Vintage Airplane Postcards

Explore 10 vintage aviation postcards featuring BOAC, American Airlines, TWA, Delta, and more, with aircraft ranging from the Douglas DC-7 to the Boeing 747.

It is really interesting to see how aviation and airplanes have changed throughout the years. Most of the large jet planes pictured on these postcards have very similar characteristics, but they are still fun to see, especially in airline advertising!

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This plane has a beautiful exterior in my opinion. The black nose with the black window line extending down the whole cabin just looks classy. The engines themselves almost look like missiles ready to be launched and made of pure Chrome. It doesn’t surprise me that British Overseas Airways Corporation used Rolls-Royce engines. This is a beautiful airplane immortalized on a postcard.

A DC-7 postcard with a wonderful overhead view looking down over the world in this beautiful postcard. The DC-7 was considered the last piston engine airplane propeller plane produced. And this plane looks a little more like a military vehicle to me though still such a sleek and beautiful machine.

A Boeing 707-320 over the patchwork farmlands flying beautifully in this vintage postcard. This color scheme is much more fun to me, but also a bit more cartoonish. A very interesting light blue with a white top. This plane looks massive to me even with little perspective available. This was an intercontinental aircraft supposedly with 5 tons of cargo room. These were passenger planes with some configured just for cargo as well. A marvel.

I wanted to include another postcard of the 707 because it is such a beautiful machine and really the luxury air travel vehicle of the mid to late 1900s. Boeing used the 700 designation to differentiate it from its earlier propeller planes. It stopped being widely used after the early 80s, but there are actually some still in the air today for non-commercial purposes!

A Boeing 727 Jet Plane in service with Delta, a postcard advertising, really. The first flight was in 1963 and actually was last in service in 2019. This single fact about so many of these airplanes amazes me. They are used for decades and decades, still doing the same job they originally had. This really is an engineering marvel. Hats off to Boeing for building these precision machines.

Jumbo Jet! This set the record, at the time, for heaviest takeoff weight. It was designed to be ultimately used for cargo once commercial flights became supersonic... which never really took off :) It was manufactured from 1968 all the way to 2023!

Japan Air Lines DC-8 Jet showing off its unique paint scheme. Designed by the Douglas Aircraft Company as an early long-range aircraft.

I included this TIA postcard because it is beautiful and really captures airplane travel. Up above the clouds, the sun in the distance, and this postcard is great because the plane isn't really even the focal point, it is the majesty of the air that really is on display here. It is less about the mechanical nature of an airplane and more about the emotion of flying.

Where would we be without Kitty Hawk? This postcard is a reenactment of the first flight and helps capture such a cool mood. All the people in the background have gathered to see a flying machine.

By land, air or sea. Are you an airplane person? Which topic should we explore next?