The first jetliner was Boeing’s square-windowed 707; it was grounded after a few months following tragic incidents which wiped out a fair proportion of elite Americans. The money flowing to De Havilland to create a civilian airliner progamme to promote their non-murderous plane trumped nationalist concerns.
Despite the fact that the 707 is a finer airliner than the Comet, nobody trusts it, and even Pan-Am and TWA are acquiring Comets. The fact that nobody had really understood pressurisation before Boeing’s painful lesson ensures that De Havilland’s planes became the narrow-body airliner to beat all airliners.
Fantasy world: #2: the first supersonic jetliner is Boeing’s supersonic 7NN7. While it made a bit of noise, the need to beat the Comet – because, despite the technical superiority of the Comet, the sheer cash of the US government and the fact that we all need to make up for America’s humiliation has ensured that nonsense about ‘supersonic booms’ was defeated by the allegiances of the civilised world.
With its Rolls-Royce/Pratt & Whitney engines, it has been allowed to fly supersonic over all territories outside of the USSR. New York-London-Singapore-Sydney-Los Angeles-New York on Pan-Am was do-able in under a day. Fashionistas signed up, in the hope it would make them sexy and youthful. The conception that transatlantic flight takes more than 4 hours became ludicrous, like the concept of taking four days in a flying boat before WWII,