C (midweek flights are a joy) to tuck into fresh bread, smoked salmon and tomatoes. The £19 fare is less than I paid for the train to Stansted, so I was happy to invest in my own classy inflight catering, from Tesco at Liverpool Street station.

As I wait to get off at the lovely lakeside town of Friedrichshafen, I notice a wrapper left by a passenger, and pick it up. Old habits die hard – but new ones are easy to acquire. There's no squad of cleaners waiting to get on, because the crew will be tidying up during the 25-minute turnaround. The savings are passed on to customers in the form of low fares, enabling even redundant aircraft cleaners to fly.

Some people in the airline business have yet to grasp that what they are selling is not the pleasure of sitting in an aluminium tube for a few hours. We are buying the sensation of warm sand between our toes; the scent of a strange Italian town; or the smile of a loved one realising that the distance between them and you has diminished. With thrills like that, who needs frills?

'No Frills' by Simon Calder is published on 9 May by Virgin Books, £16.99 – only slightly less than the fare to Friedrichshafen