GOLDEN ARROW MISSES MARK

In the early 1960s I was an editor at the travel magazine Holiday. As a geeky young aviation enthusiast, I was assigned all the dog-and-pony shows that had anything to do with airplanes. So one day my boss said, “Show up at Idlewild [as New York’s JFK was called in those days] tomorrow morning for this thing,” tossing me an invitation to take a ride in an airliner.

The airplane turned out to be a Convair 990, essentially a stretched and up-engined 880. We took off and climbed to altitude, then