As today is the anniversary of the Wright brothers first successful flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, this blog commemorates flying, as it is represented in songs from Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015). In doing so, I chose several keywords associated with flying, including airplane, airport, flight, and jet, and then omitted uses of these words that I found to be purely metaphorical*. As part of this analysis, I hypothesized that these terms would appear with greater frequency in more recent recordings rather than earlier hits, with the increase in the importance of air travel in our daily lives.

The figure below shows the quantitative distribution of these variants.

Figure 1. Variants of "flight" terms in songs from the Billboard year-end charts, 1951-2015 (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As the figure shows, it is not the case that there is a steady increase in flight variants, either by song or by total number of occurrences through the decades; rather, there were some uses in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and none in the 1980s and '90, before an increase in the use of such variants in the past two decades.

The songs offer several interesting variants in the domain of air travel. Among them are
silver plane, as in the following:

Aeroplane:

And Learjet, in the following:

And of course it would be remiss not to mention one of the great rock songs about flying, despite its not making Billboard's year-end Top 10:

* A sample of some of the songs that were omitted on these grounds were "Bennie and the Jets," "I Wanna Love You," and "Right Round." In a future post, I will look at how air travel terms are used in pop music, even those uses outside the literal.

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