Relive the glamour and glory of flying during the swinging 1960s

In recent weeks we've booked an around-the-world ticket in a digital time machine, touching down in the groundbreaking 1930s, the explosive 1940s, and the golden 1950s of the commercial airline industry to see what it was really like to fly during each decade. Now we turn our attention to the swinging sixties.

'The Incredibles' present...the 747 jumbo jet! Long before Disney's super-powered family beat up bad guys and made audiences giggle, the original Incredibles embarked on a mission that would change the face of air travel forever: 50,000 employees of Boeing, dubbed The Incredibles, conceived and created the 747 jumbo jet in less than 16 months. To build the largest commercial aircraft, Boeing needed the world's largest building, a 200 million-cubic-foot assembly plant in Washington State. Once completed, even experienced pilots needed to attend Boeing's 747 training school to learn how to fly all over again — this time from a cockpit three stories high off the ground.

Variations of the 747 are still in production today, with nearly every following decade bringing about a fresh take on the jet that changed the world.

400 shards of Aeroflot. In 1967, there was no airline larger the world over than the Soviet Union's Aeroflot. One out of every eight global passengers was on an Aeroflot flight at the company's peak. But just as TWA, Pan Am, and Eastern would diminish after a turn at ruling the skies, Aeroflot was unable to maintain its dominance against the test of time: shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than two decades later, this titan of aviation was also broken up — into more than 400 separate companies.

The woman heard 'round the world. On March 19, 1964, Geraldine Mock became the first woman to fly solo around the entire world, piloting a Cessna 180. Women within the commercial airline industry may have increasingly been relegated to "hostesses in hot pants" as the 20th century progressed, but women like Mock and Jacqueline Cochran were also breaking flight records and rocketing females into the aviation world.

Coffee, Tea or Me? Even among flight attendants, a new type of woman was emerging in the ranks of airlines. Sure, there was rampant sexism, but the mystique of the modern flight attendant practically afforded young women celebrity and superpowers. “We were almost on the same level as a movie star,” former FA Sonnie Sims told Vanity Fair, “People admired us when we walked through the terminal. I remember our uniforms — they were all custom-fitted. They were just sculpted to your body, so everybody looked fabulous."

Flight Attendant fever hit its peak with the release of "Coffee, Tea or Me", the memoirs of two flight attendants, one of whom juggled "husbands" in both Los Angeles and London. The book sold more than a million copies, led to three sequels, and even spawned a TV movie. The entire world in the sixties was utterly obsessed with flight attendants.

In living color. The advent of the color television in 1965 totally transformed the way that travel was marketed to customers. Airline commercials went from this...

...to this, practically overnight. The exotic world of travel presented to potential customers via their television screens now reflected the vibrancy and boldness of the world they saw all around them.

The beaches of California, the arches of the Colosseum and the bright red gloss of a British double-decker bus were all suddenly right there in homes across the world. The travel bug had become an itch that was now impossible to deny.

First class meals, even in coach. As competition heated up between rival carriers who had grown their flight maps to touch down on nearly every corner of the globe, consumers found themselves with multiple airlines to choose from when booking their trip. And while today the biggest carriers are once again offering us free pretzels to win back our loyalty, in the sixties, in-flight menus were upgraded to include dishes like lobster, veal, filet mignon, and curiously, cream of tomato soup. Seriously, no matter the airline, there seemed to be tomato soup on the menu.

Flight of the Concorde. "Finally the big bird flies, and I can say now that it flies pretty well," radioed pilot Andre Turcat on the first flight of the Concorde in 1969. And while Turcat never pushed the old girl past 300 mph on that first flight, the Concorde would eventually clock speeds of 1,300 mph. The Concorde would revolutionize travel, turning the trip from London to New York into just a 3-hour affair. After 27 years of service, the plane was retired following a decision by Airbus to no longer manufature the aircraft — a high-profile crash in 2000 also didn't help matters — but one group is trying to put the big bird back into service in the near future.