People going on vacation sometimes go on a luxury cruise ship so that they can have a fun time at sea. It has a lot of amenities inside the ship, and you get to travel while on it. In the 1940s, Pan Am founder and CEO Juan Terry Trippe wanted a luxury airliner that would rival ocean liners, and so, he bought Boeing’s most luxurious airliner at that time, the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser.
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The Stratocruiser was a semi-double deck airliner which featured a cocktail lounge which could be accessed through a spiral staircase that led downstairs. It had bunk beds, spacious seats, a coat closet, and even dressing rooms for men and women. It would have been the perfect luxury airliner, until its propellers started falling off.
Despite having the more advanced R-4360 engines, the propellers were pushing the boundaries of the technology a bit too far. Several flights in the 1950s had suffered from engines dropping mid-flight and in April 1952, a Pan Am flight crashed into the Amazon rainforest when one of its engines and propellers tore off, killing everyone inside.
Pan Am crashed seven Stratocruisers from 1952 to 1959, and most of the others had been sold for scrap. Later on, the Boeing 707 became the new hot thing that airlines turned to, and with it began the dawn of the Jet Age. The junked Stratocruisers were later reused to build super-sized Guppies, which became cargo carriers for NASA’s rocket parts.
(Image credit: Pan Am/HistoryNet)
Source: neatorama