Jets before 1967, and what 1967 added
The jet age did not begin in 1967. Jet airliners had been in passenger service since 1952, and the Boeing 707 began transatlantic flights in October 1958. What 1967 brought was the unveiling, on 30 September 1967, of the next big step: the Boeing 747, the first wide-bodied “jumbo” jet. That makes 1967 a milestone in the story but not the start of it.
The first jets
The world’s first jet airliner in passenger service was the de Havilland Comet, which began flying for BOAC in May 1952. A fuller account of its short and troubled first career is given separately. For this overview it is enough to say that the Comet showed passengers wanted jet travel, and that its early failures taught the industry what to avoid.
Other jets followed in the 1950s. The Soviet Tupolev Tu-104 entered Aeroflot service in 1956, and the French Caravelle, a short-range twin-jet, entered service in the late 1950s. But the aircraft that set the pattern for long-distance travel came from the United States.
The Boeing 707 and 1958
Boeing built a prototype, nicknamed the Dash 80, which first flew in 1954. The production version, the 707, was designed to carry well over a hundred passengers over long distances at around twice the speed of the piston-engined airliners it replaced. Pan American World Airways was the first airline to order it in quantity, and it began transatlantic service between New York and Paris on 26 October 1958, stopping at Gander in Newfoundland on the way.
The date needs a note of care. British Overseas Airways Corporation had actually begun transatlantic jet service a few weeks earlier, on 4 October 1958, using the Comet 4, a redesigned and larger Comet. So the Comet 4 was first across the Atlantic in scheduled service, but the 707 was the aircraft that took most of the market. It could carry more passengers, and Boeing’s production capacity was far larger. The Douglas DC-8 entered service in 1959 and competed directly.
What the jets changed
Compared with the propeller airliners of the 1950s, jets offered several things:
- Speed. Crossing the Atlantic took hours rather than most of a day, and the long journeys to Asia and the Pacific shrank in proportion.
- Comfort. Jets flew higher, above much of the weather, and were smoother and quieter in the cabin than piston engines, though noisier for people on the ground.
- Capacity and cost. A jet could carry more people further each day. This gradually lowered the cost of each seat and allowed airlines to offer cheaper fares.
Cheaper tickets were not an immediate result, and many fares in the early years were regulated by international agreements between airlines and governments. But over the 1960s, the combination of more seats and lower operating costs per seat helped make air travel affordable for many more people. Economy-class fares had been introduced in the early 1950s; jets made that class the normal way to fly rather than a special offer.
Around the late 1950s, air travel overtook ocean liners as the main way to cross the Atlantic. The exact year is given differently by different sources, so it is safest to say that the shift happened in the second half of that decade. The big liners did not disappear at once, but their role changed from transport to leisure.
Effects beyond the airline industry
The jet age affected more than aviation. Airports needed longer runways, bigger terminals and new traffic control systems. Tourism to destinations such as the Mediterranean and the Caribbean grew. Touring musicians and film crews crossed the Atlantic more easily, which helped the British Invasion become a two-way transatlantic exchange. Expo 67 in Montreal, which drew visitors from many countries over the summer of 1967, was possible on that scale in part because international travel had become routine.
There were costs too. Jet noise became a source of complaints near airports, and the spread of mass air travel raised questions about environmental impacts that later became a much larger debate.
The 747 in September 1967
By the mid-1960s, passenger numbers were growing quickly, and airlines wanted aircraft that could carry more people without proportionally more flights. Boeing’s answer was a very large aircraft with a wide fuselage, designed with two aisles. The Boeing 747 was rolled out at a new factory in Everett, Washington, on 30 September 1967, in front of representatives from many airlines. It made its first flight in February 1969, and Pan Am started scheduled 747 service between New York and London in January 1970.
The 747 could carry more than twice as many passengers as an early 707, and its arrival was meant to push fares down further by spreading operating costs over more seats. Its rollout was, however, a milestone for the future rather than something passengers experienced in 1967: no one could fly on one for more than two years.
Supersonic competition
The year 1967 also saw the unveiling of a very different approach. The Concorde airliner, a joint British and French supersonic project, was shown to the public at Toulouse in December 1967. It aimed at speed instead of capacity. The two designs represented competing ideas about the future of flight: the 747 promised cheap mass travel, while Concorde aimed at speed for a small, wealthy group. In the end the 747’s approach proved much more influential on the industry.
Related milestones
Passenger flying itself began decades before jets, a story told in the account of early airline service. Another form of travel was also being transformed in the 1960s: the Tokaido Shinkansen in Japan, opened in 1964, showed that railways could still compete with aircraft on busy routes.
A note on “firsts”
Because several things happened between 1952 and 1958, the phrase “first commercial jet airliner” can mean different things. It might mean the first in service (the Comet, 1952), the first on transatlantic routes (the Comet 4 and the 707, 1958) or the first to be a lasting commercial success (the 707). None of those was in 1967.