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Here is a glimpse of the planes that will take you to Paris or Honolulu
in about as little time as yesterday's trip to Grandma's.
N,
Iot in some Buck Rogers future but in the next
month or so, you will be able to fly by
commercial jetliner from any point in the
United States to the cities and spas of Western
Europe or the Pacific in less time than it took
Columbus to stow biscuits aboard the Santo Maria.
Today Paris is only a little more than five air
hours from New York. Tomorrow it will be closer.
By present commercial jet schedules you can be in
Rome nonstop from Chicago in 6Vfe hours. Copen
hagen is a trans-polar jet hop of not quite 10 hours
from San Francisco. That's also jetliner time west
ward from the Golden Gate to Tokyo.
In four hours jet-age vacationers from the West
Coast can be splashing in the surf at Waikiki. New
Yorkers can be in Miami in about two hours, as
Approaching debut of four competitive jetliners (left to right) Boeing 707, Con
vair 880, Lockheed JetStar, and (top right) Douglas DC-8 is striking evidence
can Chicagoans. For either, the sands of Rio are
just under nine all-but-silent jet hours away.
Anyone so minded can fly around the world, with
only five stops for fuel, in 40 hours, or a day and
a half. That's barely seven hours more than Lind
bergh's flight time for his trailblazing Atlantic hop
of 1927. Circumnavigating the globe by sail, Magel
lan would, after 40 hours, still be in sight of
Portugal's coast.
William M. Allen, president of the' Boeing Air
plane Company, said: "The coming of commercial
jets will, in effect, make the world 40 percent
smaller. And that's just the beginning."
What is a commercial jet or jetliner? It's a four
engine passenger plane designed to carry more
people greater distances in less time at higher
altitudes than ever before. No prop-driven ship
flying-today can approach the jetliners for sheer
comfort. On both- tourist runs -and first-class flights,
their service, accommodations, and decor are luxuri
ous and comfortable. .
- Your jetliner is the peacetime outgrowth of military-,
experience ince World War II in perfecting
family Weekly, October 12, 19S8
fiwr
by James C. G. Conniff
the turbojet aircraft engine. A turbojet combines an
expensive "stovepipe" with turbine blades in its nose
to pull in enormous gobs of air, a compressor mid
way to pack it down, and a chamber toward the rear
where the wad of air is mixed with fuel and ignited.
An explosion of hot gas shoots out the jet's tail with
a tremendous kick. This continuing process thrusts
the jetliner skyward. -
But it's not a kick that you as a passenger are
aware of. Nor is the jet engine, once started, a kind
of fiery runaway. Like the engine in your car, its
speed can be controlled at all times. It can be shut
off and started up again even in mid-air. It can be
throttled back and made to go faster. In fact, jet
- engines are smoother, simpler, and more dependable
than their piston-driven counterparts. In addition,
that commercial jet transportation is not futuristic dream but current reality.
Pilots have found jets simpler to fly, and improved turbojet engines are sound.
INew tetliners are huge enough to include spacious
club compartments, seating 12 guests in easy luxuryr
r.rv..
these engines deliver far more power or "ruj
In a four-engine jetliner the total thrust is 4U
50,000 pounds of driving force. To take full advan
tage of it, all commercial jets follow the pattern ot
their immediate forebears, our jet fighters ana
bombers. They manage to look as if they were doing
500 mph when they're standing still on a runway.
A jetliner's outer skin is glass-smooth to cut air
resistance to a whisper. Swept-back wings help, too.
These long, thin lifting surfaces flare back at a J
to 35 degree angle from the fuselage, so that tne
plane can enter the air , at fantastic speeds wim
minimum turbulence and use all available power.
They do an amazing job. Inside each seemingly
wafer-thin wing are packed leakproof fuel tanKS,
air-conditioning equipment, high-speed fuel je -tisoning
apparatus, and a jungle of wiring. Outsia .
the trailing edge supports superb new turn"n"
dime brake and maneuver controls. Sleek struw
come down from the leading edge to carry the -engine
pods well forward and below. .
All told, with itslhree-ton pair of engines, eacn
wing weighs 14 to 15 tons. Yet one of the many tesw
r,
t- . q& th -
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. O U G L. A
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Problems of passenger comfort and safety have been worked out.
Brutal underwater tests proved durability of fuselage and its
it must pass without even showing signs of strain is
being bent violently up and down from the horizon
tal in a nine-foot arc that no storm or flying con
ditions would ever subject it to.
This jet-engine-plus-wing team has more than it
takes to lift a fully loaded 150-ton jetliner off the
ground, under reasonably good flying conditions, in
less than half a mile. A Boeing 707 made it in 2,100
feet. Pilots won't usually push their jets that hard,
but they can if they have to. Normal jet take-off
time will be 20 to 30 seconds, or about as long as it
takes you to read this paragraph. Rate of climb:
3,000 feet per minute!
Britain got a head-start on everybody with her
DeHavilland Comet jetliners eight years
ago, but when explosive decompression fol
lowed on the heels of metal fatigue and blasted
several Comets off the world's airways, with heavy
loss of life, the largely Crown-financed British jet
effort had to go back to the research lab. Salvage
of the wrecked Comets taught British jet scientists
many valuable lessons, which the rest of the world
airtight skin. Lengthy interiors were ma
of divided compartments and strategic
was quick to pick up and adapt to their own craft.
Meanwhile, Soviet Russia, perfected her powerful
TU-104 jetliner which has flown U. N. and diplo
matic personnel to the United States. France is on
the scene with a trim, fast intercontinental commer
cial jet, the twin-engine Caravelle. Doing a mag
nificent job of marking time with transitional ships
like the Bristol Britannia turbo-prop Whispering
Giant, England will soon be back in competition with
true jets; noise tests were made on the completely
rebuilt Comet 4 and Comet 2E at New York's Idle
wild Airport this year.
But it is to the sleek product of American jetliner
know-how that we can look for the master strides
in the airborne revolution now upon us. Here is a
quick close-up of our triple threat to the jet age,
the Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8, and Convair 880.
All three are so huge you'd need a couple of foot
ball fields to park them wing-to-wing. The fastest
is also the smallest among four-engine jets: Con
vair's 880 has a wing-span of "only" 120 feet. With
the DC-8 we jump to a 139-foot, nine-inch wing.
Boeing's 707 Intercontinental tops everything with a
WeelcJy .
- zyh
de less awesome by use
use of color and decor.
far-reaching wing spread of, 142 feet, five inches.
Lengths are proportionate. Convair's 120-foot,
two-inch length zooms another city lot-front in the
DC-8 to 150 feet, six inches. The 707 again leads
with an over-all fuselage length of 152 feet, 11
inches. All have interiors three to six feet wider
and higher than anything now flying.
Seen from inside, these longer, -roomier cabins
dwarf even the near-ballroom dimensions of today's
prop-driven cargo aircraft. But makers of passenger
jets have found, ironically, that this desirable feature
has a poor psychological effect on customers.
"Frankly, it scares 'em," a Douglas engineer told
me. "Makes you feel like a mouse in a silo."
A Convair official visiting the unadorned million
dollar mockup of the 880 in San Diego told friends,
"I thought they were going to take me up in the
Lincoln Tunnel."
But the only customers who see the jetliners raw,
so to speak, are airline executives and purchasing
agents. For the traveling public, the impression of
too much space is overcome by bulkheading ' the
' (Continued on page 9)
Family Weekly, October 12. 1958