Why the 707 Felt Terrifying at First

On the twelfth of October, 1955, Pan American World Airways chairman Juan Trippe announced to a room full of senior airline executives that Pan Am had just ordered forty-five jet aircraft — twenty Boeing 707s and twenty-five Douglas DC-8s — at a combined cost of two hundred and sixty-nine million dollars. The announcement ended the party. Every executive in that room understood that the propeller era was finished. Three years later, on the twenty-sixth of October, 1958, one hundred and eleven passengers boarded Pan Am's Boeing 707-121 Clipper America at New York's Idlewild Airport for Paris. The flight took eight hours and forty-one minutes. A DC-7C would have taken sixteen. This video tells the story of how Boeing president Bill Allen invested sixteen million dollars before a single customer had committed, how test pilot Tex Johnston performed barrel rolls in the Dash 80 prototype over Seattle's Lake Washington in August 1955, and what happened when the passengers and pilots who flew the 707 for the first time encountered an aircraft for which nothing in their experience had prepared them. The Boeing 707 dominated passenger air transport through the 1960s and remained a major type through the 1970s. It established Boeing as the dominant force in commercial aviation and set the fuselage dimensions that the 727, 737, 747, 757, and 767 all inherited. Its development under programme director Maynard Pennell from the Boeing 367-80 Dash 80 prototype, the role of Pan Am and Juan Trippe in forcing the aircraft's final configuration, the competition with the Douglas DC-8, and the infrastructure revolution it triggered — runways, fuel systems, hangars, ground equipment — form one of the defining industrial stories of the twentieth century. Whether you're a commercial pilot, an aviation history enthusiast, or someone who has wondered why air travel feels the way it does, this is where that story begins. #Boeing707 #JetAge #AviationHistory