(upbeat music)
Have you ever wondered how many people
are in the sky right now?
Um.
Probably more than I imagine.
Are we including trapeze artists
and people launched from catapults?
50,000.
Half a million.
A million people.
On any given day, you're likely to find
about 1.2 million people in the air.
Now, that is a lot of airplanes.
Okay, that's a lot of people (laughs).
2019 Was the busiest year
in the history of air travel.
If you've ever seen any of the flight charts
that show all the planes in the air at the same time,
there's thousands and thousands.
How did we go from one brave passenger?
It's hard to understand how insane
you would have to be (man screams)
to go on the first scheduled commercial airline flight.
To 40 million annual flights.
[Flight Attendant] Here we go.
It's almost time to fly.
It takes wanderlust.
I don't think there are any human beings
who haven't dreamt of flying.
Innovation.
The jet engine changes the whole game.
Risque marketing.
Each airline was kind of trying to outcompete each other
with these really beautiful stewardesses.
The idea was that air travel is the fulfillment
of a fantasy, and a part of that fantasy was sex.
And the rise of coach class.
The fact you only get 30 inches of leg room.
It's a lot more democratic.
This is a story of firsts,
of millions, of billions.
The 2010 Iceland volcano explosion
cost airlines $1.7 billion.
And the lucky number seven.
This is air travel.
Please fasten your seatbelt.
Buckle up.
(upbeat music)
(plane engine roaring)
Air travel has connected people, culture, societies,
has allowed people to travel quicker, faster,
more efficiently than we've ever would've expected.
Air travel has revolutionized everything.
We need numbers to help us imagine air travel.
What is the volume of luggage getting moved every day?
What is the longest flight?
How many people are getting onto an airplane every day?
(upbeat music)
To grasp the true scope and reach
of air travel today, look no further
than Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Atlanta is the world's busiest passenger airport.
More than 110 million passengers
come through its doors every year.
There's always a running joke that no matter
where you are traveling in the world,
that if there's a layover, it's Atlanta.
But ATL would never have taken off
without an obscure risk-taking druggist
and the magic of number nine.
(upbeat music)
In 1888, Atlanta pharmacist Asa Candler
buys the secret recipe to a new soft drink
with nine mysterious ingredients.
He successfully markets the syrupy tonic
and founds the Cola-Cola Company.
Within two decades, it's America's favorite soda.
Yum.
But Asa's got a thirst for a new venture.
With the profits of his soda empire,
he gambles $77,674, or two million in today's money,
on 287 acres of marshland.
It's a fixer-upper.
Then drains the whole thing dry.
In 1909, Asa Candler opens up a raceway in Atlanta.
Thousands flock to see car races and air shows.
But after two seasons, the novelty wears off.
The raceway in Atlanta is way ahead of its time
because the car is just being introduced
to modern America and middle-class America.
The speedway is a flop.
Asa's big idea is as flat as stale soda pop.
The track sits abandoned till 1919
when Asa lets pilots use it as a landing strip.
A few years later, the city officially takes it over.
If Asa Candler could see what happened to his vision,
his mind would explode.
(plane engine roars)
So, the land is now home to Atlanta Hartsfield Airport.
It's a tiny portion of what is the sprawling system
of runways and taxiways.
In less than a century, Asa's original airfield
multiplied by 16 to now cover 7.3 square miles.
(upbeat music)
The Atlanta airport is absolutely huge.
Every time I've flown through it,
my connection is in a different terminal
on the other side of the airport,
and you have to ride a tram
to get from one place to the other.
Hartsfield-Jackson airport covers 4,700 acres,
and an average of 2,700 planes take off
and land here every single day.
(upbeat music)
The airport itself is an experience.
I mean, literally, you can do everything at the terminal.
It's like a fully-formed city in itself.
I mean, you've got restaurants,
hotels, transportation hubs.
They have little churches.
They have their own police force.
They have public transit that moves you
from one end to the other.
And it's all behind a security wall.
63,000 people are needed
to run Atlanta's airport,
making it the number one employer in the state.
(film reel clicking) (whimsical music)
All airports owe a debt to the pioneers of aviation,
but you'd be surprised to discover some
aren't the usual suspects from our textbooks.
Aviation always starts with the Wright brothers in 1903,
but people were trying, experimenting,
learning to fly long before that.
From Leonard da Vinci's 500 visions
of flying machines, to the study of aerodynamics
by mathematicians like Huygens or Newton.
Come on, come on.
Humans have been attempting flight
for centuries.
Oh, no.
If it works, it ain't stupid.
I know nothing of aerodynamics.
I don't know how somebody figured it out in the first place.
The wheels come up and then it's autopilot, isn't it?
I should know this as an engineer.
Air that flows faster has less lift
than air that flows slower, so the design of the wing
causes air to flow over the wing faster
and under the wing slower,
and that's what gives the plane lift.
You're floating.
The wings don't move like a bird.
It might just be magic.
There's a reason why it took human beings so long
to figure out how to fly.
You have to have two characteristics.
One is you have to be very logical
and rigorous in your engineering designs.
At the same time, you have to be incredibly reckless.
You have to be a lunatic to put yourself
in one of these flimsy contraptions.
Aw, just like Icarus.
The very idea of flight, it was fascinating to everybody,
but most people would say it can't be done.
Those who were prepared to give it a try
couldn't wait to get into the air.
We're used to cruising at 30,000 feet.
But it's the much lower altitude of 50 feet
that makes commercial aviation history.
Taking us on that seminal ride is a motley duo
you've probably never heard of.
Let's head to the beach.
New Year's Day, 1914,
3,000 people gather on a beach in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Everyone there, I mean, regardless whether
they were hungover or sober, had to be aware
that they're either gonna witness the greatest thing ever,
or one of the biggest tragedies ever.
They've come to see the Birdman, Tony Jannus.
A 24-year-old playboy and showman,
he's promised to wow the crowds,
flying a Benoist XIV across the bay to Tampa.
(bright music)
Well, a Benoist airplane is a boat with a set of wings,
and then a propeller driven by
an early internal combustion engine,
and a tail which enabled you
to keep the whole thing stabilized.
The model XIV was one of 17 flying machines
built by aircraft parts manufacturer
and designer, Thomas Benoist.
This Benoist fellow liked to brag about how he used
the best materials and he just used the best math.
It was all bluster, I mean,
these people did not know what they were doing.
St. Petersburg Mayor Abraham C. Pheil
shells out $400 for the only seat on board
and the bragging rights to being the very first
paying airplane passenger in the world.
It's hard to understand how insane you would have to be
to go on the first scheduled commercial airline flight.
It was an experimental, almost a toy,
I would say, this flying boat.
(bright music)
An airboat?
Oh, it's a sea plane.
That doesn't look particularly safe.
(laughs) No, thank you.
I would definitely fly in this thing just to try it.
Watch and learn, mortal.
After takeoff, the Benoist reaches
a maximum cruising altitude of 50 feet,
but soon, the engine sputters
and the boat plane splashes down.
Not about to disappoint the crowd,
Tony tinkers with the engine and lifts off once more.
It goes faster and faster and faster, and like the,
the chickly chicken chickly of the engine, and, you know,
finally it's in the air and, you know, there's birds,
you know, whipping past, and 22 minutes of flight time,
you're all the way across the bay.
Once that airboat takes its first paying passenger,
that's really the catalyst for commercial airfare.
The flight service runs twice a day,
six days a week.
In four months, it takes 1,200 paying passengers
across Tampa Bay.
Commercial aviation was getting started,
but the machines were not very powerful, not very fast,
and you couldn't carry much weight.
(mischievous music)
Early planes made of wood and fabric
are used mainly for transporting mail.
But when military aircraft from the First World War
repurposed, commercial flight gets a big boost.
After this very sort of experimental era,
we moved into the 30s.
By then, airplanes were getting quite
a lot bigger and a lot more sophisticated.
So, in the 1930s,
there's a major leap in aircraft technology.
Aircraft designers have at their disposal
considerably better internal combustion engines.
Metal airframes combined with power engines
enable planes to fly faster, farther,
and through different climates.
As the engines get better and better,
you have aircraft that really leapfrog
in their performance capabilities.
The industry takes off.
In 1930, 6,000 Americans travel by plane.
Four years later, that number multiplies by 75
to reach 450,000 passengers.
Yet, despite the technological advancements,
air travel is strictly for the 1%.
Ordinary people couldn't hope to buy
an airline ticket to anywhere,
not short haul, and certainly not long haul.
A coast-to-coast return flight
in depression-era America
would cost the equivalent of $4,270 today.
And we're not talking flying
in first-class conditions either.
The airplane was incredibly noisy
and there was no pressurization.
And by the time you landed there,
the drumming sound in your ears
didn't stop for a week after that.
For the super rich,
there was another more comfortable option
to cruise the skies.
In the 1930s, the really established and reliable,
and frankly, luxurious way to do air travel
was by Zeppelin.
You had plenty of space.
You didn't have this crazy vibrations and noise.
Replicating the exclusive
ocean liner experience,
a one-way ticket across the Atlantic on an airship,
sets you back $400, or more than $7,000 today.
It was faster than surface ships could go.
It's very stable.
An airship takes three to five days
to float from Europe to the United States.
And that seemed like a much better bet
for the future of air travel.
Until a catastrophe
spells the end of airship travel.
(water splashing)
Oh, the humanity and all the (indistinct)
feeding around here.
I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen.
35 Of 97 people aboard the Hindenburg perish
when the Zeppelin catches fire
attempting to land in May 1937.
It was such a tragic, tragic event
and was so covered in the news
that we still associate the word Hindenburg with disasters.
Planes are decidedly the future of air travel.
And once the revolutionary method of propulsion
comes on the scene, there's no turning back.
(upbeat music)
When you look at the history of aviation,
there's before the jet engine and after the jet engine.
(engine roars) (upbeat music)
Jet engine airplanes
are developed in the 30s and early 40s.
They first take to the skies in World War II.
(upbeat music)
Instead of using blades to push the air,
they ingest the air at the front,
drive it through sets of whirling thin blades,
heat it up by injecting and burning fuel,
and then propel it out the back,
so driving the plane forward on pure thrust.
Jets fly faster, farther, higher,
and more efficiently than all airplanes previously built.
After the war, a little-known military aircraft manufacturer
called Boeing sees just how commercial air travel
and company profits could soar to new heights.
To make it happen, they bet on number seven.
(upbeat music)
Nearing completion
in the Boeing planet, Seattle,
America's first jet transport
is a unit of glistening beauty.
Boeing, thanks to working on these jet-powered bombers,
had experience working with these really
technologically sophisticated engines
that were reliable and powerful.
Boeing risks a quarter of its net worth
on the 100 plus passenger jet.
That's a major leap from a flying boat
with one traveler on board.
Representing $15 million investment,
the jet giant is 128 feet long
with a wing spread of 130 feet.
The pressure is on to sell the new fleet.
The marketing department at Boeing
started to develop an idea.
Boeing's divisions are classified
by blocks of 100, so the new jet will be model 700,
but there's nothing catchy about that name,
so the mad men in marketing gamble on another seven.
(plane engine whirring)
We're taking you aboard
the Boeing jet Stratoliner, the 707,
to give you a preview
of airliner travel of the future.
The move will give rise
to one of the most successful brands in history,
and turn out to be Boeing's lucky number.
The future is bright, and a real epitome
of that brightness is the Boeing 707,
this wonderful machine that is gonna transform everything.
But it's still early days.
Boeing doesn't know yet how lucky number seven
will be for company fortunes.
Right now, it needs an entire industry
to buy into its dream.
(belt swooshing) (engine roaring)
It happens to be August 7th and somebody's lucky day.
Tex Johnston climbs into the prototype for the Boeing 707.
Once a barnstormer, now Boeing ship test pilot,
Tex is known for a love of all things cowboy.
(mid-tempo music)
He had the great mustache and the nerves of steel,
ice water in his veins, demeanor.
And he, you know, was given this really sturdy,
straight-flying, reliable aircraft.
Today's mission is a no-nonsense fly
over Lake Washington.
The goal is to impress the air industry execs
aboard Boeing President Bill Allen's yacht.
(upbeat music)
250,000 onlookers are also in attendance,
but they've come for the speedboat races.
Only Tex is planning to upstage the spectacle
on the water with his number one move.
He just could not resist the opportunity
to show the people on the ground what this thing could do.
Powering up to 490 miles an hour,
Tex throws the 280,000-pound passenger plane
into a barrel roll.
He's a mad man.
I like it.
He takes the plane upside down and everyone was shocked.
He wasn't authorized to do that.
It was not part of the flight plan.
He just knew he could do it,
so he did it.
Yeehah!
How confident was Tex Johnston
to do a barrel roll in front of his boss?
What better way to sell a plane
than to make it stand out from other planes?
Boeing 707,
powered by Pratt and Whitney jet engines,
and operated by Pan American World Airways.
Its destination, Paris.
Pan Am orders 20 707s.
TWA, Qantas and other airlines quickly follow suit.
The Boeing 707 really did kick off the jet age.
Carrying over 100 passengers
at up to 600 miles per hour,
the 707 cuts trans-Atlantic flight times in half.
So now we could go anywhere.
We could literally go around the world
in roughly 23 or 24 hours.
All of a sudden, the world opens up.
(tires screeching)
Historians of aviation jokingly call this
the era of the Mach 1 movie theater
and the supersonic whisky's hour.
The 50s and 60s were really the golden age of travel.
There's plenty of leg room, plenty of comfort,
everyone's relaxed.
It just seems like the equivalent
of first-class traveling today.
You had to be able to afford it.
Air travel in the 50s, adjusted for inflation,
was five times what it is today.
(engine roars)
Today, you'd pay about $800
for a round trip ticket from New York to Paris.
Adjusted for inflation, back in the 50s,
you'd be shelling out some $4,000 for the same flight.
It was expensive enough that 64%
of airline passengers were repeat passengers.
Good afternoon, welcome aboard.
Thanks very much. -: You're welcome.
So airlines looked for creative ways
to lure the 64% with deep pockets.
Glamor was what was going to sell it.
(upbeat music)
No carrier pulled off luxury in the skies
better than Pan American.
The genius of Pan Am was to create
a powerful association with freedom
and glamor and exoticism.
When you fly out into the world with Pan Am,
you're not going with an airline (indistinct) country best
then visits the rest.
Pan Am had a really charismatic leader,
Juan Trippe, who had endless imagination.
He was a good businessman, but he was a dreamer, too.
A former naval aviator,
Juan Trippe launches Pan Am in 1927.
Laser-focused on the number one,
he takes only three years to turn Pan Am
into the world's biggest airline.
Pan Am was an airline of firsts,
both cultural and technical.
It was the first to serve food in the air,
and it was the first to offer
trans-Atlantic passenger service.
It was the first airline to bring the Beatles to the US.
Pan Am as a brand pervaded culture, both high and low.
Pan Am was the first carrier
to sell all-expense air tours
and create the tourist class on international flights.
To lure passengers of every income level,
all the air carriers lean heavily on their staff.
(upbeat music)
Each airline was kind of trying to outcompete each other
with these really beautiful, glamorous,
and at some point in time as the sexual revolution happened,
overtly sexy stewardesses.
Here's what it takes
to be a stewardess in the 1960s.
Be at least 20 years old, but not older than 27;
a height somewhere between 5-foot-two,
but not above 5-foot-nine;
weigh less than 140 pounds;
must retire by age 32,
be unmarried and definitely not pregnant.
The idea was that air travel
is the fulfillment of a fantasy.
And a part of that fantasy was sex.
(mellow music)
Braniff Airlines had something they called the AirStrip.
The stewardess would begin the flight
wearing a jacket and a dress.
And with every meal course that she served,
she took off one layer of clothing until at the end,
she was wearing a leotard with a sheer overlay.
After dinner on those long flights,
she'll slip into something a little more comfortable.
This looks like you're hiring an escort.
It's like mad man.
Oh, she's stripping more?
We get it, you're hot.
She took out her skirt (chuckles).
That told me nothing about being on a plane.
They don't make flight attendants like that anymore.
They're actually overworked and underpaid.
There's no mention of flying in the ad,
and something like this would never work today.
But back in the 60s,
the innuendo-laden campaign is a huge success.
Within a year, business is up 50%.
(mellow music)
And that kind of wink and nod sexism
became much more overt over the course
of the late 60s and early 70s,
culminating in the National Airlines Fly Me campaign.
Everything you've heard about us
Miami girls is true.
We're always on the move.
I'm Judy and I was born to fly.
In 1972, National Airlines
spends $ 9.5 million marketing the bodies
of stewardesses, rather than the flights.
It was unbelievably sexist.
Their jobs were really dependent
on their willingness to appear as sex objects.
The highly chauvinistic strategy works.
Ticket sales increased 23% in just one year.
That's more than double the industry average.
I'm Judy and I was born to fly.
Fly me.
Fly Judy.
Fly National.
Sexism is not limited to land.
They were objectified the same way in the air
as women were treated in the workplace.
And yet being a stewardess was a coveted job.
It was the number one career choice
among female high school seniors in 1968.
It's easy from the vantage point of today
to forget just how constrained choices were
for many American women in the 50s and 60s.
There's two ways you could leave your small town.
You could join the military or if you're a woman,
you could become a stewardess.
So not only can you leave, but you can travel
to different states and different countries.
You might think a pretty face
is what gets you the job in the 60s,
but consider this.
In 1968, 266,000 women applied
for just 12,000 stewardess positions.
With one in 22 odds,
wow was a girl to stand out from the crowd?
Lynne Totten was from small town in New York state.
She was the first woman in her family to go to college.
She was the student body president.
She was incredibly, you know, bright and promising.
Lynne is passionate about her science studies,
and the events gripping her country.
She was engaged in the social movements of the day,
and she wanted to see these different places
that she'd read the headlines about.
So when she graduated, she appalled her parents
by saying that she wanted to work
as a stewardess after college.
They thought that she would be a teacher,
or work in a biology lab, or get married and have a family.
But Lynne is unstoppable.
She heads to New York City and makes a bee line
for the 59-storey standout in the Big Apple skyline.
(mid-tempo music)
The Pan Am building, which casts a huge shadow,
she walks through the lobby, up the stairs
to the conference room where there were
all of these really beautiful women in rose.
And they were incredibly intimidating to her.
There was a lot of competition.
They were also expected to be
not only attractive physically,
but to be good conversationalists.
Lynne's heart sinks.
For every hundred applicants,
no more than five get the job.
She almost turned right back around and walked out.
But she went to her interview where she talked to a man,
very frankly, about what she might be looking to do.
Lynne is clear.
She's not interested in finding a rich husband
or shopping in exotic locales.
After the interview,
Lynne is the only applicant to be offered the job.
Her smarts, calm, and honesty are what give her the edge.
For all of the glamor that Pan Am really projected,
what it really needed was women who would be able
to handle such a huge variety of situations.
In the 1960s,
six to 8% of US college graduates were women.
Yet 10% of Pan Am stewardesses had gone to graduate school.
Hi.
(plane engine roaring)
But the tenants don't get enough credit.
Yes, they're serving us our wine, which is very important,
but they're also help keeping us safe.
I mean, they should honestly give you
an electrified (indistinct)
because you are kind of hurt and (indistinct).
Yeah, they should have some like self-defense training.
You know, like people are so rude to fight attendants.
They are heroes.
They make sure that you live.
United Flight 837 to Los Angeles.
The flight is not ready for boarding.
Passengers only beyond the (indistinct) room, please.
(bright music)
In the late 60s,
all the carriers were looking for sharp candidates,
like Lynne Totten,
to handle the increase in passenger numbers.
Aviation was getting more efficient
and society was becoming more prosperous
while disposable incomes were going up.
So, they started packing the seats.
In 1970, there were 383 million
air passenger journeys worldwide.
To meet increasing demand,
Boeing introduces its most iconic plane ever.
(mellow music)
The mostest of everything describes
the new giant of commercial aviation,
the jetliner 747.
Contrasted with great conventional aircraft,
the 747 will carry 490 passengers.
Whoa.
We see a lot of very big airplanes around nowadays,
but at that time, the leap from the 707,
about 150 passengers, up to an aircraft
which could have held 400 to 500 passengers,
that was a massive leap.
The 747 enters service in 1970
to great acclaim.
It's the first (indistinct) commercial airliner,
the first to feature stairs to an upper deck,
and the first jet with overhead bins.
With 747, Boeing hit a grand slam home run again.
The legendary Boeing 747
is made of six million parts,
contains 140 miles of wire, or the distance
between Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
And with a wingspan of 195 feet,
the 747 is 35 feet wider than a football field.
(mellow music)
First of all, it's huge.
And it has a distinctive look.
It is unmistakable because of this bulge on top.
You see a 747 from any distance
and you know exactly what it is.
Dubbed the queen of the skies
and the plane that shrank the world,
the 747 flies 4,620 nautical miles on a single tank of gas
and brings travelers to the far corners of the planet.
Flying became a bit more affordable for ordinary people,
so larger numbers flew.
With many more people taking to the skies,
aircraft safety becomes an increasing concern.
(airplane whirring)
I'm gonna ask you to fasten your seatbelts.
I don't have a fear of flying.
I used to have a fear of flying,
but now I'm sort of jaded about it.
I do have a fear of heights
and I have a fear of outer space,
so it's weird that plane flying is fine.
Obviously during turbulence,
like when you do those like vertical drops,
you definitely get the like butterflies in your stomach.
Oh, I hate flying, probably 'cause
I have no control over the situation.
You are literally in a metal tube in the sky.
(plane engine roars)
Aerophobia is the most commonly held fear
in the United States.
So many people are so uneasy
about what is mathematically
such a ridiculously safe form of transportation.
One statistic has it that 40% of air travelers
experience some kind of anxiety or unease.
Obviously, that kind of instinctual risk assessment
is not rational,
but the fact that so many people experience it
just signals how deep-seated it is.
(plane engine roars)
If you have a fear of flying,
falling from 10,000 feet might be your worst nightmare,
but there can be far greater dangers at ground level.
Christmas Eve, 1971,
17-year-old Juliane Koepcke is flying
over the Peruvian Amazon on board LANSA Flight 508.
40 minutes in and the turbo prop flies into a thunderstorm.
The plane shakes violently.
Juliane watches helplessly as lightning strikes the wing.
(lightning sizzles)
Thunderstorms have violent updrafts and downdrafts.
It can literally rip an airliner to pieces.
The plane breaks apart.
Suddenly, the buckled-in teen is falling from 10,000 feet
toward the jungle canopy below.
She blacks out before impact.
When her plane started to go down,
she was still trapped in her seat
and had the seats on either side of her empty,
which may have helped cushion the fall, and she survived.
Juliane wakes up with broken bones,
a concussion, and deep lacerations.
And she then had to spend 11 days searching for safety.
Picking her way through the jungle,
Juliane dodges deadly snakes, fends off swarms of insects,
and sidesteps hungry caimans.
She had a broken collarbone,
was attacked by parasites and maggots.
She eventually found her way to a loggers encampment
and they were able to get her to a hospital.
Today, airplanes are equipped
with weather radars, so pilots can fly around storm systems.
It's hard to really overstate how safe air travel is.
Back in the 1980s, your chance of being on an airplane,
which had an accident that killed even one person on board,
would've been about one in one and a half a million.
Now, we're in a different league altogether.
Safety has gotten better by a multiple of about six.
(plane engine roars)
The odds of dying in an aircraft accident
on any airline are one in 11 million.
The odds of getting hit by lightning are one in 500,000.
Huh, the numbers lie.
It would take one person 10,000 years
of daily flights before a fatal crash would occur.
So a flight every day for 10,000 years,
how crazy is that?
You have a bigger chance than getting hit by lightning
than dying in a plane crash, like, that's amazing.
It shows you how safe planes are.
Well, now I don't wanna go outside anymore, thanks.
(laughs) I'm just gonna stay in a plane all the time.
It's the technology which has made
the biggest single difference.
Airplanes now, they're not just
technologically beautifully engineered,
but they're smart.
There are computers galore on board,
monitoring the equipment, much better than people can.
After deregulation of the industry in 1978,
ticket prices fall and air travel explodes.
New carriers spring up through the 80s and 90s
to cater to the demand.
They could charge less, price competition.
You could start thinking about things
like low-cost carriers,
things like People Express, Southwest airlines.
As budget airlines trade comfort
for affordability,
air travel finally becomes democratic.
From 1980 to 1989,
the number of passengers worldwide
increases by 368 million.
Flying is absolutely virgin for everybody since then.
However, the actual experience has gone somewhat downhill.
The fact you only get 30 inches of leg room
obviously is disheartening.
If that's just too tight a squeeze,
there's always first class, provided you can afford it.
One of the most expensive airline tickets right now
is Lufthansa from New York to Hong Kong and it's $43,000,
which is also the starting salary of many teachers
in the United States of America.
♪ (indistinct) is responsibility. ♪
But back in the 80s and 90s,
there was something even more glamorous
than flying first-class.
(indistinct chattering)
It was riding on board a rare bird
that harnessed the power of seven,
to become the most exclusive super jet in the skies.
Some people would say the Concorde
is the most beautiful and impressive aircraft
that ever flew.
And I think those people would be right.
(crowd cheering)
So the British and the French, you know,
faced with this juggernaut that Boeing was becoming,
thought, "How can we steal a march in the Americans?
While the Americans are building bigger,
we're gonna build faster."
You have an airplane here,
which didn't just beat the speed of sound;
it more than doubled it.
Cruising the skies at Mack 2,
twice the speed of sound,
the ultimate aircraft,
many believe in commercial jet travel.
At a cost of $1.8 billion,
the Concorde program was behind schedule
and grossly over-budget.
But when the super jet finally enters commercial service
in 1976, the result was utterly spectacular.
When you push those throttles forward,
the acceleration in the small of your back
is like nothing else that you can get
on any other civil airline.
Oh, here we go.
You can really feel much of the power in your back.
Concorde take off at twice the speed
of a normal aircraft, 250 miles per hour.
It is amazing, my ears are popping.
(plane engine whirring)
Concorde breaks the sound barrier
at 770 miles an hour.
Its cruising speed is 1,350 miles per hour,
Mach 2, or 23 miles per minute.
And it made its fastest trans-Atlantic crossing
in two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds in 1996.
You're flying much higher than normal commercial aviation.
You could see the curvature of the Earth
and the sky was dark overhead,
almost like you were traveling in space.
Cruising at 60,000 feet,
Concorde cuts air travel time by more than half.
Everybody in there was somebody famous or rich.
In the late 1990s,
a return ticket to fly in this rarefied air
sets you back $12,000 or $18,000 today.
Only the creme de la creme of pilots
are permitted to fly this bird.
It had to be flown different.
It had a thousand little dials everywhere.
It took an incredibly competent
and well-trained crew to fly.
Piloting the super jet was a sought-after gig,
but the failure rate among captain candidates was 50%.
Flying Concorde was not an easy thing to do.
You've got a whole load of passengers down the back
who don't want any shocks,
and they don't want you to spill their gin and tonic.
For 27 years, the supersonic jet
was the coolest, fastest,
and most exclusive commercial aircraft in the skies.
But those things have cost.
Notably, it made a sonic boom,
so it created this giant earth-shattering rumble
as it passed overhead.
And it also burned tremendous amounts of fuel.
Concorde was not good for the environment.
Maybe in the future, we'll see a return
to this kind of hyper-quick travel,
if there's a way to do it, where it's fuel-efficient.
After Concorde is retired in 2003,
supersonic air travel becomes a thing of the past.
Or maybe not.
(indistinct chattering)
In 2021, United Airlines announces the purchase
of 15 supersonic passenger planes from a Colorado startup.
Boom Supersonic is more than happy
to show off their fancy new jet online.
I would love to see travel expediated,
so those 23-hour flights are now five or six hours.
Those six-hour flights are now are 30, 40 minutes.
Talking about a supersonic business jet technologically,
it would be possible.
A supersonic airliner as big as Concorde
or bigger than Concorde, all the technological challenges,
they're still there to be overcome.
You can't get around with it.
If you're gonna go faster than the speed of sound,
you're gonna make a boom.
So you can't fly it over populated areas.
A jackhammer creates
about 100 decibels of noise.
Human ear drums rupture at 150 decibels.
(man screams)
A sonic boom exceeds 200 decibels.
It's enough power to kill a person.
(man groans)
(mid-tempo music)
If you wanna go really fast,
you have to burn a lot of fuel.
And if you're building your aircraft
around burning tremendous amounts of fossil fuel,
that's a problem.
I'm not investing my money
in a supersonic project at the moment.
I am not.
(mid-tempo music)
The business of aviation
is not for the risk-averse.
You need more than lucky numbers to stay in this game.
It's a volatile business.
It takes nerves of steel to run an airline.
Preparing for the unpredictable
comes with the territory.
Yet no airline could have quite foreseen
a sleeping giant beneath a glacier in Iceland.
After a 177-year long nap
and some 300 earthquakes, he wakes up.
From 10 miles away, it's awe-inspiring.
From two miles, it's intimidating.
From just a few hundred yards, it's frightening.
Soon, his tongue-twister name
is on everybody's lips.
Well, sort of.
Eyjafjallajokull.
Eyjafjallajokulla.
What?
Eyjafjallajokull.
The latest images of the volcano
in Eyjafjallajokull.
An easy name to say.
Eyjafjallajokull.
It was kind of an obscure volcano.
It wasn't particularly huge or anything,
but the peculiarities of the geology or what have you,
this thing sent tiny shards of glass
high up into the stratosphere.
On April 14th, 2010,
Eyjafjallajokull, nailed it,
unleashes a plume of volcanic ash
that rises 6.2 miles into the sky.
We're talking 12 of the tallest buildings in the world,
stacked atop one another.
At that time, the jet stream
was blowing right over Iceland,
and it was carrying all of these tiny shards
of floating glass over Europe,
over the entirety of Western Europe and beyond.
The debris drifts and spreads
across 2.7 million square miles,
some 10 times the size of Texas.
Old pilots know that volcanic ash in the air is dangerous,
particularly for jet engines.
It's very abrasive.
It is like sandblasting your engine,
and turbines, they are incredibly reliable.
They are marvels, but they cannot be screwed with.
If you throw volcanic dust into it,
you will destroy a multi-million dollar engine
in a heartbeat.
For seven days, planes across Europe
sit idle on the tarmac.
10 million grounded passengers
shake their fists at mother nature.
The 2010 Iceland volcano explosion
cost airlines $1.7 billion.
(cash register tinkling)
Among those grounded
was a familiar face to United Airlines.
It's not about the places I go.
It's about the people I meet.
American Tom Stuker
is the world's most frequent flyer
with 21 million miles flown.
That's like going around the equator 844 times.
Tom pays for all his trips,
including the 350 he's made to Australia,
and then donates his frequent flyer points.
Air travel covers such long distances
it's fairly sensitive to changes in weather,
or even local events like disease outbreaks
or political coups.
Early in 2020,
Tom and the entire industry are blindsided again,
this time, an invisible airborne villain
100 nanometers in diameters, to blame.
(electronic swooshing)
(ominous music)
COVID 19, this pandemic has really hit aviation hard.
(ominous music)
I think there are no other industries
that have been hit harder.
People weren't allowed to travel.
So all the industries and all the jobs
associated with the airline industry are being affected.
At its worst stage,
about 90% of aviation stopped, of civil aviation.
As COVID 19 spreads,
passenger journeys drop from 4.5 billion in 2019
to 1.8 billion in 2020.
That's a $370 billion loss for the airlines,
and another $115 billion hit to the airports.
(taut music)
Things have happen all the time
that can cause tremendous loss
and there's nothing they can do about it.
But ultimately, air travel will continue as it has,
which is to grow and grow and grow.
I don't have any doubt that people will recover
their wanderlust and their wish to travel by air
once the pandemic is under control or even behind us.
No stranger to the ups and downs
of the business, Boeing predicts a full recovery
within two and a half years.
Domestic aviation in the USA
is rebounding surprisingly quickly.
(bright music)
On June 27th, 2021,
2,167,380 passengers passed through US airports.
It's the busiest day since air travel
came to a screeching halt in March of 2020.
Air travel connects countries.
It connects citizens.
What starts as daredevils
in their flying machines
morphs into an exclusive form of transportation,
and then evolves into the most sophisticated
and safe way for everyone to travel the world.
On behalf of the flight crew,
thank you for flying with us and have a pleasant day.
Air travel equals freedom.
Air travel makes the world smaller.
Air travel is a boring experience
that allows you to do something awesome.
Air travel equals dirtier air and more pollutants,
but it also equals beach vacation.
It doesn't take a lot to get me on a plane.
It usually takes two Valiums and a glass of wine.
Air travel.
(plane engine roaring) (upbeat music)