The Flight That Changed Everything When the 707 gave us the world.

 https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/707-flight-changed-everything-180971219/




America’s youngest jet-setter was seven years old when he boarded a Pan American World Airways Boeing 707 in New York, headed to Paris. It was October 26, 1958 and along with his parents and two older sisters, Loren Hopkins was on an all-expenses-paid, two-week tour of European capitals. His mother won the trip after entering a contest printed on the back of a Kellogg’s cereal box.

“She always had a desire to see other places,” said Hopkins, now 68 and a farmer in Kinsman, Ohio, of his mother, Vera. But she’d married a farmer, and their livelihood did not promise a life of travel. “For my mother to fly on a jet plane was the adventure of a lifetime,” Hopkins said.
A U.S. Army band serenaded the flight’s 111 passengers that night in 1958 as they approached the air stairs leading to the jetliner at Idlewild Airport. Among them was a genuine celebrity, the actress Greer Garson, who’d won an Academy Award for her performance in Mrs. Miniver 16 years earlier. (On its return flight from Paris, that 707 would carry Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye.)
“We walked to the airplane on a red carpet with flags on both sides,” Hopkins recalled of the rainy night. Floodlights accentuated the white aluminum airplane’s size: 140 feet long with a 130-foot wingspan. Its four Pratt & Whitney JT3C-6 turbojet engines were sleek in polished metal nacelles suspended below and forward of the wings, rakishly angled 35 degrees off of the fuselage.
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.
And though the 707’s impact on the world was as yet unwritten, Loren Hopkins had an inkling that things were about to change.
“Going on that trip when I was so young made me think, ‘Why not go wherever you want to go?’ ” he said.