I like anniversaries where the headline is simple and the detail is not. This is one of those. The headline: TWA was first to run scheduled non-stop transcontinental service in the United States, starting in October 1953. The detail is which flight, which direction, and whether it really went the whole way without stopping.

What the sources agree on

The date holds up well. NYC Aviation's "On This Day in Aviation History" entry for 19 October 1953 says a TWA Lockheed Constellation completed the first regularly scheduled non-stop transcontinental service in the US, Los Angeles to New York, in eight hours. The US Centennial of Flight Commission also gives 19 October 1953 and says TWA was first to regularly schedule non-stop service between Los Angeles and New York. Wikipedia's TWA article says only that TWA offered non-stop transcontinental service on that date, citing Rummel. TWA's own list of firsts, on a fan site, says "October 1953" without a day.

On the aircraft, the Centennial of Flight essay says TWA introduced the Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation on 10 September 1952. The TWA Museum's timeline and the AvGeekery site both tie the 1953 service to the Super Constellation, and Wikipedia says TWA ordered ten of the type in December 1950, delivered in 1952.

Where they do not

Direction. The TWA Museum describes the 19 October service as the first non-stop eastbound scheduled transcontinental service, and says westbound flights still stopped at Chicago because the prevailing winds made a non-stop trip impractical. AvGeekery agrees it was eastbound and says it depended on cooperating winds. NYC Aviation and the Centennial of Flight do not give a direction beyond naming Los Angeles and New York.

Whether it was non-stop. A blog post citing the 2010 Specialty Press book From Props to Jets describes the 19 October flight, TWA Ambassador Service Flight 2 to New York Idlewild, as having a scheduled 15-minute technical stop at Chicago Midway for a crew change, with no local passengers. It says the flight arrived after 7 hours 55 minutes, just inside the federal eight-hour crew limit. That post also calls the same flight westbound in one place and eastbound in another, so I would treat it with care. I could not open the book itself.

I could not settle this from the sources I could read. Three say non-stop for the Los Angeles to New York flight, one secondary account says it made a crew-change stop. The honest summary is that TWA's claim to the first scheduled non-stop transcontinental service is widely repeated, and that the first flight itself may have been less clean than the claim.

The day. I was warned that some pages put the event on 20 October. I did not find one, and every source I could open that gave a day said the 19th, so I am going with the 19th.

The race

AvGeekery says American Airlines began DC-7 service on the same route a little over a month later. The Specialty Press blog gives American's start as 29 November 1953. If that is right, TWA had the headline for about six weeks.

What I will not claim

I have no photograph of the 19 October flight, and the pictures I use with this story are labelled as what they are. One is a TWA Constellation dated 1945, one is a TWA L-1049H photographed in 2004, and one is a Lufthansa Super Constellation flying today. None of them is the 1953 flight. I also have no radar catch of a Super Constellation, so this is told in photographs.

Would you have flown it?

Eight hours in a propeller airliner is a long time by today's standards. Would you have taken the seat?

Sources

  • NYC Aviation, "On This Day in Aviation History: October 19th": https://www.nycaviation.com/2011/10/on-this-day-in-aviation-history-october-19th/4361
  • US Centennial of Flight Commission, TWA essay: https://centennialofflight.net/essay/Commercial_Aviation/TWA/Tran14.htm
  • TWA Museum, history timeline: https://twamuseum.org/history
  • AvGeekery: https://avgeekery.com/?p=32001
  • Tails Through Time blog, "The Holy Grail of Nonstop Transcontinental Service" (citing Specialty Press): http://aviationtrivia.blogspot.com/2010/10/holy-grail-of-nonstop-transcontinental.html
  • Wikipedia, "Trans World Airlines": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_World_Airlines
  • TWA Spirit, TWA firsts: https://www.twaspirit.com/twa_firsts.html
  • Photos via Wikimedia Commons: unknown photographer / ETH-Bibliothek archive (public domain), US Air Force (public domain), Clemens Vasters (CC BY 2.0), Thomas Vogt (CC BY 2.0)