How Jetliners Shrank the World About 1960

How Jetliners Shrank the World About 1960

J. Roger Osterholm

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Transcontinental air travel had taken two days when the 1930s began, combined with rail links, but by 1936 the venerable Douglas dc-3 could do it in 16 hours without help from the railroads. The world began to shrink about 1860 with long-range rail traffic and the later steamships, but that increasing shrinkage virtually ceased with 1960. A transcontinental flight in 1936 of 16 hours was itself a tremendous improvement over the two-month journey in covered wagons and the three- to five-day trip by railroad. The Boeing Model 317 Stratoliner was developed by 1938 with the b-17 wing, but it came too close to World War II to amount to much. The ten-hour transcontinental flights from 1946 to 1958 were another milestone in shrinking the world, but the five-hour flight that has been common since 1959 has served as the standard now for forty years. The jet age also has the recommendation of providing comparatively cheaper fares, making flights today very common. If we consider shrinking the world as not only a matter of speed but also the availability of economically priced flights, then the blue ribbon goes to 1958.

After the war, the Constellation (a sleek airliner with three vertical tails), the pressurized Douglas dc‑6 of 1946, and the Boeing Stratocruiser, the latter a two‑decker version of the b-29, all flying at about 300 miles per hour, were the primary aircarriers until jet airliners appeared. Thus, by 1946 the world had already shrunk for the general public, but not as much as it would by 1960. The Consolidated‑Vultee b‑36 and the swept wing Boeing b‑47 jet bomber of 1951 were succeeded in 1954 by the eight‑engine b‑52s, which carry 20,000 pounds of bombs or missiles and another 40,000 pounds under its wings farther and faster, and about 100 still serve the Air Force, although the last built (the 744th) was in 1962.

Improved airline connections even before jet travel enhanced statehood for Alaska and Hawaii and the expansion of Major League Baseball since 1953 beyond Eastern railroads, and then emerged the international “jet set.” Congress created an independent Federal Aviation Administration in 1958 to improve safety. Martin and Convair produced twin-engine airliners to replace the DC‑3, now using 100‑octane fuel, and flying became more attractive and safer than taking trains and ocean liners.[1] Soon transatlantic jet flights revealed “jet lag,” all‑cargo jetliners developed right after passenger jets went into service, and Delta Airlines joined American, Pan American, TWA, United and others as a major carrier. Unfortunately, the immense popularity of jet travel and attractive airports contributed to the decline of city centers.

The jumbo jets, like the Lockheed L‑1011 TriStar and the Douglas dc‑10, followed the trailblazing by the Boeing 747. Since 1980 the European Airbus Industrie has offered airliners that compete well with Boeing and others, except for the paramount 747. Boeing also produces smaller airliners like the best‑selling 737 and the 150‑seat 727, and McDonnelll Douglas provide the competitive dc-9 and md-80.

But the story of how civilian jet air transportation developed and shrank the world is itself fascinating.

The de Havilland d.h. 106 Comet was the world’s first jet transport to enter service as a passenger airliner, doing so with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. It was an orthodox, low-wing design with leading-edge sweep of 20 degrees, powered by four de Havilland Ghost centrifugal-flow turbojet engines producing 4,450 pounds of thrust and housed within the wing roots. Initially it seated 36 passengers in two pressurized cabins. Its cruising speed was 490 miles per hour, with a range of 1750 miles. The prototype flew in July 1949, and boac received a fleet of ten in 1952. The first jet route was from London to Johannesburg, covering 6,700 miles in just under a full day [23 hours, 34 minutes]. The Comet cut twelve hours off the flight to Ceylon and a day and a half off the route to Singapore. The Comets were introduced on many other air routes, drastically reducing flight times. The flight from London to Tokyo became 33 hours and 15 minutes instead of 86 hours, nearly reducing the flight time to one-third. Then Air France and uat, another French airline, began to fly Comets, while many other airlines had orders for the jetliner.

But then one broke up in the air near Calcutta in 1953, exactly one year after the inaugural Comet passenger flight (Janes). In January and April of the next year, two more Comets suffered in-flight structural failures after more than 3000 flights on each airframe (Whitehouse 281, Caidin 109–10), resulting in the withdrawal of the aircraft from passenger routes. The Comet 2s, powered by Rolls Royce Avon engines, were strengthened but diverted from boac to the raf. A “stretch” long-range Comet 3 first flew on July 19, 1954, but it served only as a test vehicle, making a round-the-world flight, and did not go into production. The Comet had failed in the early 1950s to shrink the world.

The world was stunned at the loss of three Comets in a little more than a year, and the grounding of the airliner seriously damaged public opinion about jet flight. The studies of the Comet revealed metal fatigue, previously a little regarded phenomenon, which had begun at the sharp corner of a window in the cabin and allowed explosive decompression at a high altitude (Whitehouse 280). Although designers learned how to overcome metal fatigue, in the race to produce a jet airliner, the baton of jet flying was handed off to Boeing and America.

The phenomenon of metal fatigue had been emphasized in the feature film No Highway in the Sky, directed by Henry Koster and starring James Stewart as Theodore Honey. Honey is an awkward British genius who is an aircraft metallurgist and predicts that the tail of a new airliner called the Reindeer would break off after 1440 hours of flight. (Remember, one famous reindeer was named Comet.) In the film, however, the Reindeer is a turboprop aircraft, like the Vickers Viscount and the later Lockheed Electra. After a flight to Labrador and warning airline officials and a movie star named Monica Teasdale played by Marlene Dietrich, Honey pulls the lever of the landing gear to disable the airplane on the ramp. Later, of course, he is vindicated when his tests show that at about 1450 hours of simulated flight, the tail of a test Reindeer does indeed break off. One curiosity is that this British film, which also features Glynis Johns, Jack Hawkins, Elizabeth Allen as Honey’s daughter, and Kenneth More as the copilot, appeared in 1951, a full year before the first Comet suffered catastrophic metal fatigue. Robert Robbins, a test pilot through the ‘40s, has informed me that there were instances of metal fatigue back to 1940, but it was of little consequence, and also that wings of two b-47s actually broke off in flight in 1958 (interview March 9 and 11, 1998).[2]

In 1957 the Comet was reinstated as boac ordered 19 Comet 4s, powered by improved Rolls Royce Avon 524 engines, and could carry from 60 to 81 passengers each. The first Comet 4 flew on April 27, 1958, and on October 4 boac inaugurated Comet service from London to New York, but the range of the Comet 4 was inadequate for this demanding route. Airlines in Argentina and East Africa and the raf flew Comet 4s, and in 1959 improved versions were introduced. The Model C went into service in 1960, and a total of 112 Comets of all models were produced. The type was far outclassed, however, by the Boeing 707 and the Douglas dc-8, so that future Comets, instead of capitalizing on having innovated public jet air transportation, merely became the Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft for the raf.

In 1952 Boeing managers foresaw the end of the production of the Model 367 Stratocruisers and the Air Force tanker kc-97. Having provided the United States Air Force with six-jet b-47 bombers and already the eight-jet b-52 bombers, Boeing gambled that the Air Force would need a high-speed jet tanker to refuel these jet bombers in the air. Their gamble was dicey for a few years, but in August 1954 the Air Force announced that it would buy a few of these new jets, which Boeing obscurely called the Model 367–80, or the “Dash Eighty,” and the Air Force called the kc-135 (Caidin 135, 145–46). That decision was the beginning of another great aviation story, for the model became not only the 717 (for c-135s and kc-135s) but also was enlarged as the 707 and the 720, the first great success as an international passenger jet airliner. One of the main test pilots for Boeing from 1944 to 1948, Robert Robbins, who introduced the b-47 bomber to the world in 1947, is proud to observe that virtually all the succeeding jet airliners, save the little used supersonic Concorde, follow the general configuration that Boeing developed for that early bomber (Caidin 135, 141, 144–46).

While the British Comet was sinking under the weight of the tragedies of structural failures in 1954, Boeing had the benefit of de Havilland’s failures and of its own expertise to produce an airliner that, more than any other, continues to stand for jet travel. Juan Trippe, the legendary president of Pan American World Airways, risked $296 million dollars in April 1955 by ordering 20 Boeing 707s and 25 dc-8s. United Airlines ordered thirty dc-8s, and then American Airlines ordered thirty more 707s, which enabled Boeing to begin production the most famous jetliner until the emergence of the 747. TWA resisted jet aircraft for a while until it had to buy jets to be competitive. In 1956 the 707 outsold the dc-8 three to one (Heppenheimer 169). A 707 cost about $5.5 million.

The first production 707 was delivered to Pan American in the middle of August 1958, nearly four months after the Comet 4 entered service. The 707, however, appeared three months ahead of schedule, and reporters gloated that the jetliner was like “a penthouse in the sky” and “like flying ten miles a minute in my easy chair.” Another advantage was that established pilots adapted easily to jet flying. The world began to shrink for good in October 1958 when Pan Am assigned the only two 707s available at the time to fly transatlantic, replacing six piston-engine airliners. The passenger load on each 707 was 109 seats, including 65 in economy class. Two months later Pan Am leased 707s to National Airlines to fly happy passengers from New York to Miami, and profits rose. In January 1959 American Airlines placed 707s in transcontinental service (Caidin 63, 116), and other airlines followed. In December 1959 one 707, assisted by the jet stream, clocked a speed of 626 miles per hour and crossed the Atlantic in 5 hours and 41 minutes. More people bought airline tickets, and by October 12, 1959, in barely fourteen months, a million passengers had flown on the 707, thanks especially to the affordable prices and the attractiveness of speedy travel. Airline profits soared even higher through cargo revenue.

There were a few incidents with 707s in 1959, but only one fatal accident (Whitehouse 288–90). The autopilot on a 707 caused a tense moment in a transatlantic flight in February 1959, and a defective electronic device caused a fatal crash at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) on March 1, 1962, but there was no structural failure and the aircraft proved to be a reliable and safe giant. In August 1959 the 707 Intercontinental versions arrived, able to carry 189 passengers for up to 5000 miles. In barely 18 days in July 1960, Sabena Belgian World Airlines flew its five 707 Intercontinentals nonstop day and night to ferry 15,000 people to safety from a bloody rebellion from Leopoldville in the Congo to Brussels. On one flight 303 passengers flew the 4000 miles, and altogether there were 62 round trips that carried an average of more than 250 people per flight.

In 1960, moreover, Pan Am’s North Atlantic route had 91.5 percent of all seats filled, and American had 95.3 percent of seats filled on transcontinental flights, and other lines had exceptional records (Whitehouse 291). Passengers doubled from 1950 to 1960, and they doubled and doubled again by 1970 even before the advent of the jumbo jets (Whitehouse 311–12, Morrison and Winston 7, “Aviation,” Grolier). In 1959, 51 million passengers flew on domestic air routes, and in 1969 the number had risen to 120 million (Whitehouse 318). Total air passengers on all the American airlines rose from 418,000 in 1930, to 20 million in 1950, to 58 million in 1960, to 170 million in 1970, to nearly 300 million in 1980, to 465.6 million in 1990, and nearly 500 million in 1993 (Morrison and Winston 7).

In 1946, while New York’s Grand Central Station served 65 million riders of the rails, La Guardia airport served 2.1 million passengers, Washington National served 757,000, Chicago’s Midway airport served 1.3 million, and Los Angeles served 760,000 people (Heppenheimer 131), but these numbers became dwarfed after 1960 and jet travel. Twenty-one years later, in 1967, Chicago’s O’Hare airport had 27 million passengers, which rose to 40 million in 1975 and 60 million by 1990 (Whitehouse 319, World Book Almanac, 1993). Without the jet airliners, the increase in air passengers might have doubled every twenty years after 1957. At that rate the number of passengers would have been about 100 million in 1977 and 200 million in 1997, but the total passengers by 1997 was about 600 million. The increase of threefold more than an expected basic increase can be attributed especially to the convenience of jetliners, which shrank the world about 1960.

The second-generation dc-8 broke the sound barrier in 1961 and regularly flew at 634 m.p.h. over 8800 miles. Moreover, air safety of the airlines increased, and the public took further note of the estimable Boeing Airplane Company. Thus, as even many timid passengers agreed to fly, it was by 1960 that the world shrank and ocean-going liners were doomed. The Douglas dc-8 deserves much of the credit, behind the outstanding leader of the Boeing Airplane Company. It took the safe and reliable Boeing 707 to overcome the public’s hesitation to fly jets, especially after the debacle of the British Comets in 1953 and 1954. By 1960 the public had largely forgotten the terrible history of the Comet. With the safety of jet engines, the fatality rates per million airline departures (in a three-year moving average) dropped significantly, until it went from 1.2 in 1977 to 0.7 in 1985 and down to 0.2 in 1993 (Morrison and Winston 32).

Passengers flocked to the jetliners (Whitehouse 294). The future of the airlines in the 1970s may have been as bleak as some analysts forecast, for then as now smaller cities had scant air service, but not so with the larger cities, which thrived beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Eastern, Braniff, and Pan Am did ultimately fail,[3] while the surviving airlines profit through less generous service, but the number of passengers did rise dramatically and the ability to span the world increased amazingly. The public now has little choice but to accept being squeezed into jumbo airliners for long flights, except for the few who can afford lavish first-class service. The chief advantage has become the relative brevity of uncomfortable flying.

In 1967 Pan American, which also operated hotels and provided aerospace services, was the world’s largest air-cargo carrier and was rich. It earned about $1.1 billion from operating revenues, for a profit of about $65 million, and in that year Pan Am had 14.9 billion passenger miles, and increase of 12.7 percent over 1966, with about 8.5 million passengers, an increase of 15.2 percent, and about a 62 percent seat capacity (Whitehouse 304, 306). The world did indeed shrink for good in 1958–59.

About 1956 General Curtis LeMay[4] could foresee the future of aviation. Considering the leap from the first Wright Flyer of 1903 to the b-52 bomber of 1953, the general prophesied, “There will be more progress in the air in the next fifty years than in the last fifty” (Mansfield 374). The quantum leaps became possible, but economies and social issues generally restricted increases of jetliner speeds and, instead, jetliners offered increased total weights and improved jet engines. But General LeMay presciently expected the industry to fly men to the moon when most Americans dismissed that as a comic-book fantasy and envisioned the Space Shuttle and the Soviet Mir space station.

Boeing 707s are not seen much today at city airports, for their original engines are too loud for modern regulations (Caidin 69–72), but the Air Force still flies many kc-135s and e-3s, which were given improved engines. The Air Force had nearly 900 overall, counting 50 e-3 awacs reconnaissance aircraft, which are based on the Model 707, and a few that served as Air Force One, until it was replaced in 1990 by a b-747.

One test of the popularity of an airplane is that it misleads many people. For example, the Douglas dc-8 looks very similar to the 707. Its wings are swept back 30 degrees rather than 35 degrees, but who can tell? Most people would call a dc-8 a 707 just because the Boeing airliner is so much more famous and highly regarded. The dc-8 was a worthy competitor to the 707 except initially for its shorter range, a range far extended in a later version. Fully 556 dc-8s were built, but about 1700 Boeing models were built as 707s, c-135s, kc-135s, and e-3s.

The Boeing 707 four‑jet airliner became popular in 1958, the similar dc‑8 the next year, and “jumbo jets” and “wide‑body jets” began service in 1969 with the 400- and 500‑passenger Boeing 747s, a design the Air Force rejected in 1962 in favor of the Lockheed c‑5 Galaxy. The c-5a itself replaced a long line of huge military cargo planes, like the Douglas c‑124 Globemaster, and overshadowed the Lockheed c‑141 Starlifter. Unfortunately the jumbo jets of Lockheed and Douglas, the l-1011 and the dc-10, respectively, seriously impaired the financial health of both companies and forced their mergers with other manufacturers. But now that the world is as small as it has been for forty years, the future holds something like the x-30 of nasa and the Air Force or the x-33 National Space Plane being proposed by various manufacturers (“X-series Aircraft,” Grolier). The x-33 is currently a contest between three versions, one offered by McDonnell Douglas and Boeing, for a trans-atmospheric vehicle that could fly from New York to Beijing in two hours at Mach 20. Perhaps General LeMay foresaw this possibility as well.

The present thesis, however, is especially that about 1960 the world shrank dramatically, and that primarily occurred through the speeds and attractiveness of jet air travel. Notable shrinkage of the world occurred in 1936 and by 1950, but that was cut in half in 1958–59, along with lower fares. Airline speeds leaped from 300 miles per hour in 1950 to 600 miles per hour in 1960, which proves this point all by itself. A transcontinental flight that took two days in 1930 was reduced to ten hours by 1950 and was reduced to a flight of less than five hours by 1960.[5] A nonstop transatlantic airline flight was not even possible in 1930 and improbable in 1940, and it took a demanding twelve hours by 1950, but only six hours in 1958, a time that remains in effect today, forty years later. The attractiveness of flying in a 707 or a dc-8 by 1960 further contributed to making the world smaller not just theoretically but in actual and common practice.

Whether the Space Plane will become popular depends on its cost. I can see that the public will be flying the latest models of the 747, the new Boeing 777, and other airliners for the next thirty years. Despite the congestion in seating preferred by the major airlines, tremendous improvements in the power and quietness of recent jet engines, fortunately, make jet flying as attractive as it remains (Heppenheimer 348–50).

Table 1: Selected Airlines

Yeara

Manufacturer

Model

Typeb

Powerc

Passengers

Speedd

Range

1930

Boeing

247

2 recip

550 hp

160

750 mi.

1936

Douglas

dc-3

2 recip

1000 hp

28–36

180

1025 mi.

1938

Boeinge

317

4 recip

1100 hp

220

2390 mi.

1943

Lockheed

Constellation

4 recip

2200 hp

290

3500 mi.

1945

Boeingf

377

4 recip

3500 hp

100

300

4000 mi.

1946

Douglas

dc-6

4 recip

2100 hp

310

3000 mi.

1951

Vickers

Vicount

4 tprop

2000 hp

357

1587 mi.

1952

de Havilland

Comet 1

4 jets-c

4450 lb

490

1750 mi.

1958

Boeing

707

4 jets-a

19,999 lb

170

605

3000 mi.

1958

de Havilland

Comet 4

4 jets-a

10,500 lb

500

2000 mi.

1959

Lockheedg

l-188

4 tprop

4000 hp

405

3000 mi.

1959

Douglas

dc-8

4 jets-a

15,000 lb

176

600

2600 mi.

1970

Boeing

747

4 jets-a

47,000 lb

400

590

6500 mi.

1971

Douglas

dc-10

3 jets-a

40,000 lb

270

564

4600 mi.

1972

Lockheed

l-1011 Tristar

3 Jets-a

50,000 lb

300

558

6000 mi.

1974

Airbus

A300

2 jets-a

52,500 lb

269

567

3700 mi.

1976

BAe/Aerospatiale

Concorde

4 jets-a

38,000 lb

130

1200

4100 mi.

1982

Boeing

767

2 jets-a

44,300 lb

250

600

2500 mi.

1995

Boeing

777h

2 jets-a

95,000 lb

305

600

4630 mi.

c. 2010

Consortium

x-33 Space Plane

6 scramjets

200?

Mach 20

25,000 mi.

a The year in which the airliner first went into passenger service.

b Number of engines, and whether reciprocating (radial or inline), jet (centrifugal or axial), or turboprop (jet prop).

c Horsepower for reciprocating engines and turboprops or pounds of thrust for jets, rating cited for each engine.

d Cruising speed in miles per hour.

e Boeing Stratoliner, designed in conjunction with the famed b-17

f Boeing Stratocruiser, designed in conjunction with the famed b-29

g Lockheed Electra, one of a long line of distinguished airliners of the same name

h Basic data on the original 777 was furnished by Mr. Michael Lombardi of Boeing Airplane Company (March 11, 1998).

note: Some of the above airliners, most notably the Lockheed Constellation, the Douglas dc-6 and dc-8, and the Boeing 707, 747, and 777 went through many improvements in design over the years. The dc-8, of course, is credited to McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company through a merger in 1967. The Lockheed l-188 Electra was withdrawn about 1962 because of structural failure near the tail, but a newer and slightly smaller model continues to fly as the Navy’s p-3 Orion reconnaissance aircraft. The Boeing 737 is now the best-selling airliner, save only for the venerable dc-3 that hails back to 1936 and which still flies. The newest Pratt & Whitney engine for the Boeing 777 is rated at 105,000 pounds of thrust (Lombardi), merely 15 years since the most powerful airline engines were rated at about 45,000 pounds.

Bibliography

“Aviation” and “X-series Aircraft,” Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, 1996. CD-ROM 8.1S. Danbury, Conn.: Grolier Interactive, 1996.

Bilstein, Roger E. Flight in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984. Includes spacecraft.

Boyne, Walter J. The Smithsonian Book of Flight. New York: Orion, 1987.

Caidin, Martin. Boeing 707. New York: Ballantine, 1959. No. F 322K. An original paperback, illustrated.

Heppenheimer, T.A. Turbulent Skies: The History of Commercial Aviation. Sloan Technology Series. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995. 350 pp. plus index and notes.

Jablonsky, Edward. Airwar, 4 vols. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.

Kelly, Charles J. Jr. The Sky’s the Limit, with a new introduction by the author. Orig. 1963. New York: Arno Press, 1972. 301 pp. plus notes and index.

Lombardi, Mike. Head, Boeing Archives Division, Telephone Interview, March 11, 1998, Seattle, Wash.

Mansfield, Harold. Vision: A Saga of the Sky. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1956. The story of Boeing Airplane Company.

Morrison, Steven A., and Clifford Winston. The Evolution of the Airline Industry. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1995. 163 pp. plus index.

Redding, Robert, and Bill Yenne. Boeing: Planemaker to the World. A Bison Book. Greenwich, Conn., Crescent Books (Crown), 1983. 253 pp. plus index, many illustrations.

Robbins, Robert M., formerly a senior test pilot and engineer with Boeing Airplane Company, Interviews March 9 and 11, 1998, Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach, Fla.

Solberg, Carl. Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. 413 pp. plus bibliography and index.

Taylor, Michael J.H., Ed., Jane's Encyclopedia of Aviation, rev. New York: Portland House, 1989. 948 pp. plus index, highly illustrated.

Whitehouse, Arch. The Sky’s the Limit: A History of the U.S. Airlines. New York: Macmillan, 1971. 338 pp. plus index.

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[1] Some analysts charge that flying on scheduled airliners is less safe than automobiles and trains if one calculates the time spent in the respective vehicles rather than just the overall accident rates, especially rates per passenger mile (Whitehouse 333–37; and on air safety, see 184–87, 280–82, 288–91).

[2] Robert Robbins told me that about 1955 Boeing became aware that the newer and lighter aluminum alloy they used since about 1948 was too brittle and very susceptible to metal fatigue. Boeing began to produce the b-52hs with an older and less critical alloy, and the “skin” on the wings of b-47s, kc-135s, and b-52gs were retrofitted, so that many of these aircraft aside from b-47s, are still in use. Of the two b-47s that broke apart in 1958, one was near Homestead Air Force Base, Florida, and the other was near Tulsa, Oklahoma. The 707 had the advantage from the beginning of the superior aluminum alloy (Interview, March 11, 1998).

[3]Pan American World Airways made a tentative comeback in 1997 and continued to struggle along into 1998, but it was hardly a mere shadow of its former glory.

[4] General Curtis E. LeMay (born in 1906) was the most extraordinary tactician and strategist of the United States Air Force, who virtually saved the Eighth Air Force of the Army Air Corps in England during World War Two, perfected the bombing of Japan in 1945, initiated the famed Berlin Airlift in 1948, improved the later Strategic Air Command and its b-36s, b-47s, b-52s, and jet tankers, and became the Air Force Chief of Staff from 1961 to 1965. Although George Wallace’s racist views disturbed him, he campaigned for Vice President as Governor Wallace’s running mate in 1968 to undermine the campaign of Hubert Humphrey, although the decision cost him his national reputation (Walter J. Boyne, “LeMay,” Air Force Magazine, March 1998, 60–67).

[5] For views on aviation about 1940, which was severely curtailed by the developing World War, see Whitehouse 266 and 269.