Pan American World Airways teacher, Vol. XIV, No. 5, June 1958

              June 1958
VOL. XIV, No. 5
Published by Pan American World Airways
FIRST JET CLIPPER TO BE DELIVERED THIS SUMMER
Delivery of Pan American’s first Jet Clipper, a Boeing 707, is expected early this summer. It will be assigned immediately to a program of indoctrination for both flight and ground crews in preparation for inauguration of scheduled service on PAA’s world routes.
The accompanying picture shows the Boeing 707, photographed recently at Seattle, Washington, displaying the new Pan American markings. The Clipper fleet to be assembled during coming months will include others of this type, additional 707’s in the larger Intercontinental version and Douglas DC-8’s — forty-four aircraft in all.
In various passenger cabin configurations, the new Clippers will accommodate First Class, Tourist and Economy Class passengers. The one-hundred foot long cabin has space for 96 First Class passengers. Set up for Tourist Class, it has room for 143, for Economy Class, 174.
Four powerful J-57 Pratt and Whitney engines, much less complicated than piston-driven engines, power these giant Clippers. The thirty-eight foot tail, high as a four-story building, dwarfs the passengers. Wing span is one hundred and thirty-one feet, longer than the entire length of the Wright Brothers’ historic flight at Kitty Hawk!
Requiring no engine warm-up, the Jet Clipper proceeds to the runway. During takeoff, the engines use fifty-three hundred pounds of purified water for two minutes of
thrust boosting. (Water left over is automatically dumped.)
The jet, climbing at more than three hundred miles an hour, takes passengers above the weather to an altitude of 35 thousand feet in half an hour.
Fuel Is Kerosene
The plane’s four engines use eighteen to twenty-five hundred gallons of kerosene each hour, fed from wing tanks which hold more than seventeen thousand gallons.
Even though it cruises seven or eight miles above the earth, cabin pressure stays at about five thousand feet.
Interior design is gay and modern. Walls, of plastic-on-metal panels, are easily removed for repairs or cleaning. Indirect fluorescent lighting can change from bright day light to the pink of dawn or sunset, or to the restful dark blue of midnight. Two luxurious sky-lounges offer a club-room atmosphere of luxury and relaxation.
A typical flight crew consists of the Captain, First Officer, Flight Engineer and Navigator who is also a pilot.
The four galley units are capable of providing up to one hundred and ninety-two Tourist meals to be served by four cabin attendants in thirty-six minutes.
Fresh foods will be cooked to perfection in three minutes by new type ovens, using quartz glass with infra-red elements. Menus will carry a wider variety of the world’s
foods, due to mechanical refrigeration of an entirely new type.
Seating will be two or three abreast on each side. Above every seat, each passenger has his own reading light, public address speaker, air outlet and an emergency dropdown oxygen mask.
Large double-paned windows provide excellent visibility from every seat. Outside light is controlled by plastic shades, one completely opaque, the other smoke-tinted.
The cruising speed of five hundred and seventy-five miles an hour makes possible a flight from New York to Paris in six and a half hours, Tokyo to Los Angeles in nine hours, New York to Buenos Aires in less than eleven hours.
The Flying Clippers
The Boeing 797 and the Douglas DC-8 are the latest in a series of Pan American aircraft which began with the tri-motored Fok-ker which began service between Key West, Florida and Havana, Cuba, in 1927.
First Pan American craft to be called Flying Clippers were the Sikorsky S-42’s which operated in the Caribbean area, and in which the survey flights were flown for both transpacific and trans-Atlantic service.
Capable of flying the oceans, but not suitable for commercial service over those long routes, the Sikorsky S-42’s gave way to the Martins of the China Clipper type, and these were joined later by the Boeings of the California Clipper type.
Because the original Flying Clippers were flying boats, a misconception developed that Flying Clippers were flying boats. But this limitation of terminology never was intended. When the further development of the aeronautical sciences brought multi-engined land planes to the fore as the aircraft for over ocean service, Pan American assigned Clipper names to the Douglas and Boeing four engine airplanes which went into service on the ocean routes and around the world.
It was at this time that the practice of naming the Flying Clippers for famous sailing clippers of another day was adopted. Flence, there now are such Flying Clippers as Clipper Flying Cloud, Clipper Golden Fleece, etc.
Introduced to the flying public during the past decade, these Boeing and Douglas Flying Clippers made history in terms of speed and comfort. But progress is rapid in aviation, and now they in turn will yield to the Flying Clippers of the Jet Age.
A Pan American Jet Clipper—Boeing 707—in flight.