Before the year was out, the sleek was in service with Pan-Am. It was to change the way we fly and see the world. Curiously, the graphic designer working for Capitol Records appeared to have been behind the times.
The artwork for Come Fly With Me shows a snappily dressed Sinatra taking the hand of a girl as he cocks his thumb towards a TWA Lockheed Constellation, the last of the great American piston-engine airliners. The might have been one of the most glamorous of all forms of transport when it entered service with Pan-Am, yet its very success led ultimately to the horrendous and heartbreakingly banal conditions the majority of us fly in today.
As for Sinatra, he so admired the new — the aircraft that should have been on the sleeve of Come Fly With Me — that he bought his very own. This was an ex-Qantas , built in , that, since , has belonged to John Travolta, Hollywood star and pilot. Some people like to gaze at the curves of their prize classic car, or latest Ferrari: Travolta opts for the sight of a four-engine, mph jet.
The began as a discussion and some sketches in when Boeing engineers Ed Wells, George Schairer and John Alexander began thinking about a swept-wing jet airliner. In August , the first experimental takeoff of a jet-powered airplane was that of the German Heinkel He On October 4, , the Comet, redesigned after disastrous crashes, made the first transatlantic flight. Meanwhile, in September , the Soviet Tupolev Tu entered operations.
To start a design dynasty, the revamped Comet was too small and unprofitable, and no successor models existed. Only the countries of the Soviet bloc used Tupolev aircraft. The first successor, in , was the three-engine Boeing ; the four-engine , launched in , was perhaps the most innovative concept in modern aviation; and the new addition, the Dreamliner, launched in , was the first aircraft to be made of composites of carbon fiber, capable of flying more than 17 hours on routes.
On October 26, , the first scheduled flight of the , named Clipper America , was followed by a welcoming ceremony and a speech by Juan Trippe, president of Pan Am. On the tail of Boeing , an enormous blue globe was painted just for the flight. It was a symbol that meant Pan Am would offer travelers the world; a revolutionary logo crafted especially for the mid-century modern era that Pan Am was ushering in. That night in , as the passengers reached the air stairs leading to the jetliner at Idlewild Airport, a US Army band serenaded them.
Among the first transatlantic jet travelers was a genuine celebrity, the actress Greer Garson, who had won an Academy Award for her performance in Mrs. Next, the fuselage was put to the same test; this time, five blades pierced the pressurized fuselage, resulting in wisps of air escaping from the punctures — but no cracks and no structural failure. The Dash 80 prototype led to the commercial and the military KC tanker. Both planes shared the basic design of the Dash 80 but were very different airplanes, neither one being a derivative of the other.
One great difference was in the width and length of the fuselage. Airlines wanted the fuselage to be 4 inches 2. Its width and the foot length Miniver 16 years earlier. An enormous blue globe was painted on the tail of the airplane named Clipper America just for the flight.
This was a new logo designed specifically for the mid-century modern age the airline was ushering in with its jetliner, an emblem that promised travelers the world. I spoke to Cusack last fall, two days after the foundation opened its permanent exhibit at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, Long Island, with a celebratory gala. The Saturday-night affair had a golden-age-of-aviation feel about it. Attendees not in cocktail attire were dressed in vintage Pan Am uniforms, the women in crisp blue stewardess suits and the retired pilots in white caps, navy blue blazers, and plenty of gold braid.
An accordionist played during the cocktail hour, and cancan dancers performed during dessert. Jay Koren, who would eventually publish a memoir about his 40 years of service with Pan Am, was called in to work the flight at the last minute when the airline decided to add a seventh flight attendant to the crew. He was 26 at the time. The luxuries aboard that flight—wines poured into stemware, hot meals served on china and set on linen-covered tables—likely went unappreciated by the seven-year-old Hopkins.
He was ecstatic. He drove us to where it was going to land, and we watched it make a perfect landing. The following day, Steve Eastman learned that Pan Am would be the first operator of the He immediately booked two economy seats on the inaugural flight.
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