Boeing bids farewell to an icon on Tuesday: It's delivering its final 747 jumbo jet.
Since its first flight in 1969, the giant yet graceful 747 has served as a cargo plane, a commercial aircraft capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers, a transport for NASA’s space shuttles and the Air Force One presidential aircraft. It revolutionized travel, connecting international cities that had never before had direct routes and helping democratize passenger flight., with only two engines to maintain instead of the 747′s four.
“If you love this business, you’ve been dreading this moment,” said longtime aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia. “Nobody wants a four-engine airliner anymore, but that doesn’t erase theto the development of the industry or its remarkable legacy.” Boeing set out to build the 747 after losing a contract for a huge military transport plane, the C-5A. The idea was to take advantage of the new engines developed for the transport plane — high-bypass turbofan engines, which burned less fuel by passing air around the engine core, enabling a farther flight range — and use them for a newly imagined civilian aircraft.
The plane’s fuselage was 225 feet long, and the tail stood as tall as a six-story building. The plane’s design included a second deck extending from the cockpit back over the first third of the plane, giving it a distinctive hump and inspiring a nickname, the Whale. More romantically, the 747 becameSome airlines turned the second deck into a first-class cocktail lounge, while the lower deck sometimes featured lounges or even a piano bar.
“It was the first big carrier, the first wide-body, so it set a new standard for airlines to figure out what to do with it and how to fill it,” said Guillaume de Syon, a history professor at Pennsylvania’s Albright College who specializes in aviation and mobility. “It became the essence of mass air travel: You couldn’t fill it with people paying full price, so you need to lower prices to get people on board.
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