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The Boeing 747 begins its final descent
- anovikov 3mo agoBut really, it was just about four-engine planes becoming too expensive to run. Two-engine planes won. 777 burns 30% less fuel per passenger and has almost the same cabin width. And top level became a flop because it's too narrow for a first class cabin by today's standards and all other uses for them make no sense. Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition in which C-5 Galaxy won: it was meant to be a cargo plane with a small - top floor - passenger cabin.
- pfdietz 3mo agoI think the top floor is there because the crew cabin has to be high so the nose can swing up. The cables and wiring from the cabin can't be easily disconnected to allow such access. You will notice other large cargo variants of airliners load cargo only through the side of the fuselage.
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoYes and no. The C5 has an upper level too. The whole setup solves a lot of problems at once. Opening nose makes for faster cargo operations which the military cares about for a bunch of reasons. There are usually people associated with military cargo so might as well seat them up there.
- lstodd 3mo agoAny large cargo aircraft has primary loading inline with centerline, side doors just aren't efficient. It's either via front, via rear or both. Me321/323 was I think first heavy cargo with nose clamshell doors, but after that everyone settled on nose rising up, clamshell rear. It also had the top deck.
- pfdietz 3mo agoI understand that for the 747, they initially just had a cockpit bulge atop the fuselage. However, this created too much drag, which they reduced by extending the bulge aft. They didn't need this space for flight operations, so it was naturally then used for additional passenger space.
- bobthepanda 3mo agoThis is correct. For context, when the 747 was being developed, simultaneously Boeing was developing the SST, Britain and France were developing Concorde, and the Soviets had their own supersonic Tupolevs in development. Boeing was anticipating that supersonic aircraft would render the subsonic 747 obsolete for passengers overnight, so it was designed to be easily convertible to freight.
- dotancohen 3mo agoAnd interestingly, the Tu-144 flew passengers before the Concorde did!
- SoftTalker 3mo agoI'd guess they'll continue in cargo service for many more years, just as the DC10 and MD11 did (despite the grounding after the Louisville crash, I expect they will fly again before finally being retired).
- addaon 3mo ago> Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition Yes, but it turns out the hump is great for area ruling (aerodynamic drag reduction at transonic speeds), as observed by the 747-300's extended hump giving lower drag (but higher weight, of course) than the short-hump versions.
- fransje26 3mo agoSlightly pedantic, but this is not completely correct. It had a lower Cd with the extended hump, but it still had a higher drag, due to the larger wetted area.
- dotancohen 3mo agoCould you expand upon that for us interested laymen?
- fransje26 3mo agoAh. It was based on a series of performance graphs from Boeing, dating back to my aircraft-design days where that very question was discussed and I was baffled enough by the contradiction to ask for detailed clarifications to the presenting professor. Unfortunately, I don't have access to those old notes, and couldn't quickly find what I was looking for online. So for now, due to lack of proper supporting arguments, I would say: scratch that. The Cd is normally normalized by the wing area, and the wing planform was the same between the 747-200 and 747-300. So if the Cd was lower for the -300, the total drag should be assumed to be smaller.
- dotancohen 3mo agoI remember hearing that the -300 cruised at a slightly higher Mach number, I assumed that was enabled by the center of pressure being moved back a few metres. But I have no idea what kind of drag the hump transition imparted on the upper fuselage. I kind of assumed that the low pressure zone above the rest of the aircraft would make up for most of the drag penalty of the transition (in general, not -300 specific). I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Assuming that the boundary layer is laminar for the entire length of the extended part of the fuselage during cruise - which is probably a good assumption, correct me if I'm wrong - then I wouldn't expect that the increased wetted area to add any significant drag. There is no additional frontal area, and no additional low pressure transition (just one moved back, obviously). But I'm not an aerospace engineer, just an interested laymen, so I'm just guessing. For all I know the straight staircase reduced drag compared to the classic spiral!
- philipwhiuk 3mo agoEngines became reliable enough for regulators to allow two engine planes to cross large bodies of water. (ETOPS) That's what really killed 4 engine planes.
- WalterBright 3mo agoTwin engines are actually safer than four.
- scrumper 3mo agoIs this because of something analogous to an expected value calculation? Like the increased probability of failure of a single engine when carrying 4, combined with the lower excess power per engine, means that the safety margin of a 4 engine plane is worse? Or is it something to do with the doubling of the number of critical parts that could fail? I'm struggling to come up with a workable argument why 2 is safer, it seems counterintuitive. I don't have enough of the puzzle. EDIT: Never mind, I see you wrote more down below about this. It's increased risk of a catastrophic engine failure bringing down the entire plane, not an engine simply dying and forcing a landing. Four engines = twice as many chances for that to happen.
- WalterBright 3mo agoThere's an enormous amount of energy in a jet engine with that spinning turbine. Then there's all the heat, fuel, and fire in it. When that energy lets go, you don't want to be anywhere near it. It's amazing that jet engines work at all! Yet the safety record of the engines is incredibly good.
- dotancohen 3mo agoBut twins typically have even larger turbines, no?
- WalterBright 3mo ago
- WalterBright 3mo ago> it was just about four-engine planes becoming too expensive to run Four engines are also less safe than twin engines. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but Boeing did the math and made the case.
- anonymars 3mo agoCan you link to the source?
- WalterBright 3mo agoMy time working on Flight Controls at Boeing.
- angled 3mo agoNot sure if you ever make it over to HKG but there are quite a few cargo 747s that still seem to be making the rounds. CX and others have them on the GA / cargo side, and when on Lantau you often see (and hear!) them on final or takeoff. I think CX would hate to retire them because from what I understand their load capacity is unparalleled. And you can load horses in them! There'll always be money from that for HAECO to keep them aloft. It's even better when you're at the bus terminal at HKIA and watching them fly overhead...
- WalterBright 3mo agoMy dad took me to Frankfurt AM to watch the first 747 to land there. Wow!
- anonymars 3mo agoCan you at least explain the reasoning then?
- zz0rr 3mo agothere's a book on this, "How Boeing Defied the Airbus Challenge: An Insider's Account" I don't know if it lays out the safety math but it goes very deep on twin engine safety and some of the fights over the a340 vs. 777 regulations
- robotnikman 3mo agoGuess I probably wont get a chance to fly on one, flying on the 747 was on my bucket list.
- exmadscientist 3mo agoSomehow I only managed to end up on one of these gorgeous birds once. In seat 64K, NRT-DTW (or was it NRT-MSP?). The main cabin is... nothing to write home about. I was in no hurry to book another 744 leg. Upper deck, perhaps a different story. Great seat number though.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoYeah economy class on a 747 sucks as much as it does on any other airliner.
- apelapan 3mo agoOn the A380 you get to enjoy the higher ceiling also in economy. It does make quite a difference for how cramped you feel, even though the leg room might be the same. And both B747 and A380 fly much calmer than the smaller, lighter widebodies, which is equally nice for passengers on all classes.
- rootusrootus 3mo agoThe A380 is probably the smoothest flying plane I've been in, but in my experience it has one slightly annoying behavior quirk that degrades from my ability to enjoy it. Granted, I've only flown in one a few times, so I may have just been unlucky. But at cruise, the autopilot surges and coasts on a slow repeating schedule. Ease off and float for a bit, get just a little bit low and throttle up slightly to catch it, rinse and repeat. Not terribly noticeable when awake, but when I try to sleep I'm acutely aware of that sensation. So far my personal favorite is the 787. About the only thing 'bad' I can say about it is that all the mechanical bits are kinda loud, like the flaps and stuff, and are very noisy inside the cabin. But it cruises so nice, and the lower pressurization altitude and increase in humidity is noticeable on a long flight.
- thesumofall 3mo agoIt’s such a beautiful plane. Despite having worked for Airbus, the 747 triggers emotions for me that the A380 simply doesn’t. It represents an era of aerospace engineering that will not come back (in many cases probably for the better - but still!)
- microtonal 3mo agoAs an aside, if anyone is going to Southern Germany, it's worth going to Technik Museum Speyer, where you can really go into the guts of the 747. They also have a Russian Buran space shuttle. The next day you could go to Technik Museum Sinnsheim, which is about half an hour from Speyer, and has both a Concorde and a Tupolev Tu-144 (both of which you can go inside). All truly marvels of engineering.
- selimthegrim 3mo agoDon’t forget to top it off with a visit to the Hermann Oberth Museum near Nuremberg.
- rambambram 3mo agoVery interesting! Looks like nice museums to go to. When I DuckDuckGo these museums, they seem to be related somehow!? https://www.technik-museum.de/ https://www.technik-museum.de/ I recently visited Stuttgart to go to the Mercedes Benz Museum. They too have a lot of technical stuff of course, and history. Really recommend it!
- joezydeco 3mo agoI've been to this museum, it's absolutely incredible. It's their version of the Henry Ford museum in Detroit. The thing you neglect to mention is that the Speyer 747 is suspended 30 meters above the ground. It's breathtaking. https://simpleflying.com/technik-museum-speyer-lufthansa-boeing-747-move-story/ https://simpleflying.com/technik-museum-speyer-lufthansa-boe...
- microtonal 3mo agoThe thing you neglect to mention is that the Speyer 747 is suspended 30 meters above the ground. It's breathtaking. Fair. We had been to Sinnsheim a couple of times before Speyer. In Sinnsheim, they have the Concorde/Tu-144 on poles on top of one of the buildings. So, the 30 meters high suspension of the 747 was not so impressive anymore I guess :). The museums are also great for kids. We went several times with our daughter and she loved it every time.
- d_silin 3mo ago1969 was truly the pinnacle of US aerospace industry - Concord, Boeing 747 and Apollo 11 all happened during this year.
- ceejayoz 3mo agoThe Concorde wasn't made in the US. It was a UK/France partnership.
- d_silin 3mo agoMy bad! Global aerospace industry then.
- schainks 3mo agoThe US was still very much involved in its development and testing, so I think we can still chalk it up as a win for multi-country collaboration, eh :3
- tonyedgecombe 3mo agoThe biggest impact the US had on Concorde was banning it from flying supersonic overland.
- rsynnott 3mo ago> The US was still very much involved in its development and testing ... Wait, how was that? The Concorde was essentially the Franco-British entry in what was once a rather fierce international race to build a supersonic passenger jet (then seen as the future); the US entries were the (failed) Lockheed L-2000 and Boeing 2707. If the US had been open to collaboration, it is likely that the UK would’ve gone in with them, and we might live in an alternate universe where there was a UK/US Concorde-ish thing, and maybe a French mini-Concorde (the French design which got subsumed into Concorde was particularly small, only 70 passengers). In our universe, though, US manufacturers were sceptical of working with BAC because they believed that govt funding for a foreign design would be hard to come by.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoPaywalled.
- ck2 3mo agowe'll always have QatarForceOne (747-8) well as long as Congress doesn't let him keep it, hopefully BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance program to refurbish it * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25B_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25B_Bridge
- exe34 3mo agoIt was a private bribe, he's not giving it back. He's probably not even leaving the White House in 2 years either.
- rbanffy 3mo agoNot on his own will at least.
- elzbardico 3mo agoAt least he is not going to live forever. He seems really fucked up lately.
- exe34 3mo agoThey'll stuff him and then use the autopen.
- dylan604 3mo agoThe funniest thing is that he's not going to continue using it after office. They plan to hang it in that hotel being called a library when it gets built
- moojacob 3mo agoDidn’t read the full article but it starts with > The jet was perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence. Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition. End of American ambition? SpaceX landing is rockets… today! That’s apples to apples also, both aerospace. In other fields we have literally taught computers how to talk.
- Leonard_of_Q 3mo agoThe Atlantic writes for its owners as well as its readership, both of whom consider it unsavoury to compliment their homeland without adding multiple caveats.
- jquery 3mo agoConsidering who the current face of the country is and how we are acting on the world stage, it’s the least they can do.
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoHow is this kind of ritual flagellation supposed to mitigate Trump though?
- GMoromisato 3mo agoIronically, it's this ritual self-flagellation that helped elect Trump. Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America. And if you don't trust the media, then it's a lot easier to believe Trump's lies.
- jquery 3mo ago> Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America. I would argue they lost faith because the media constantly lies and distorts the truth to promote the ideology of capital. They are elite and disconnected, absolutely, just not in a left wing way, but a corpo-capitalist way (which only looks “left” if you’re to the right of capital).
- floorfour 3mo ago[dead]
- babbel 3mo ago[dead]
- spankibalt 3mo ago> "[...] the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful." Pathetic drivel. There's legion of commercial airliners that are more beautiful than the 747.
- rbanffy 3mo agoAt least it’s not an up/down scaled 737… I’d say it looks nicer than the 777 replacing it, or the 380 that tried it.
- spankibalt 3mo agoConcorde, Tu-144, L-1011 TriStar, Il-62, Tu-154, SE 210 Caravelle, de Havilland DH.106 Comet and Vickers VC10 are all much sexier. Just for starters.
- elzbardico 3mo agoMaybe the Concord and Comet. For the rest of the list I think you'd spend a very long time finding people to agree with you. The soviet ones are even more complicated, the Tu-144 is basically an Ugly Concord.
- spankibalt 3mo agoSo or so, Bogost's statement is akin to describing the Amiga 500 as the only beautiful home computer. And that's obviously ridiculous. As for your statement, nah, I won't have to search very long for people agreeing with me on many of the aircraft listed; whole coffee table tomes have been published specifically dealing with the subject of Soviet, French and British classic, especially narrow-body, airliners.
- watersb 3mo agoI'm reading through the comments here before reading the actual Atlantic story, so I didn't see the author's name until you mention it: > Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful. Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view. (I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)
- ayaros 3mo agoI realize this might be an unpopular opinion but I never liked the look of the "hump" created by the upper deck of the 747.
- rbanffy 3mo agoAt least it’s distinctive. Most planes look like scaled versions of the 737 - similar shape, similar proportions…
- Gagarin1917 3mo agoWhat?! It makes it look like a giant fighter jet
- intexpress 3mo agoI will miss the 747. Modern planes with less engines feel less safe. I hate all the justifications used to fly long distances across oceans with only 2 engines, or only 1 engine.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- stouset 3mo agoYou mean the justification that they are, in fact, just as safe?
- GMoromisato 3mo agoI'm curious about this--wouldn't one expect more engines to be safer? Unless having more engines increases the chance of certain kinds of accidents? Like maybe the chance of an engine failure damaging the hull goes up with more engines? Not questioning the justification--I do believe it--I'm just curious about the details.
- mjg59 3mo agoAll else being equal, potentially - although as I mentioned there have been cases where one engine falling off a 4 engine aircraft hit another in the process. But ETOPS certification is based on it being demonstrated that engines are sufficiently reliable that the probability of an independent failure is incredibly unlikely, and also requires that operators have a stricter maintenance process. The only dual engine failures on modern two-engine aircraft I can think of off-hand have been fuel exhaustion (either actually being out of fuel, or ice blocking fuel filters in the case of BA38), and would have affected 4-engine aircraft just as badly.
- KolmogorovComp 3mo agoNo, the highest risk for dual engine failure is bird strike.
- GMoromisato 3mo agoAnyone interested should read Joe Sutter's book, 747. Sutter was the lead engineer for the development of the 747 and he has some awesome stories. One interesting story is that Juan Trippe (CEO of PanAm) wanted Boeing to create a double-decker airplane. He was enamored with the idea of "ocean liners" cruising the sky. But Sutter (and other engineers) knew that it would be impossible to create what he wanted, so instead they proposed a wide-body aircraft (10 seats across). Nevertheless, Trippe insisted on a double-decker design. The engineers then created two cabin mockups. One for a double decker, which was basically two narrow-body cabins stacked on top of each other. The other was the wide-body of the 747. Once Trippe saw the trade off, he realized that the spacious cabin of the 747 was the way to go. But even then, when he saw the second level where the pilots go, he insisted on putting passengers up there too. I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
- hydrogen7800 3mo agoOne thing I remember from his book is that the 747 was initially of secondary importance within Boeing, behind the SST. This wasn't Boeing's flagship, so to speak, until SST was canceled.
- sidewndr46 3mo agoThis seems like an odd version of the story. My understanding is Boeing designed lots of military aircraft, not all reached production. The 747 is the result of some of that design work.
- fracus 3mo agoMy memory of the 747 was that it was originally the military who paid for the design. They wanted an aircraft that could be loaded from the front. This led to the bubble at the front of the plane. For whatever reason, the military didn't bite so they repurposed it as a commercial aircraft.
- Animats 3mo agoThat was also said about the B-707, which was supposed to have some parts commonality with their KC-135 Stratotanker built for the USAF. But as development progressed, the airliner and the tanker diverged. The B-747 went through a similar process. Boeing was proposing a big cargo aircraft to the USAF (the CX-HLS), but that was never built. Lockheed got the C-5 contract instead, which satisfied the USAF's need for a really big cargo plane. So the B-747 was built as a commercial plane, mostly to Pan Am's requirements. Military-civilian commonality was mostly wishful thinking at the management levels, as it turned out.
- himata4113 3mo agoThose interiors look so much more pleasing than the ones we have right now even in business / premium economy class and I am not even that old!
- aurareturn 3mo agoFlying is much cheaper today. People want low prices over more comfort. They vote with their wallets.
- himata4113 3mo agoI don't know, having more color doesn't seem that much more expensive? I guess the fabrics are expensive and stain relatively easily, but if public transport can keep them clean so can airlines IMO. Some fabric seats are over 3 decades old and they're still in a really good shape.
- aurareturn 3mo agoMaybe it looks better because there are only 9 seats in an aisle in the picture compared to standard 10 nowadays?
- himata4113 3mo ago10?! That's news to me. I had to fly american airlines and there was still 9.. oh it has been more than half a decade.
- dcrazy 3mo agoPublic transport can’t keep them clean. BART famously had disgusting carpets until the 2010s.
- himata4113 3mo agoIf a poor second world country can have clean seats on public transport surely...
- dylan604 3mo agoTo me, any 747 without a space shuttle on top of it looks naked
- spking 3mo agohttps://archive.is/PZO0r https://archive.is/PZO0r
- lippihom 3mo agoSomehow archive.is has mostly stopped working for me on many mainstream sites (Bloomberg, NYT, WSJ, etc...).
- massysett 3mo agoThis article is but one example of a tiresome genre: the paean to the supposed glory days of aviation. Passengers dressed up, dined on caviar, and smoked cigarettes. Stewardesses were sexy, and liquor flowed in the expansive 747 lounge. These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks. I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me. But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account. Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.
- huflungdung 3mo ago[dead]
- stephen_g 3mo agoFor the money things have actually got better. If you pay the equivalent (adjusted for inflation or compared to wages) of what they were paying back then for an international flight, you're in first class and on a good airline that's hugely better than anything from the 'golden age'. Even business class is cheaper and (again on good airlines) is better than what people had then - the planes are quieter, the seats lie flat, the food is good, lounge access with free food and drinks before and on any stopovers... It's kind of crazy that people compare the experience on a $1000 transalantic ticket and bemoan that the experience doesn't seem quite as good as something that was costing people the equivalent of 10-20x as much back then!
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- chrisss395 3mo agoI know less about the airframe differences across the -400 and -8, but I can say the 747-8 represented a major upgrade in Flight Management Software. I re-wrote the Central Maintenance System (portion inside the FMS) in C from scratch because no one had the original detailed design documents. The original -400 code was written in Pascal if I'm remembering correctly. I gleamed what I could from the source and relied on unit tests to get the rest of the way there based on what I knew of the protocol itself. The entire FMS software was completely re-written in C++ and using modern object oriented patterns (at the time). Probably the most fun I've had over my now 20'ish year career. Of course Boeing was pissed with the delays this caused because the airframe wasn't a major change. I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying." Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out. Personal opinion, this was a large part of what led to the MAX situation.
- wkipling 3mo agoAwesome. Was this part of the NG FMS program? I find it interesting how the 747 FMS is newer than the 777s yet due to type similarity retains legacy features.
- scorpioxy 3mo agoThat executive has lost any human decency and should be fired.
- GuB-42 3mo agoNot just human decency. We all know that some CEOs will sacrifice your child for their goal. In fact, many people are ready to sacrifice other people children as long as they are distant enough, war wouldn't be a thing if we didn't. But saying it out loud is another thing, it is, to me, a terrible blunder in terms of communication, and executives who talk like that should 100% get fired. They are the face of the company, what they say and how they say it matters. Maybe it matters even more than the technical part of their job. If they get a pass for saying things like that, that's even worse, because it means that it is what the shareholders and customers want to hear.
- uwagar 3mo agoto see sofas on a plane feels weird when they ask u wear seat belts all the time now due to risks from turbluence (clear air turbulence apparently!).
- sgjohnson 3mo ago> the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful Concorde?
- eichin 3mo agoConcorde is exotic, absolutely, but having seen the one at Udvar-Hazy I'm not sure I'd call it beautiful... not being an aircraft designer, my sense for this is of course biased by the way the average commercial jet looks like, well, a commercial jet, and the Concorde looks like someone who was really good at paper airplanes got ahold of the CAD system for the weekend :-)
- Ozzie-D 3mo ago[flagged]
- kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago> They are just metal tubes with wings. The 787 would beg to differ. It is an engineering achievement on par with the 747.
- gib444 3mo agoJust a shame the airlines mostly opted for an interior that ignores obesity rates and the existence of shoulders
- linzhangrun 3mo agoOne interesting thing is that the 747 was born as a temporary transition product, from a failed proposal after Boeing lost the competition against the C-5 Galaxy. In the era when Joe Sutter designed it, almost the whole world believed that supersonic passenger aviation was right in front of us. Boeing put almost all of its core resources into the Mach 2 Boeing 2707. The Jumbo Jet was only a temporary plan based on a freighter foundation from the beginning. Its later conversion to cargo use was deeply considered from the start (which makes its situation today much better than the A380). What happened later we all know. The Tu-144 fell from the sky over Paris. Concorde barely entered service because Britain and France did not want to pay cancellation penalties. Boeing was almost dragged down by the 2707. And the 747 became Boeing’s savior. Ironically, as engine bypass ratios increased, newer airliners became more and more fuel-efficient, also slower and slower. This former "slow temporary backup freighter" is now the highest and fastest mainline airliner in the sky, able to fly above 40,000 feet and cruise close to Mach 1. Another perhaps sad point is that before 9/11, the Jumbo Jet dominated the sky of large aircraft. So almost all the well-known bomb attacks people can easily remember were on 747.
- idontwantthis 3mo ago> Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values. Can some explain why replacing it with more efficient, and still American, jets is somehow a negative for American might, progress, and invention?
- rdiddly 3mo ago"Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition." What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this? The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American. Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature. [0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."
- jdblair 3mo agoLufthansa still flies a 747-8 between FRA and SFO. https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH454 https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH454 I booked it once when I couldn’t find a direct flight from AMS to SFO.
- _jackdk_ 3mo agoQantas gave its final 747s a nice send-off too, back in July 2020, flying its final commercial 747 flight as QF7474. https://www.qantas747.com/ https://www.qantas747.com/ They also had QF7474 trace the Qantas logo in its track along the way, which is so cool and I am surprised I couldn't find it in the official site: https://www.escape.com.au/destinations/australia/how-qantas-pulled-off-that-amazing-kangaroo-stunt/news-story/9832bf96679c53712d2c90d653358c33 https://www.escape.com.au/destinations/australia/how-qantas-...
- rob74 3mo ago> Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. If this article is going to be so poetic, I'm not sure I can continue reading it. Let's just stop for a moment and remember that the 747's, er, distinctive shape wasn't some designer's fancy, it was dictated by necessity: while it was being designed, Boeing feared that in the near future all (long-distance) passenger travel would be supersonic, so it wanted the 747 to also be attractive as a freighter, so they added the possibility of loading cargo from the front, so the cockpit had to be moved up. Simple as that. Of course, the supersonic revolution didn't happen, instead the 747 ushered in the era of widebody jets, and all the fond memories it created now make it look beautiful to the nostalgic. But in the end, Boeing's engineers were proven right: currently there are around 300 747s still in operation, but only 29 of them are passenger variants. Ok, moving on... > Most 747 routes spanned oceans and continents, giving travelers a speedier option than the Queen Mary had across the Atlantic, or the California Zephyr across the West. You've got your Boeing planes mixed up there buddy! That was the 707, not the 747. The Queen Mary was retired in 1967, and the 747 first flew in 1969, so there obviously was no timespan where the one was an alternative to the other.
- Sweepi 3mo agoAlso: > In the cabin, the heft makes the plane feel almost still, even at 500 miles an hour and 35,000 feet; it is the only plane I have ever flown in whose takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses. "Only"? Not "First"? Ever flown an A380?
- freetime2 3mo agoAnd "takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses" is quite an exaggeration for both the 747 and A380. They are nice to fly, but takeoff and landings are definitely perceptible. Unless the author was black-out drunk for both takeoff and landing.
- nextstep 3mo agoAmerica begins its final descent
- chasd00 3mo agoThe very first 747 is at the flight museum in Seattle. Pretty interesting to walk through it except there’s poweredge servers in the test equipment racks in the main fuselage. Pretty sure dell wasn’t even formed when that plane was in testing hah.
- TomMasz 3mo agoI was able to fly business class in 747s to Japan back in the 90s (it was coach to Europe, though). That meant the upper deck and amenities like a sandwich and snack cart that you could just help yourself from. By the 2000s, it was coach everywhere, regardless of the plane.