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Boeing says goodbye to an icon on Tuesday: It delivered its last 747 jumbo jet.
Since its maiden flight in 1969, the gigantic yet elegant 747 has served as a cargo plane, a commercial jet capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers, a shuttle for NASA’s space shuttles, and Air Force One presidential jet. It revolutionized travel, connecting cities international flights that had never had direct routes before and contributing to the democratization of passenger flights.
But in the last 15 years or so, Boeing and its European rival Airbus have introduced more cost-effective and fuel-efficient widebody jets, with just two engines to keep instead of the 747’s four. number 1,574 built by Boeing in the Puget Sound region of Washington state.
“If you love this business, you’ve been dreading this moment,” said veteran aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia. “No one wants a four-engine anymore, but that doesn’t erase the aircraft’s tremendous contribution to the development of the industry and its remarkable legacy.”
Boeing set out to build the 747 after losing a contract for a massive military transport, the C-5A. The idea was to take new engines developed for transportation—high-bypass turbofan engines, which burned less fuel as air passed around the engine core, allowing for longer flight range—and use them for a newly imagined civil aircraft.
It took more than 50,000 Boeing workers less than 16 months to build the first 747, a Herculean effort that earned them the nickname “The Incredibles.” Production of the jumbo jet required the construction of a massive factory in Everett, north of Seattle, the world’s largest building by volume.
The plane’s fuselage was 68.5 meters long and the tail was as tall as a six-story building. The aircraft’s design included a second deck that extended from the cockpit rearward over the first third of the aircraft, giving it a distinctive hump and inspiring a nickname, the Whale. More romantically, the 747 became known as the Queen of the Skies.
Some airlines turned the second floor into a first-class cocktail lounge, while even the lower deck sometimes featured lounges or even a piano bar.
“It was the first big airline, the first wide-body plane, so it set a new standard for airlines to know what to do with it and how to fill it,” says Guillaume de Syon, a professor of history at Albright College in Pennsylvania 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 had to lower prices to get people on board.” It contributed to what happened in the late 1970s with the deregulation of air transport.”
The first 747 entered service in 1970 on the New York-London route and its timing was terrible, Aboulafia said. It debuted shortly before the 1973 oil crisis, in the midst of a recession in which Boeing went from having 100,800 employees in 1967 to 38,690 in April 1971. The “Boeing bust” was sadly marked by a billboard near the airport Seattle-Tacoma International that read: “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE — Turn out the lights.”
An updated model – the 747-400 series – arrived at the end of the 1980s and came at a much better time, coinciding with the Asian economic boom of the early 1990s, explains Aboulafia, who recalls his trip on a 747 from Cathay Pacific from Los Angeles to Hong Kong as a 20-something backpacker in 1991.
“Even people like me could go see Asia,” he said. “Before, you had to stop in Alaska or Hawaii to refuel, and it cost a lot more. This was a direct trip, and at a reasonable price.”
Delta was the last US airline to use the 747 for passenger flights, ending in 2017, although a few other international carriers continue to fly it, including German carrier Lufthansa.
Atlas Air ordered four 747-8 freighters early last year, with the last one leaving the factory on Tuesday.
Boeing has its roots in the Seattle area and has assembly plants in Washington state and South Carolina. The company announced in May that it would move its headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia, bringing its executives closer to top officials in the federal government and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which certifies passenger planes and Boeing cargo.
Boeing’s relationship with the FAA has been strained since the fatal crashes of its best-selling plane, the 737 Max, in 2018 and 2019. It took the FAA nearly two years – much longer than Boeing expected – to approve the design changes. and allow the plane to fly again.
*With PA; adapted from its original in English
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