BBC Future has brought you in-depth and rigorous stories to help you navigate the current pandemic, but we know that’s not all you want to read. So now we’re dedicating a series to help you escape. We’ll be revisiting our most popular features from the last three years in our Lockdown Longreads.

You’ll find everything from the story about the world’s greatest space mission to the truth about whether our cats really love us, the epic hunt to bring illegal fishermen to justice and the small team which brings long-buried World War Two tanks back to life. What you won’t find is any reference to, well, you-know-what. Enjoy.

It is 30 September 1968, and a crowd of thousands has gathered at the new Boeing factory at Everett, about 30 miles (50km) north of Seattle. They are here to see the airline manufacturer’s radical new design.

The 1960s has seen seismic social change, the race to put an astronaut on the Moon, the tumult of the Vietnam War and the undulations of Cold War tension. Over the course of the decade air travel has gone from being the preserve of the wealthy to something much more affordable.

Key to that has been a new generation of jet airliners. They are bigger and faster than their propeller-driven ancestors, and their powerful jet engines let them fly far higher – allowing them to climb over bad weather instead of having to fly around it. That means flights to far-flung places take a lot less time than they used to.

Boeing’s 707 has been a mainstay of ever-expanding airlines since the mid-1950s, and there are rivals from the UK, France and the Soviet Union. The bigger jets are able to take more passengers, which means airports are having to grow just to keep up with demand.

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The genesis of Boeing’s new design has come not from the airliner producer itself, but from one of its customers. Juan Trippe, the chief of globetrotting airline Pan Am, has noticed increasing congestion at airports. While the number of flights is increasing, the aircraft themselves can carry only relatively small numbers of passengers. A bigger plane will help the airlines keep down running costs.

Trippe asks Boeing to design something completely different – a super-sized airliner twice the size of the Boeing 707.