October 1958: Pan Am, the 707 and America's first transatlantic jet service

Published

2026-10-30

Updated

2026-10-30

Facts checked

2026-10-26

On the evening of 26 October 1958 a Pan Am Boeing 707, the Clipper America, left New York for Paris with 111 passengers. It was not the first jet across the Atlantic: BOAC's Comet 4 had opened the London - New York route 22 days earlier. But the 707 was the jet that stayed. Juan Trippe had ordered it while the industry was afraid of jets; it cut flying times in half, and within two years Pan Am was flying jets across its whole network.

Comets for Pan Am and an industry afraid of jets

Before Pan Am ordered American jets, it ordered British ones. In October 1952 Pan Am ordered three Comet IIIs from de Havilland for an estimated $6.3 million. According to the Air Transport Association, they were the first foreign aircraft an American airline had ever ordered. TIME read Trippe's statement as a warning to American planemakers: the deal would let Pan Am buy a whole fleet if suitable American jets were not available by then (TIME, 1952).

Then the Comet faltered. In the early 1950s, the Pan Am Historical Foundation writes, manufacturers did not want to build jets and airlines did not want to fly them. Jets devoured fuel, civil airports had no runways long enough, and the investment looked incalculable. Britain withdrew the Comet after two crashes in less than 20 months, which seemed to confirm that the world was not ready for commercial jets, and the industry expected the next generation of airliners to be turboprops (Pan Am Historical Foundation).

An American jet was already in the air. On 15 July 1954 the Boeing 367-80, the "Dash 80", flew for the first time. Boeing had designed it for the Air Force as a jet tanker and transport, and the Smithsonian dates the start of the jet age in American civil aviation to that flight. The Dash 80 became the prototype of the 707 (Smithsonian).

Trippe wanted more than a prototype. The foundation calls him the only customer for jets at the time, and he would not settle for just any jet. He demanded one that could carry nearly twice as many passengers across the Atlantic as most propeller airliners, more profitably than the most profitable of them.

Forty-five jets in October 1955

None of the first offers met that demand. Douglas, Pan Am's main supplier, had a jet on the drawing board. Boeing offered a version of its military tanker. Pratt & Whitney offered the engine it sold to the military, not the more powerful one it was testing. None came close to the capacity and range that Pan Am had worked out as the minimum for a profitable jet, and the manufacturers, in the foundation's account, told Trippe to take it or leave it.

Trippe found his leverage abroad. When Pratt & Whitney heard that he was talking jet engines with Rolls-Royce in Britain, it agreed to sell him 120 of its bigger engines. With those engines secured, he told Douglas that if he could not get the aircraft he needed built in the United States, he would look overseas. Douglas agreed to build 25 DC-8s to his specifications and to keep the deal quiet. Then Trippe ordered 20 707s from Boeing (Pan Am Historical Foundation).

Boeing dates the order to 13 October 1955 (Boeing). That month, at a gathering of the world's airline leaders, Trippe announced that he had just ordered 45 jets for $269 million. TIME called it the first purchase of American commercial jets and the biggest deal in airline history. By splitting the order between the only two American manufacturers with jet transports, the magazine wrote, Pan Am had squeezed out its competitors and would be first to put jets into service (TIME, 1955).

The announcement shook the industry. Other airlines realised they would need jet fleets of their own. Boeing, finding that Douglas was designing a bigger aircraft, renegotiated on Pan Am's terms and agreed to widen the 707 for six seats abreast. In return Pan Am agreed to take the first six 707s as soon as possible with smaller engines of 13,500 pounds of thrust.

The promises were large. TIME expected the Boeing to carry up to 125 passengers and the Douglas up to 131, both cruising at 575 miles an hour at 30,000 feet, with New York to Paris in 6 hours 35 minutes instead of 11. One jet, the magazine calculated, could carry 50,000 passengers a year across the Atlantic, almost as many as the liner United States had carried the year before. At that rate 36 jets could have flown all 1,799,000 passengers that Pan Am's fleet of 147 aircraft carried in 1954.

From Renton to Washington, 1957-1958

The first production 707-120 was rolled out at Renton, Washington, on 28 October 1957 and flew on 20 December (Boeing). In 1955 Boeing had promised its first deliveries for December 1958. In the event Pan Am took delivery of the country's first commercial jetliner on 15 August 1958, four months ahead of schedule, to start transatlantic service in October.

The launch was staged in Washington. In October 1958, in front of Hangar 10 at Washington National Airport, the First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, broke a bottle of water from the seven seas on the fuselage of a Pan Am 707 and christened it the Jet Clipper America while 6,000 guests looked on (TIME, 1958). An hour later the jet flew to Baltimore, took aboard 41 guests, among them Juan Trippe and 33 newspaper and magazine executives, and landed at Melsbroek airport in Brussels 7 hours 19 minutes later.

TIME treated the Brussels trip as a prelude to scheduled service between New York and Paris and, from 16 November, between New York and London. Rome was still in doubt: the 707 had technical clearance for Ciampino airport, but the Italian government had so far refused "political" clearance.

The race with the Comet

Pan Am was not first. On 4 October 1958 BOAC opened the world's first transatlantic jet service, between London and New York, with the de Havilland Comet (Guinness World Records). Two Comet 4s crossed that day in opposite directions. G-APDB, now kept at Duxford, flew from New York to London in a then record 6 hours 12 minutes, half the time of the fastest piston airliners (Duxford Aviation Society). The westbound G-APDC left Heathrow at 8.45 a.m. with BOAC's chairman, Sir Gerard d'Erlanger, and 31 passengers aboard. With a fuel stop of an hour and ten minutes at Gander in Newfoundland, it took 10 hours 20 minutes (This Day in Aviation).

TIME was blunt in its issue of 27 October: Pan Am had lost the race to put the first pure jets on the Atlantic with paying passengers. Under the headline "Pan Am Up, BOAC Down" the magazine also reported that BOAC had hoped to start daily New York - London flights on 14 November, but a wildcat strike of maintenance workers at London Airport had grounded its Comets. "It's bitter to have run so hard and then see the tape snapped just as you're going to breast it," a BOAC official said (TIME, 1958).

Nor was the Atlantic where sustained jet service began. Aeroflot had been flying the Soviet Tu-104 between Moscow, Omsk and Irkutsk since 15 September 1956, cutting the journey from 18 hours to 7. Guinness World Records counts it as the first sustained jet airline service and the Tu-104 as the second jet airliner to enter service after the Comet (Guinness World Records). That story is told in Aeroflot in the 1950s.

Britain's head start did not last. Just 22 days after the Comets, the Duxford museum writes, Pan Am put its bigger and faster 707 on the New York - Paris route, and Britain's lead was lost for good: 74 Comet 4s were built, against more than a thousand Boeings. BOAC flew its Comets across the Atlantic only until the middle of 1960.

26 October 1958: the Clipper America

Pan Am's first scheduled jet flight left Idlewild airport in New York at 7.20 p.m. on 26 October 1958 (The New York Times, 1983). That night an Army band from the 42nd Infantry Division played John Philip Sousa at the airport. Aboard the 707-121 Clipper America were 111 passengers and a crew of 11 (Pan Am Historical Foundation). On the flight deck were Captain S. H. Miller, First Officer W. W. Lynch and Flight Engineer James Etchison, and the cabin crew included Hope Ryden, Jay Koren, Betty Ganz and Kay Landing (Pan Am Historical Foundation). Twenty-five years later The New York Times recalled the scene: bands played, corks popped, dignitaries made speeches, and the people aboard sensed a historic moment, the first scheduled jet flight by an American airline.

For the crew in the cabin everything was new. "None of the cabin crew had ever flown on a jet," one of the stewardesses recalled in 1983. "We had many, many more passengers than we had ever seen and half the time to serve meals. It looked impossible, but it was very exciting".

The 707 could not reach Paris nonstop that night. The company newspaper, Pan American Clipper, explained in November 1958 that weight limits at Idlewild ruled out a full fuel load. The tanks held 17,398 gallons, enough for 4,400 miles, but with a full load of passengers only 9,731 gallons could be taken on in New York (This Day in Aviation). So the Clipper America refuelled at Gander and landed at Le Bourget in Paris on 27 October; the whole trip took 8 hours 41 minutes.

The aircraft changed the arithmetic of flying. The first 707 model could seat 165 passengers in an all-economy layout, almost twice as many as the DC-7C, the largest propeller airliner, and it cruised at 555 miles an hour as high as 32,000 feet, often above the weather. By the foundation's reckoning it did three times the work of a DC-7C. It also needed two miles of runway to take off, had to inject water into its engines to generate enough thrust and had less range than the DC-7C. Even so, the University of Miami archive notes, the Clipper America cut flying times in half (University of Miami Libraries). A Pan Am jet soon flew inside the country as well: National Airlines began domestic jet service with a 707 borrowed from Pan Am (Smithsonian).

Economy class: cold sandwiches across the Atlantic

The jets arrived together with a cheaper ticket. From 1 April 1958 the airlines on the North Atlantic added a third class, economy, a stripped-down version of tourist class, and with deluxe, first and tourist they now sold four classes. The New York Times called it a compromise forced on the carriers by a few of their number who insisted on lower fares and by the Civil Aeronautics Board (The New York Times, 1958).

Economy was austere. A New York - London ticket cost $252 in economy, against $315 in tourist, $435 in first and $485 in deluxe. Economy passengers got cold sandwiches, no hot meals and no alcohol for sale, though tea, milk and coffee stayed free. Their seats were 34 inches apart, against 39 in tourist and 42 in first. Pan Am planned to fly 97 economy passengers at a time in one-class DC-7Cs.

For Trippe it was a step toward an old goal. The foundation counts economy fares, alongside the jets, among what Pan Am introduced in 1958. In 1943 Trippe had set himself the target of flying 150 passengers from New York to London in 10 hours for $100 one way. Fifteen years later the jets met the targets for capacity and speed, and the company kept working toward the fare. In the 1960s, the foundation sums up, traffic boomed (Pan Am Historical Foundation). On the first jet flight to Paris a round-trip economy ticket cost $489.

Across the oceans without stopping

The 707-121 was only the start. In mid-1959 Pan Am began receiving the 707-321, with the more powerful engines Trippe had pried out of Pratt & Whitney. Its JT4 engines of 15,800 pounds of thrust extended its range from 3,200 to 3,900 miles, and Pan Am jets could now fly routinely from New York to Frankfurt, Rome or Rio de Janeiro without stopping (Pan Am Historical Foundation). The Smithsonian sums up the change: the 707 had been designed for transcontinental range or a transatlantic crossing with one stop, but with extra fuel tanks and more efficient turbofan engines the 707-300s crossed the Atlantic nonstop.

The new model made its name in Moscow. In July 1959 the first Boeing Intercontinental flew from New York to Moscow nonstop, 4,800 miles in 9 hours 54 minutes at an average of 545 miles an hour, a record. It carried 73 reporters and officials travelling with Vice President Richard Nixon on his tour of the Soviet Union and was the first American commercial aircraft to visit Moscow. The next month, The New York Times reported, the type would enter Pan Am service between the West Coast and London (The New York Times, 1959).

The network followed. In September 1959 Pan Am opened jet service from the mainland to Hawaii (Smithsonian). Within two years of its first jet flight Pan Am had moved its worldwide routes from propellers to jets: to Europe and Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Australasia and the Middle East. "The free world has become a neighborhood," its 1960 annual report announced.

The DC-8, the other jet in Trippe's order, came late. Douglas began deliveries early in 1960 and the aircraft entered service that spring, with performance close to the 707-321. By then Pan Am's Boeings had been flying for 16 months and, in the foundation's words, had stolen the march. Pan Am took 19 of the 25 DC-8s it had ordered and flew them for about ten years.

The jets changed the ground as well. Pan Am's terminal at Idlewild, later known as the Worldport, opened in May 1960. It had been designed for propeller aircraft such as the 100-passenger DC-7C, and to fit the bigger jets one gate was dropped from the plan and the aircraft parked nose-in to the building (Pan Am Historical Foundation).

The first jet decade

The bet paid off. By 1961, thanks to jet productivity and economy fares, Pan Am set records in traffic, revenue and profit, earning $26 million on revenue of $460 million, while its operating costs fell from 53.9 to 49.1 cents a ton-mile. In 1963 operating profit reached $79 million on revenue of $561 million, and the next year fares came down substantially (Pan Am Historical Foundation).

The aircraft kept improving. In 1962 turbofan engines produced the 707-321B, with a range of 4,600 miles. Pan Am could now fly nonstop from New York beyond Rio to Buenos Aires and between California and London, and flights from San Francisco to Tokyo no longer made a 1,400-mile detour to refuel at Honolulu. In 1963 the 707-321C freighter, with a cargo door and pallet loading, opened the first all-cargo jet service; that year Pan Am sold more than 200 million cargo ton-miles, almost double its 1958 volume. Over the years Pan Am bought 130 707s of various models.

In October 1968 the company newspaper marked ten years of jets with an article by William Patterson, publisher of the Saturday Review. In a decade, he wrote, Pan Am alone had carried 45 million passengers on intercontinental flights and flown 6,538 scheduled jet flights around the world, which he likened to 350 round trips to the moon. New York was six and a half hours from London, and fares were lower than ten years earlier (Pan Am Historical Foundation). The people aboard the Clipper America in 1958, in his phrase, "flew into the future and found that it worked".

There was no going back, the foundation writes, not for Pan American or for the rest of the world (Pan Am Historical Foundation). The boom of the first jet decade brought its own problem: airports were nearing their limits, more aircraft of the same size would not help, and the answer, in the foundation's words, was bigger ones. The road to the jet order, from the first mail contract to Havana, is told in Pan Am before the jets. How it all came apart is in why Pan Am failed, and the whole story is in the Pan Am series.

Fly an airline of 1955

• Era: Jet Age, 1955
• Base: New York, JFK
• In the catalog: Boeing 707-120, from 1958

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