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Ever since Orville Wright took to the air in 1903, the progress of commercial aviation has been evolutionary. Planes grew bigger and faster, in predictable steps; for the past quarter-century they have increased their speed each year by 8 m.p.h. Today all that is ancient history. Evolution has become revolution with the age of the jet.
The jet will fly nearly twice as fast and nearly twice as high as the present piston planes, pack 40 times the power in its turbine engines. It will shrink the world by 40%, making no spot on earth more than a day's distance from a jet airport.
Manhattan businessmen will be able to commute to San Francisco for lunch, be back home after an afternoon's work in time for bed. Weekend flights to London and Paris will be as easy—perhaps easier —than weekend drives to the country in jam-packed Sunday traffic.
For U.S. airlines the jet age has already dawned over the Atlantic with the start of Pan American World Airways' service to Paris.* But for countless Americans, it will not arrive until American Airlines President Cyrus Rowlett Smith, 59, a tough, hardworking boss who has built his line into the nation's biggest, sends an American jet winging off on the first transcontinental jet flight, two months hence.
First to Shift. American's role in introducing the U.S. public to the jet age will be greater than any other line's. It carries 8,000,000 passengers per year, one in every six Americans who fly in the U.S., and almost twice as many revenue passengers as all overseas U.S. airlines combined. Already its Boeing 707 jetliners are whooshing back and forth across the U.S. on shakedown flights as regular as scheduled trips, cutting cross-continent flight time by more than three hours: 5½ hours from New York to Los Angeles, 4½ hours to return. On most of its major routes, American will start jet service months ahead of its competitors.
Of the $2.6 billion that U.S. airlines will spend by 1962 on 400 new jetliners and improved ground facilities, American will plunk down $440 million, by far the biggest sum of any airline, become the first to shift its line completely to jets. American has ordered $365 million worth of new planes to be delivered by 1962: 25 Boeing 707s for long-distance flights, 25 shorter-range Boeings, 35 Lockheed Electra turboprops for short hops, and 25 Convair 600s, which, if the plane lives up to its billing, will be the world's fastest commercial jet (635 m.p.h.).
What will the jet revolution mean to the aviation industry and the U.S. public? Items:
Bigger Airports. Forty U.S. airports are spending $260 million for jet-age buildings, new ground facilities and enlarged runways. To handle the jets, runways will have to be lengthened to at least 10,500 ft. v. 7,500 ft. for the piston-propelled DC-7.
Better Controls. The new planes will fly so high and so fast that the Government will have to set up a whole new system of air controls to prevent collisions with military jets flying at the same heights, separate the jets from slower piston planes at lower levels. In the next five years, it will spend $1.8 billion to set up all-weather, round-the-clock controls on all U.S. airways.