Boe Hamp: Fill & Download for Free

Too much weight and moving too fast,would be my guess. A Boeing 747 weighs over 300 tons. If jettisoning the wings and engines got rid of 2/3 of the weight you'd still have 100+ tons to deal with. That would take some really big parachutes. It's probably not practical.

This from: Consolidated B-24 Liberator (Wikipedia)Often compared with the better-known Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 was a more modern design with a higher top speed, greater range, and a heavier bomb load; it was also more difficult to fly, with heavy control forces and poor formation-flying characteristics. Popular opinion among aircrews and general staffs tended to favor the B-17's rugged qualities above all other considerations in the European Theater.[4] The placement of the B-24's fuel tanks throughout the upper fuselage and its lightweight construction, designed to increase range and optimize assembly line production, made the aircraft vulnerable to battle damage.[5] The B-24 was notorious among American aircrews for its tendency to catch fire. Its high fuselage-mounted "Davis wing" also meant it was dangerous to ditch or belly land, since the fuselage tended to break apart.[6] Nevertheless, the B-24 provided excellent service in a variety of roles thanks to its large payload and long range and was the only bomber to operationally deploy the United States' first forerunner to precision-guided munitions during the war, the 1,000 lb. Azon guided bomb.

Arguably, air travel really started taking off after WW2. The war brought on massive technological development in aerospace, with some of the larger aircraft builders of the war really cementing their place in the commercial market post-war (eg Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, de Havilland, etc). Many of these companies would use their expertise to build successful and revolutionary airliners during the late 40s and 50s.Moreover, the abundance of transport aircraft left over from the war (mainly DC-3s and C-47s) meant that many were sold as surplus to airlines. Many smaller carriers popped up as a result.It is true that air travel was still quite expensive though. You no longer needed to be part of the1%, but it was still mostly out of the reach of the average person. I would still argue that WW2 was a significant catalyst however.As the decades rolled on, the price of air travel decreased fairly steadily. The 1970s and the advent of new and efficient turbofan-powered widebody aircraft like the 747, A300 and DC10 really started bringing air travel to the masses (though initially hamped by the 1973 oil crisis). The Airline Deregulation Act would further drive costs down into the 80s.imaged sourced from https://www.icao.int/sustainability/Documents/AVIATION-BENEFITS-2017-web.pdf