A shout out to J Burton Berlin, who designed the stab trim system on the 747. He mentored me a lot on the 757 system. He showed me his design notebook on the 747 design, quite a treasure. All done in pencil with a slide rule. An engineer's engineer. He had many entertaining stories about the B-47 design.
Hi Walter! You have (evidently) a tonne of experience in the aviation industry. Is there anything you noticed the 'engineer's engineers' had in common? What made them such great engineers.
I was looking to a career in Aerospace Engineering - but it's an interest. I'm still in college, but I'm not sure if it's what I want to do. Regardless - what do you think makes an engineer an engineer's engineer?
It's simple - they loved engineering. It was not just a job. It oozed from their core. They'd have done it for free. I've known many engineers who were in it for the money. While they could get the job done, their heart wasn't in it, and it showed. I'm sure you can pick them out in your organization.
Burt, who was in his 60s, was always excited to show me some new way of doing things, showing off his notebook, showing me his (then useless) slide rule, etc. He was also an endless source of engineering tales which he'd tell with relish. So was Erv, though Erv didn't work on the 747.
And they were happy to tell this stuff to me, because it was exactly what I wanted to be doing.
On the software side, I haven't met John Carmack, but I suspect that working with him would be a similar experience. Woz too, obviously.
It was like that at Caltech. Caltech didn't admit people just for good grades and a high SAT score. That wasn't good enough. They were looking for people who were born scientists and engineers, people who would fearlessly look through the Gates of Hell if it would further their field.
For example, students would often do a double major, with the other one AY (Astronomy). Why sign up for all that extra work? Because AY was fun fun fun, but one couldn't get a job in it. Being around people like that is tremendously fun, I was never bored. We had Carl Sagan over for dinner once, and the entire conversation was about what would life based on silicon rather than oxygen be like. There was no class in this, no homework assignment, it was simply fun.
(Dr. Sagan went on to write about "silicon giraffes".)
Wow thank you for those stories. I took Astronomy in addition to computer science because evidently CS wasn’t nerdy enough. (Sorry to over share my stories but I really related with yours, sans celebrities and accomplishments)
My two favorite classes were cosmology (where things just bend your mind from sheer scale and spacetime effects) and another class called “life in the universe” taught by Dr. Virginia Trimble. Both of these, I had countless “what? WHAT?? did you all just hear that?” moments where you felt that you were being exposed to the most fantastical ideas.
Day one, Dr. Trimble gave us a sheet with 35 assignments. She said, do any 21 of these well and you get an A. No final or requirement to attend class. Or, you can stay and also attend the lectures and you’ll learn something.
Almost every assignment was as thought provoking like your silicon life form discussion.
One was to change one of the universal constants (like if the gravitational force was slightly stronger or weaker etc) and describe how the universe would be different.
Another was to write an Astronomy themed song/poem/short story. I wrote a short story about a boy and girl that go stargazing for a date and he tries to impress her with facts about binary stars and romance but doesn’t know that she is an Astro major and knows more but she finds his attempt endearing.
Greatest classes I took.
So it sounds like dinner parties were as fascinating as we’d imagine!
Not really. I suppose I should write it down, but it was a loooong time ago.
It was always a treat to hang around with Burt. The other engineer there who mentored me was Erwin Schweitzer, who'd take me flying with him (he was a pilot) and let me fly it once in a while. Burt and Erv were why I stayed at Boeing as long as I did.
Another engineer who took me flying was Ernie Spriggs. He hailed from Lockheed, and always went on about how great Lockheed was. I finally asked him "Ernie, if Lockheed was so great, why are you working at Boeing?" Ernie replied "because one day I told Mr. Lockheed he was a fucking asshole."
Good times.
P.S. What you suspect is true. A lot of Boeing engineers were also pilots. They loved airplanes and flying and engineering.
One afternoon in early fall of 2005 or 2006, I had a couple of hours to kill -- it might have been been before an evening flight out of SeaTac. I drifted down towards the water nearby, to come across Saltwater State Park. After checking out the shoreline, on the way back to my car I passed by an old fellow parked in an older red pickup facing the water. He had his window rolled down, and instead of just saying "howdy", I asked him whether he had a good local place he could recommend for seafood.
That turned into a half or maybe hour long conversation. Turns out he was an engineer with Boeing and was involved with stuff and knew the big shots circa WWII and/or a bit thereafter. This was early 2000's and he looked like he could be well into his 80's or even a well preserved 90-ish, so I had no trouble believing him. Plus, the details he knew, and it was a pleasant and interesting conversation, anyway.
I wish I could remember his name.
It was a fascinating conversation, and I knew just enough to be able to hold up my end in basically understanding and appreciating what he was saying. I think -- hope -- he enjoyed that.
(And I was humble and curious enough to ask lots of questions. And I guess I knew enough to make some counterpoints and do my part in furthering the conversation.)
I left with the impression that he was a dyed in the wool engineer and personality. Although, at this remove, I'm a bit vague on how much of the conversation was engineering and how much business, about which he also certainly had some opinions.
Anyway, I only provide the details because it was the better part of twenty years ago and I'm sure I'm not revealing his hang out spot too soon.
He did have two places to recommend, the much more convenient of which was Lorraine's. They were packed, but they fit me in for dinner at the bar and the wild salmon was excellent.
P.S. I'm almost certain it was called Lorraine's, but I'm not finding it now. A short distance away, right on the water -- in fact, sticking out into the water. Gorgeous sunset views -- both the 2005 and 2006 trips had great weather.
Sam. Sam was his first name. Maybe another hour or two will give me his last name, from memory.
P.P.S. I can't edit my parent comment anymore, so replying to self.
The restaurant was Salty's. I wasn't zoomed in enough to get the name to pop.
Lorraine's is the steak house in Omaha that both my great aunt and Warren Buffett liked.
That's what comes of not thinking about something for a decade or two...
By the way, Walter, I agree with the others here; I always enjoy your comments and the insight they provide. This one just triggered a memory in me, of a character who reinforced my impression -- at some remove, on my part -- of the old Boeing.
I saw one up close and personal for the first time recently, and was caught off guard by just how genuinely huge it is. I kind of expect things like "famously huge X" to be a disappointment in real life, but no, I was viscerally reminded that it's (at least!) a three-story building on wheels, and that's not even counting the extra story or so of space beneath it as it rolls. My younger airplane-obsessed self would have been pleased. Hopefully an air museum or three picks one up before they all go out of service.
Wait until you see the Airbus Beluga [1] or Boeing Dreamlifter [2]!
I recommend going to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Boneyard in Tucson, AZ [3] and the nearby Pima Air & Space Museum [4] to see all the other big baddies.
I live directly under the flight path for the Beluga's landing in the Hamburg airbus site, in a nice area north of the Elbe river.
One interesting thing about the Beluga: the pilots very often fail to land them and have to do multiple attempts! The Beluga landing is kind of loud, but it's nothing compared to the sound of the engines when they pull up after a failed attempt
> One interesting thing about the Beluga: the pilots very often fail to land them and have to do multiple attempts!
They're likely just doing a fly by for a visual inspection of the runway since it's not a major public airport with full time air traffic control.
Most people are smart enough not to park something in the middle of a runway but might not have an intuitive grasp of how large a wingspan these things have.
Most of the time they land the first time and you can tell they’re coming in too hot when it happens. It could also be when there are container ships crossing the Elbe that they’re scared they might hit
(They stopped at the onset of the pandemic and AFAIK never resumed.)
The museum is still well worth visiting, and driving around you can see some of the planes parked in the Boneyard. Davis-Monthan also puts on a pretty good airshow every couple years.
The same sorta happened to Paul Allen’s fighter plane museum in Washington. His sister manages his estate now, and has been ruthless at liquidating all the assets he collected for the public good. It’s infuriating.
I saw the Mriya landing in my city once. I was right bellow her when she was on the final approach, less than 50ft above my head. The experience was... humbling, to say the least.
I have been on two tours of the A380 final assembly building, the last time was with senior Airbus people so got basically the customer tour walking round the aircraft.
Have seen Belugas flying and on the ground at Toulouse.
Beluga isn't that special, if you live where they come and go daily, sometimes several times. Rather annoying, because loud. At least louder than an A380, which is really big, but not as loud.
One time I heard a different-sounding plane, I looked up, and it was one of them flying a different path than usual on their routine flights from Tolouse to Hamburg (Airbus sites), sadly it seems they haven't repeated that.
Your comment reminded me of an article about another massive manual-engineering feat: the F1 engines powering the Saturn V rocket. Just the amount of hand-welding alone is phenomenal.
That article has such Asimov's Foundation vibes. Maybe it's just me. The amount of effort going into refurbishing old technology instead of designing something new reminds me of that decrepit old Empire that's reliant on technology designed and built thousands of years ago and all the knowledge being lost.
It’s weird for sure. The number of important things that people don’t understand is always surprising although it’s very common.
Early in my career I had an “Asimov moment” firsthand - I was an intern working on a project to instrument an industrial facility with better sensors, etc. The whole place was dependent on a 100 year old machine that just did its thing every day with only minor maintenance and repairs. (I think the power source has been swapped out a few times) The manufacturer was long defunct and the plan was to keep the thing running indefinitely. Pretty sure it’s still there!
There is a great chapter on the F1's engineering and development in 'Apollo: Race To The Moon', Murray and Cox. The whole book focuses on the engineering and management challenges involved in putting a man on the moon and returning him safely in one decade.
One of the consequences of this was that there were many parts on the 747 that were fundamentally the same part but had different part numbers (think physical copy/paste). Boeing had a huge effort turn of the century to rationalize those types of situations.
My son is interning with an aviation parts supplier. He's had to deal with a few of those older drawings while developing custom jigs. They are amazing pieces of skill and fine detail.
Indeed they do, the "City of Everett". You can walk around inside. Boeing used it as a test bed for various experiments. The Museum of Flight is really a gem.
Boeing used to offer tours of the 747 factory. It's immense. I wonder if they're spinning up a different manufacturing line in that building?
South of Portland is the evergreen air and space museum. They have the spruce goose in there, it's huge. The water park next door has an old 747 mounted on the roof, and I'd the start of 6 water slides.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Everett_Factory#Current...), they are left with just the 767 (currently only available as a cargo or military tanker plane) and 777. 787 production was moved completely to the (non-unionized and reputedly lower-quality) South Carolina plant in 2021.
If I recall correctly, that building was so vast that they had trouble controlling the weather inside on a few occasions. Trouble as in, clouds were forming and rain was falling.
May that's just myth, but I like that myth enough to not google it.
If you’re impressed by genuinely large flying things, I can’t recommend the Kennedy Space Center enough. Just standing beneath one of the rockets is truly impressive. Just one of the stars painted on the side of vehicle assembly building is as tall as three Kerbals on top of each other wearing a trench coat and pretending to be one tall guy. Like wow!
That stuff is cool, but nothing has ever blown my mind like seeing the spruce goose. It’s at the evergreen aviation museum outside of portland, and it’s impossible to believe how big it is.
Going to museums like that is honestly one of the main reasons I'd like to visit the US. Unfortunately though, even just the biggest ones seem to be way too spread out to attempt in one trip, coming from Europe.
Fly into New York City. Visit museums there for several days. See a Broadway show. See the Intrepid.
Take the train down to Washington DC. Several days at the Smithsonian there, including a trip out to the Udvar-Hazy Center. Take a day trip by train to Baltimore to see the National Aquarium and the Maryland Science Center.
Rent a car, drive to a beach town in Virginia for a weekend; drive back and take the train back to NYC. Or, drive up to a Delaware beach instead and return the car in NYC.
See the other museums in NYC that you missed the first time. Fly home.
The Delta Flight Museum at the Atlanta Airport has one on display that you can go on board and walk around inside. They've removed the the interior paneling in places so you can see the wiring and flight control cables.
Hrm. Imagine living near to the flight path of an airport. Say something like 1.5km to the side of it, at which point they are about 400m high, going between 280 to 320kph, depending on the wind, and model.
One late evening, shortly before 23:00, where airport is closing for the night because of local noise restriction laws, except for emergencies, otherwise heavy fines, something wasn't on that glidepath.
Immersing me in it's landing lights from beneath, and somewhere in the middle from each wing. Flew erratically. Curve to the left and coming down really low, then UP, then going back right towards the normal path. Coming directly over me.
While doing that the wingtips vibrated by at least half a meter, making the position lights a blurred vertical line. Wasn't even that loud, just BIG!
If it wouldn't have done the reclimb and curving back towards the path, it would have crashed into the highrises next to me.
What was it? A 747 from UPS, clearly visible because the golden letters against the brown tail were illuminated.
Sat there at my desk, thinking WTF?! Are you doing VFR, or what?
If you are in Europe the Technik Museum Speyer has one: https://speyer.technik-museum.de/de/
And if you are in the general area, their sister museum in Sinsheim has a Concorde and its Russian counterpart.
I was used to seeing mostly smallish domestic flight planes up close and to me they seemed big but not imposing. Once I saw one of them parked next to 747, and boy was I blown away. The small plane's fuselage was sort of same size as the 747's engine; and 747 had four of those engines! That's when I realised how humongous 747 is. I still marvel at human agency; not only can they build structures as big as 747 it can also fly across continent, reliably and safely carry hundreds of passengers in total comfort.
Of those aircraft, the upper lobe of the 707, 727, 737 and 757 is the same. There's a lot of history still being carried over into aircraft manufactured today.
Indeed. I find it fascinating that the widespread modern generations of the 737 still have largely (or maybe entirely?) the same fuselage design as the now-ancient 707.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE9X used in the 777x (assuming it eventually gets certified) is significantly larger than the 747 engines. Even the engines used on the original 777 from the 90s outsize individual 747 engines, which is somewhat terrifying.
What astonishes me is that they built the 747 first, before the small planes. It’s like Airbus’s birth was initiated with the Concorde, then the mass-passenger planes. All with negative timestamps, since we were before 01/01/1970 (joke).
Leaders of that time knew they had to start with the grandest project before cascading for a full range of smaller products; whereas leaders today roll out an MVP and try to grow from there.
It truly was another epoch, the epoch of mass amounts of money and resources, not little optimizations.
I don't think that's true. Pretty sure the 707 and 727 were launched and in service before the 747 even started development. The 737 was certainly in development as well, and was in service before the 74.
So by the time the 747 was flying with airlines, they already had the 707, 727 and 737 flying.
Boeing quite literally "bet the company" on the 747 and if it hadn't been as popular as it was the company would have struggled to continue, saddled with enormous debt and no products companies wanted to buy
Interestingly, one of the ways that they hedged this bet was by designing it to be easily converted into a cargo plane (though the assumption was the supersonic aircraft would be the replacements).
It certainly does. Not a knock on Boeing[1], but my least comfortable flight ever was on a Virgin 747 from London to New York. At 194 cm (6”4) I’m tall, but not insanely so. I got a middle seat in the middle section where it was physically impossible to fit my legs. Thankfully, before even taxiing out I was able to move to a bulkhead seat in the family row. Since then I insist on picking the seats (emergency exit row ftw) when travelling with someone.
[1] Though I believe that aircraft manufacturers should require some minimal level of comfort on planes they make.
Ultimately they're making planes for the airlines to buy though. If the airlines say they'd rather fit in 300 people by making most of the rows cramped together than 250 people with more legroom, the aircraft manufacturers will make sure they account for that in their design.
Yesterday, I took my 4-year-old son to la Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace in Paris so he could see and walk through a 747 in real-life. This was after flying to Frankfurt on a 787, and seeing a 747 and A380 on the tarmac there. He said, "I want to go on those ones."
Managed to fulfill the 747. La Musée had an A380 on the tarmac too, but not open to walk through.
Honestly, for aviation geeks, it's a worthwhile visit for the 747 and Concordes alone.
Exactly. Inside the 747 luggage bay, there is a brand new Renault Twingo 1 from the mid 90's. The plane is so huge the car looks like a toy (it's small, but still a car...).
I think the effect is partially due to all modern (well, jet age) airliners looking more or less the same at a glance. You can tell the 747 is larger than a, say, A320, because it has four engines and the second floor. But just how much larger the 747 is you see when they are parked beside each other.
This is true for many airplanes. The first time I saw the SR-71 I was shocked at how large it was. The photographs simply don't do them justice and often the pics that are used are those of the planes flying which have no items to set a scale with.
For those wondwring, the Blackbird is the same lenght as a 737-600. So, the next time you board a 737, try to picture something that size going mach 3+...
IMHO the 747 is the tech that changed australia more than any other post the shock of european colonisation, conquest, settlement, whatever you want to call that.
The world suddenly got a lot smaller and closer. Visiting foreign lands became a thing accessible to a vastly larger proportion of the population and that was all most needed to get out there and see some of it.
Closely followed by satellite comms, then fibre, then the web & consumer internet. (Skype and its ilk).
The A380 is great and drew a crowd for its first landing in aus. Somehow its still not a Jumbo Jet for all that it is even bigger.
Which areoplane is winning the kilogram kilometers per Litre of jet fuel for long haul nowadays?
> Which areoplane is winning the kilogram kilometers per Litre of jet fuel for long haul nowadays?
Pretty sure it would be A350, or B787, or one of the latest gen updated B777's. Basically stick the latest generation biggest super high bypass turbofans on a modern body with lots of composite construction to minimize weight.
I used to fly over to the US a couple of times a year for family holidays (from the UK) and almost always went on a 747, the difference in comfort was massive.
We often flew with a small little airline called 'Travel City Direct' who have since been merged into Virgin Atlantic. They leased two 747's from a charter company, one of them was all dolled up in their own livery, the other was just white and a looked super ropey on the outside...but inside it was still night and day a better experience than anything else.
We were fortunate enough to be in the 'bubble' on that one so had a great upstairs view - it was still only economy, but felt more like premium.
I later found out that the blank white plane we flew on so many times ended its days as the white 747 you used to see at Dunsfold - where Top Gear is filmed. Yep, that 747. The one they modified and used in the 007 film Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace to be the Skyfleet S570.
As a tall person, I miss the 747s if for nothing else the stairway area where you could stand and even walk around. They sure made sure to get rid of that nicety.
As a slightly above average height 6’1”, I’m finding it harder and harder to fit in most planes lately. Are they putting the seats closer together or something?
"Seat pitch" is the term you're looking for, and the airlines have been steadily reducing the seat pitch over the last ~decade to squeeze in an extra few rows.
Some airlines are notably worse than others. Spirit and Frontier, in particular.
Yes, they are. Spirit, in particular, has reduce the amount of room to such an extent that anyone over 6' doesn't really fit without their knees pressing into the hard plastic seat in front of them. Look at leg room before booking a flight. It varies quite a bit from airline to airline.
I mostly fly spirit because it actually is much cheaper. Perfect for people under 6 foot who bring nothing but a backpack and don't mind the middle seat.
Yes. I started globetrotting seriously in 2006 and can attest to this phenomenon. I am 6'3". I need to pay for exit row or similar seats for short haul and play with points to get on business for transoceanic flights.
AFAIU, only a handful of major airlines are (partial) exceptions to the unrelenting trend of packing in more seats, decreasing both seat width and especially seat pitch. None of those airlines are in the U.S. I believe at least one is a Japanese carrier.
Occasionally you hear about cabin layouts that provide more width and/or pitch, but these never come close to recovering the space that has been lost over the past 20 years. Airlines don't announce space reductions, after all. For them it's always quietly 3 steps ahead (less space), loudly 1 step back ("roomier" seats).
Recently I read that Airbus was developing a revision to the A350 that would permit adding an entire additional row. Airbus had to do this because not only does the 777X support 10-abreast layout, but most customers have long moved to 10-abreast layout in the older 777 despite the 777 never being designed for 10-abreast. In fact, IIRC 1 or 2 major A350 operators had already moved to 10-abreast on the existing models, but they may be pushing the regulatory envelope, thus the need for Airbus to cooperate with some redesign work.
I've generally preferred Airbus planes. For reasons I never really understood (perhaps by mere coincidence of their design process, coincidences in evolutions in cabin construction material, or maybe deliberate design by Airbus), economy coach layouts typically provided anywhere from 1/2 to 2+ more inches of seat width relative to the comparable Boeing plane and cabin. A Boeing 737 or 737MAX with even the newest cabin construction technology is always going to be a tighter squeeze (at least width-wise) than an Airbus A320, for example.
Coach layouts for the A350 are likely going to shift from being some of the best to some of the worst in long-haul travel as the additional row comes half from accommodating thinner walls, and half from seats with less width. Same thing happened with the 777: when it first entered service it was one of the roomiest; now with 10 rows, and especially when invariably combined with reduced seat pitch (which I personally don't care quite as much about as others) it's soul crushing--metaphorically, figuratively, literally, actually, physically, all of the above.
For some reason Boeing made the 777/787 slightly too wide for 9/8 abreast so of course eventually the airlines realized they could snug in another column of seats. The airbuses generally don’t have that problem because they are already quite snug in default configuration. So ironically a product less comfortable by design ended up being more comfortable.
10 abreast in a350 sounds terrible though. Might work for shorter ultra cheap charters but I very much doubt that any mainline carrier would consider it. Think they did a similar concept with 11-abreast a380 but luckily no-one caught on.
I don't know how the Mint cabins fare, but IIRC Jetblue was an LCC that marketed very heavily that they removed seats to increase pitch.
(That was more of a side reason. The real reason is that the FAA requires an additional flight attendant for every 50 seats, so Jetblue just removed enough seats to get to a round multiple of 50 and decrease the amount of labor required.)
They're so quiet, and relatively comfortable. For years I've gone out of my way to take the A380 between JFK and CDG, because it's the only way to fly transatlantic in economy without it being a complete misery.
I sort of understand the economics of why they don't work for shorter routes, but those long flights are still extremely necessary, and everything else is godawful.
Emirates A380 every sector from UK to Oz and back in 2015 was a huge highlight of travel for me. They hadn’t done any obvious cost cutting and we got proper menus and silverware in economy. It was such a smooth flight and all the space on board to walk and stretch was fantastic.
ANA flies them exclusively between Hawaii and Japan with a fleet of 4 A380s. If you want to fly the A380 – Emirates is your friend, with over 80% of the fleet under operation (100+ planes).
If you want to fly 747 - Lufthansa is your friend as the sole operator of the passenger version 747-8. Business on the upper deck is a delight in that plane, especially the window seat.
We flew to Heathrow to Dubai on our first leg to Thailand last week and I was again struck by just how little like flying the experience is. Even the acceleration down the runway doesn't feel dramatic in the same way (I imagine it's a bit slower than a A320 for a start). You don't even feel the expansion joints in the runway.
We flew our second leg in a 777 and it was noticeably louder and more airplane like.
The very first one was on one of their newest A380s which even let you pair my Bose Quiet Comforts with the in flight entertainment system over Bluetooth. That really was the dream.
I find the 787 a downgrade from the 747 or 777. The 787 is noticeably smaller and lighter which makes for a less smooth and solid-feeling ride in turbulence. Whenever I fly International I try to look for a 747 or 777.
The 787 simulates a much lower altitude and has more humid air I believe which makes recovering from long flights much easier in my experience. I look forward to the 777X which has the features of the 787 with the space of a 777.
Agree with this. Flew to Australia in 2015 on a 777. The return flight was on a 787. The increased air pressure and higher humidity made a huge difference in comfort and fatigue.
I think I’ve flown on a 747 maybe once in my life in a cross-US flight from LA to Florida. I remember being completely dazzled by the sheer number of people on the plane.
Recently I flew back from Europe on a 787 and that too was a wonderful experience. The plane feels like the future and was so comfortable and nice to be on.
In previous posts where the 747 has come up, I've been able to say that I once flew top deck on a 747 and what a privilege it was to do so before it ended service with U.S. carriers, not knowing how close I was to missing that chance forever.
And here I am, sitting in Berlin, reading this article about the last 747, happy in the knowledge that I will once again fly on the top deck of a 747 in exactly a week. Lufthansa's still flying them, and I could not pass up the $500 upgrade for the flight home.
I was fortunate enough to travel in a Lufthansa 747. I have never felt so joyously overwhelmed by any other vehicle. The newer A350s and A380s unfortunately don’t carry the same appeal for me personally.
The A380 looks real ugly for me resembling the beluga.
747 looks beautiful, majestic and aesthetically very pleasing.
Sad to see this plane approaching the end of its life.
Boeing’s final 747 rolled out of the company’s cavernous factory north of Seattle Tuesday night as airlines’ push for more fuel-efficient planes ends the more than half-century production run of the jumbo jet.
The B747-8 is pretty fuel-efficient. As is the A380.
The smaller two-engine jets have grown bigger and fly now further. Therefore the B747 and A380 operate mostly between the big hubs far away with many passengers, fitting the design profile. Deutsche Lufthansa and Korean Air operating happily with the B747-8i and the plane works reliable.
Reliability:
The B777X is delayed, the B787 suffers quality problems and "lost tools", paint goes off (both B787 and A350), the engine problems on the A320neo seem solved some time ago and then the MCAS on the B737-Max is another sad story.
Lufthansa solved it delivery issues with the B787 by buying used ones. And the B747 just looks like a Queen, graceful and elegant :)
The end of 747 production was “inevitable but it would be a little more palatable if they were making something new,” said Richard Aboulafia, managing director at consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory.
Let us hope so. At some point aging existing feels need replacement and transportation between big hubs remains important. My recommendation about the 747, watch the freight loading before boarding. It is incredible how much freight (I don't mean baggage) fits into this plane while traveling across the Atlantic and transporting 450 passengers at the same time.
I haven't kept up, but my understanding was flights keep shrinking. Planes were flying near-empty, or even completely empty to maintain hangar contracts on either end. Making them bigger also increases the minimum fuel needed. Smaller planes can be used to respond to changes in demand and popularity of destinations in a way huge planes can't.
The "hub" model is disappearing; customers travel to the supposed hub via other methods (car, train) or they take direct flights. The super jumbo planes like the 747 rely on hubs for passenger density so it shouldn't be any surprise that most airlines aren't interested.
Having more smaller planes lets you do more direct flights and gives you way more flexibility should you need to change destinations, lease an empty plane to someone else, etc. It also costs you less in fuel when you need to fly it with few or no passengers.
Of course getting _any_ new plane means a years-long backlog right now so the newest trend is to acquire a regional or small airline and dismantle it purely to get the airplanes. Virgin America (by Alaska) and Spirit (by JetBlue) were victims of that strategy and won't be the last.
Hubs are not disappearing. NWR, JFK, FRA, CDG, LHR, LAX and so on are hubs and major destinations, served with long range, high capacity wide body planes. The middle-east airports are a special case, they are mostly hubs and the business relies on being a hub and not being the destination. This is why Emirates already asks for a A380 successor. Bonus, the airlines need only one slot and one crew to fly a plane from/to this hubs instead of multiple planes. And with four engines you get a bigger safety margin in case of "bad things happen".
And as you write, smaller planes better serving less loaded destinations, it allows airlines to fit customer demand. As you said. Better fly four times the week than just two times and lose half of the passenger to a competitor. And yes, they need to maintain only two engines.
The 777X is therefore an interesting design decision. Really big, only two very powerful engines and they need to handle the extra complexity and maintenance of folding wingtips. Just to fit the plane into smaller airports.
The biggest change so far is engine power, efficiency and reliability. Passenger and freight demands are changing even more frequently. And airports often cannot grow and even if - only slowly.
There are 3 retired 747s on an airfield 10 miles from my house (in Surrey, southern England). It isn’t open to the general public most of the time but two weeks ago I ran a charity 10km around the runways and perimeter roads. So beautiful to see these birds up close. You can get a feel for it on the gallery page of the run’s site: https://jigsaw.run/gallery/
What blows my mind is that the grand ocean liners (Four Funnel Liners, like the Titanic) were all built over a span of 25 years. So the jet age is already at least twice as long as the era of production of those great steam ships was.
I like the A380 because it’s so quiet and smooth, but if I had to deal with the 747 noise I had a soft spot for the Rolls-Royce RB211 engine like Qantas used on their 747-400 non-ERs. The triple stage turbofan spool-up sounded and felt awesome.
I flew on the second floor of a 747. It felt posh for some reason. Also the flight was super smooth. I suppose its weight and sheer size helps with that.
My favorite seat was actually on the lower level. The furthest forward window seat on either side (usually 1A or 1K) was unique. It’s directly below the cockpit and the fuselage is curved at that point so you get the almost pilot-like view out the window of facing forward.
On most airlines the upper deck was originally used as lounge space, and then later for first/business class, which may have helped with the poshness you experienced.
In the early-mid 2010s I was fortunate to fly several times on the upper deck of an EVA Air 747 (SEA–TPE). On these planes, the upper deck was regular economy in a 3x3 configuration. It felt like a miniature 737 inside the huge 747, cozy in its own strange way. They also provided slippers and the window seats had a fun shelf/storage space, making it feel all the more special.
Probably quite a lot, the size is way too big for a standard pallet as LTL freight, so it would have to come by flatbed truck with a built-in small delivery crane, if you don't have your own huge forklift to get it off.
Meanwhile during MCAS affair, 400 units of 737 Max 8 were stuck to the ground and 300 more were in production if I remember correctly, which shows we were producing the old 747 at a much slower pace.
this is a little surreal. one of the first aircraft i ever flew on was a 747. in the 80s and 90s if you were on a long haul 6+ hour flight, it was likely a 747 (if not an L1011 or 767). it was notable for me personally as it was one of the most advanced feats of human ingenuity and engineering that i was able to get close to.
notably in the early 90s virgin atlantic was one of the first airlines to offer personal seatback video screens in economy on their 747s. the screens were backlit color lcd (similar to atari lynx), about 3.5" in diameter and had 6 or so channels that were on a four hour loop.
it's a bit sad to see the program end, as it sort of marks the end of an era where the engineering feat of putting something that large in the sky was prized. i suppose that focusing on operating efficiency and environmental sustainability are far more important, but it's hard to not be nostalgic for the long running engineering triumphs of the jet age.
I rode one on an international flight in 2007 that seemed like pristine stock from the 70s. Still had a weird lounge on the second floor, and those awful headphones that are just like piped-in music. The seats still had the little ash trays in the armrest too. Quite an experience!
Comments like yours remind me how everyone's life experience is different!
For various reasons, my family would fly back and forth between the U.S. and Europe, so I grew up flying thousands of miles a year on 747's.
The year I get married we decided to check out Israel, and flew twice! from NY -> Israel -> NY -> FL -> AZ -> NY -> ETC), with almost all legs on a 747.
In Phoenix I learnt to pilot a small plane, (and have sat in the pilot's seat of 747 without touching anything :)), and that's probably because of my rearing.
I did right before the pandemic coming back to NY from Germany on Lufthansa. I mean I am glad I did it just to have the experience, but you aren't really missing anything. I much prefer the 777. The 747, while having been updated over time, is still a 50 year old design at its core.
I have not flown on a 380, but the 777 is still my favorite plane to fly on, edging out the 787 even, though not by a whole lot- the increased comfort (higher pressure and humidity) in the cabin and reduced noise don't quite make up for the lack of spaciousness you feel inside a 777.
I personally have no desire to get on a 380, they just seem too big... like the tropey quote "They were so obsessed with whether they could, they didn't think of whether they should..." it just seems out of scale somehow.
Same here. 747s are everywhere in the literature I grew up with. They are also in news, games and films. But when I actually grown up, the time of those planes have lapsed. Now due to visa limitations, I am even harder to travel internationally, not to say to choose a specific plane to fly on.
I think that there's a lot of potential for ground effect vehicles/planes for island nations; as they're more easily scalable and still in the weight range of being feasible to work with electric motors as well.
As an example, the Fischer Airfish AF-8 can transport up to 8 passengers (+2 pilots) [1]. They're whitelabelled as Wigetworks Airfish around the Singaporean area [2]. The concept of the plane/boat hybrid is as old as 1997, which is kind of ridiculous [3].
I sure hope not. Look, the problem is pollution of the environment due to dirty energy. Energy per se is not a problem, but the solution to many problems.
One of the most beautiful objects ever built. I went to NYC from Paris for the first time in 1990, on a 747, and a few days later stayed at the airport a whole afternoon, just watching 747s land. It was splendid, I think I could have spent a lot more time there.
I flew on a 747 only once, a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Denver back in 2006 (returning to the US after being stationed in Germany for 3 years). Absolutely huge.
I only fly domestically nowadays. Rarely do I end up on anything bigger than a 737.
According to the article, they built a total of 1574 planes. This number happens to be equal to 2 * 787. The significance of this would be that 787 is also the model number of one of Boeings current generation jetliner, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. I, as a small-time-wannabe number nerd and small-time-wannabe airplane nerd, reacted positively when I happened to see this connection.
I have no idea if there is any intent behind this specific number of produced planes, but I suspect that there would be people at Boeing who feel the same kind of mild satisfaction as I did when I saw the number of aircraft produced.
The ability of the cargo version of the 747 to swing up the nose (that's why the cockpit is in the bulge on the top) will be missed. Cargo versions of currently produced airliners will not be capable of doing this.
Actually, if you look at the graph in the article, you will see that the 747 would have probably been cancelled around 2006 already if it weren't for the freighter variants. From 2006 to 2012 they only delivered freighters.
The irony being that because air traffic keeps increasing and airport capacity doesn't (in term of runways), those cancelled jumbo jets (B747, A380) will be needed again in a few years.
That's what Airbus thought too when they gave the A380 the go-ahead. Turns out they were wrong - the airlines moved towards a system with more direct flights and less "hub and spoke" connections, which makes it difficult to fill the largest widebodies. Instead they need more but smaller widebodies for the direct connections.
Understood. But again as traffic increases, those direct flights will themselves become a bottleneck, and there are so many fights you can run through a runway (with most major airports already at full capacity pre-covid). So at one point those planes will need to be bigger.
Those airframes were originally intended for delivery to a defunct Russian cargo airline. They were completed and rolled out of the factory years ago, sat in storage for a long time, and have already delivered from Boeing Commercial Airplanes to their initial customer, Boeing Defense, Space & Security, which is a different corporate entity.
This will be the last one produced, but there a plenty of companies still using 747. I can't find a good source, but it look like their lifespan is 20 years or more, so you will be able to fly in one of them if you have enough money and time and do some research. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_747_operators
Boeing designed the plane to be easily convertible to a freighter because they expected the market for subsonic passenger travel to vanish during its lifetime. Sadly they didn’t get that one right but helps explain why it has done quite well as a freighter. For example the hump allows it to be loaded from the nose.
Kinda the opposite of the Airbus situation where they banked on a mostly single use plane plane that was all about moving a large volume of passengers a long distance and instead smaller planes took over and the plane was of little use beyond passengers.
