Originally Posted by
greggwiggins
Even earlier, Pan Am's flying boats offered non-stop service from New York City to the UK and France in the late 1930's.
Pan Am's flights of the 30s were direct but not non-stop: stops in eastern Canada and/or Newfoundland (a decade before it was part of Canada
) and/or Ireland were required between NYC and the U.K.
In fact, Pan Am's first scheduled NYC-PAR flight, advertised as a seven-hour non-stop, had an
eastbound tech-stop.
After an unscheduled 71-minute stop in Gander, Newfoundland, due to headwinds, the flight landed at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport at 10:01 am, 8 hours and 41 minutes after leaving New York.
So the element of airline optimism in scheduling/routing is hardly new.