The first generation jetliners get much fond reverence for being such a quantum leap from even the most high-tech turboprop-liners and with good reason. The ability to haul 100 people across country in five hours was a tremendous achievement in the early 1960s. The Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8 get most of the accolades, but Convair had their own four-engine, single-aisle airplane—the CV-880— at the time that was nearly as capable but, for a number of reasons too complex to list here, never caught on as well. Only about 100 CV-880s and its successor CV-990s were built and most were out of service by the 1980s (By comparison, DC-8 was in domestic freight service until 2009), which essentially made the planes a financial disaster for General Dynamics, the parent company of Convair.

However, the performance of the CV-880 was admirable; it remains one of the quickest non-supersonic airliners ever built. The swept-back wings and relatively narrow fuselage—the CV-880 and CV-990 only seated five abreast—helped that, but the 880’s screaming General Electric CJ805 turbojets were the real secret, though certainly not a quiet one. Developed from GE J79 that powered a number of military planes, the CJ805 was everything great about 1960s engines: thirsty, loud, smoky, and powerful.

The video below captures ex-TWA bird N807AJ on its way to retirement from sometime in the early 1990s, I’d guess. While the engines where the asterisk-shaped “hush kits” that were developed to keep older airliners in service, there’s no doubt that even from the video, the 880’s old turbojets howl like banshees. They also smoke in ways that would make the tinfoil-hatted chemtrail folks cower in fear and the coal-rollers stand mouths agape.