The 1960s were a golden period for aviation. Key.Aero recounts the time that the Douglas Aircraft Corporation set out to break the sound barrier in its DC-8, years before anyone else managed it
There’s a common misconception that Concorde was the world’s first supersonic airliner when actually the Russians beat everyone to it with the Tupolev Tu-144. But despite this, these two were not the first commercial aircraft to go supersonic, that title is held by an unlikely candidate.
Around seven years before the world was introduced to the British-French-built jet and its Soviet counterpart, a group from Douglas Aircraft Corporation took a DC-8 through the sound barrier, marking the first and only intentional supersonic flight by an airliner other than Concorde and the Tu-144.