ABSTRACT
Big time The speed with which the Jet Age arrived and its concurrence with the Space Age fed fantasies about a still more astounding future. Around the time that the first manned lunar flights were making the once remarkable feat of jet travel seem mundane, aviation experts on both sides of the Atlantic forecast that supersonic passenger travel would become standard on international routes in the 1970s. By the mid-1960s, the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans all had supersonic transports in various stages of development. Yet it was a different kind of innovative aircraft developed in the same period that would ultimately have a much larger impact upon the way the world works. For supersonic travel, despite its early promise, never attained anything like the heights that had been imagined, but new jetliners distinguished not by their speed but by their gargantuan size did take the airborne world to a new level. Foremost among this new class of wide-body jets was the Boeing 747 (Table 3.1). Indeed, the jet’s bulbous nose became an icon of the Jet Age, an easily recognizable symbol for air travel. More than double the size of any preceding airliner, the 747 helped to lower the cost and broaden the accessibility of air travel much as the DC-3 had two generations earlier. The 747 was the “Everyman airplane” (Gandt 1995: 70). But the 747, which made a troubled first flight with launch customer Pan Am in 1970, would not so easily generate the traffic to fill its seats as had the DC-3. The scale of the 747 respects was without precedent in all respects, including its cost. Combined, the financial commitments of Boeing, Pan Am, and the engine-builder Pratt & Whitney to the project made the jumbo the greatest private sector enterprise in history up to that time. Pan Am’s launch order for 25 747s was worth $550 million, more than the world’s most famous airline had made in any year. Pratt & Whitney had perhaps a billion dollars at stake in the development of engines powerful enough to meet the plane’s performance specifications (Rodgers 1996: 246-7). And Boeing, which initially estimated its commitment to the project at $750 million before the first plane would fly with paying passengers, may actually have spent $2 billion,1 several times its market capitalization at the time (Newhouse 1982: 115).
