Originally Posted by
rog747
the 707 cornered the UK market for long-haul capable narrow body passenger jets - whereas in the USA and Canada the DC-8 and DC-8 Stretch was the most popular type used by the affinity group charter airlines, such as ONA Seaboard Loftleidir Universal Saturn AFA TIA Airlift and Capitol, with CP Air in Canada.
World and Wardair used 707C's, as did International Air Bahama at first, who switched to a DC-8, as did World AW and Airlift re-equipping with DC-8 63PF's.
Truth is the initial DC-8s, before the -60 series, were rather poor aircraft, and depreciated with their original purchasers quite quickly. Had it not been for Douglas going for the big -60 series revamp it probably would have been finished production by the mid-1960s. Boeing back in the 1950s had bought their own wind tunnel (for tax reasons it was ostensibly owned by the University of Washington in Seattle), whereas Donald Douglas didn't invest in one, and just bought time on the NASA etc tunnels. The DC-8 had a series of both high and low speed aerodynamic inefficiencies which really should have come out at the design stage, the most surprising being discovering it cruised better with a little 1 degree of flap set rather than zero. It wasn't until the DC8-62 wing that they finally got a good design there. Boeing had all their B-47/B-52/KC-135 experience to fall back on.
Of course, there was a lot of prior UK experience, both aircrew and engineering, from BOAC initially selecting the 707, then British Eagle doing so from the Eagle-Cunard-BOAC tieup, Eagle going under and personnel becoming available (particularly at Laker), the DC-8 not being UK certified, etc.
In the USA the buildup to the Vietnam war saw several mainstream US carriers buy significant 707-320C fleets specifically for this - Pan Am, Braniff and Continental particularly. Just as they took delivery the DC8-63F came along, the Defence Department liked this better, and placed a whole range of contracts, not with mainstream carriers but with the supplementals, who until then had staggered along with old cheap Connies and such like. They all placed orders for the new Big Doug as specified, which their salesmen readily signed up; the resulting production meltdown at Long Beach and some inappropriate subcontracting which didn't work was one of the key reasons for the end of Douglas independence. These also took over all the US military traffic to Europe, principally Germany, which the many commercial transatlantic charters were very integrated with in aircraft scheduling, often just being back-hauls to military work.