William Stadiem - Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviations Glory Years

Copyright 2014 by William Stadiem

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

B ALLANTINE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

ISBN 978-0-345-53695-2
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53697-6

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Jim Tierney

Jacket images: PF-(sdasm2)/Alamy (stewardesses), Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy (Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra), Ezra Stoller/Esto (jet and airport)

v3.1

T HE PASSENGER JET WAS, AND STILL IS, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD, A world whose other wonders the jet made accessible. Along with the personal computer, it ranks as the greatest technological innovation of the second half of the twentieth century. The computer turned your lowly desk into a cross between Harvard and Hollywood. The jet turned you into an adventurer. It freed you from the shackles of that desk and set you free to roam the world, to become a Lindbergh, an Earhart, a James Bond, and, if you had enough money and time, a jet-setter.

On October 26, 1958, Pan Am made history when it launched the Boeing 707 on its first commercial flight from New Yorks Idlewild Airport to Pariss Le Bourget. The plane, called the Clipper America, had just been christened a week before in Washington, D.C., by first lady Mamie Eisenhower, and it was as different from its airborne antecedents as Jackie Kennedy soon would be from Mamie, as Jack from Ike. Before the 707, the king of the skies and the way to Europe was President Eisenhowers own Air Force One (before the appellation), the Lockheed Constellation. Ike had two of these Connies, named Columbine II and Columbine III.

The Connie, developed by the eccentric billionaire aviator/mogul Howard Hughes for his airline, TWA, with the same zeal for design that he had lavished on Jane Russells brassiere in The Outlaw (a movie that he produced), was instantly recognizable for its curvy dolphin-shaped fuselage, its four huge, brutal propellers, and its trident tail, which looked like a gladiatorial weapon from Spartacus. At its maximum speed of 376 miles per hour, it seemed incredibly big and fast, able to transport sixty-six passengers from New York to Europe in a mere fourteen hours. Before the Connie, the trip had taken more than twenty-one hours, with stops in Gander, Reykjavk, and Shannon before reaching the Old World.

The 707 made the Connie look like the proverbial ninety-seven-pound weakling so famous in the advertising of the age. With its four grand Pratt & Whitney jet pods, the 707 cut the transatlantic time to a good nights sleep of seven hours. Not only did the jet take half the time, at over 600 miles per hour, it also doubled the load, to 120 passengers. The sleek, shimmering silver rocket-bomber-shaped craft weighed 100,000 pounds more than the Connie and was 30 percent longer, at 144 feet, but it was exceptionally light on its toes, flying above the weather at 40,000 feet, compared to the Connies ceiling of 25,000. Gone was the bone-rattling propeller vibration; gone was the stomach-churning turbulence. Now Pan Ams first-class passengers could savor the gourmet meals of foie gras and lobster thermidor and Mouton Rothschild catered by Maxims of Paris without recourse to the airsick bags. Pan Am was taking haute cuisine as high as it could go.

DREAM MACHINE. The first version of the Boeing 707, which started crossing the Atlantic in 1958. ()

The world of 1958 was in the Space Age, and the 707 was in every sense a futuristic spacecraft, Tomorrowland today. The subdued lighting, the ventilation, the individual controls, the Eames-like modernist seats, the relative silence, all instantly belied the 707s whimsical motif of hot-air balloons decorating the panels that separated deluxe from economy. Tourist, Pan Am had decided, was a dirty word, and first class meant that there was a second. No one wanted to be second, not at Pan Am, which made a fetish and a legend out of always being first. Every traveler was to be treated as an explorer. They were all Phileas Foggs, and the 707 was their beautiful balloon.

Suffice it to say that a trip on the new 707 was a special event. The pilots were straight out of central casting, John Waynes who could rise to any occasion, not that occasions were expected ever to befall this miracle of technology. The stewardesses were sexistly stunning, pure Coffee, Tea or Me? avian goddesses, yet there was no hauteur, just a crisp, omnicompetent cheeriness befitting your favorite schoolteacher. The passengers felt impelled to dress the part, coats and ties for the men, suits and pearls and heels for the women. It was a sky party, and you were honored to be on the guest list.

Furthermore, the price was right: $909 round-trip deluxe, $489 economy, the same fares as on the now-snailish Connie. Those prices, which would go down the more jets went up, were definitely doable for the American middle class, who in 1958 could buy a snazzy Chevrolet Impala for $2,700 and a home for a national median price of $12,750. Even at $10 a day, which was twice the price on which Arthur Frommer would make his name and fame, a three-week European adventure of a lifetime would cost under $1,000. That may have been the deal of the century.

Within two years of Pan Ams inaugural flight, virtually all the worlds major airlines would make the big switch from props to jets. Pan Am quickly expanded its initial service to Paris to include daily nonstops from New York to the other capitals of the grand tour, London and Rome. In early 1959 Air France began flying the 707 across the Atlantic, while TWA and American Airlines began jetting coast-to-coast in under five hours, compared to the Connies endless eight. Also in 1959, Boeings rival Douglas Aircraft introduced its own jet, the DC-8, which was so similar to the 707 that it was instantly relegated to copycat status, despite becoming the jet of choice for such giants as United, Swissair, KLM, and Japan Air Lines.

By 1960 BOAC (the forerunner of British Airways), Lufthansa, Air India, and Qantas had all jumped on the 707 bandwagon, giving the Boeing product a synonymy with jet travel that Douglas could never equal. Whichever plane they took, travelers were the beneficiaries of a newly accessible world. In 1958, 500,000 American tourists visited Europe. A decade of jets later, the figure had gone up to 2,000,000, an increase of 400 percent. The growth rate was so enormous that it rendered the 707 obsoletely small in record time and led to the development of the leviathan 747.