The 747 is making its final approach
HOW much do I, a Boeing 747 pilot, love the airplane that I fly? It’s tough, and maybe a little embarrassing, to answer. But as the iconic jet’s eventual retirement draws closer, I am surely not the only 747 fan who’s taking some very long flights down memory lane.
I could tell you pretty much everything about my first passenger flight on a 747, a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight to Amsterdam, on June 25, 1988. And I’d certainly describe the marvelous night of December 12, 2007, when I first piloted a 747, for British Airways, the airline I now fly for, from London to Hong Kong. That night, the majesty of the 747 made the experience of takeoff new again, as joyful as it had been on my first flying lesson years earlier, when a steely eyed instructor and I strapped ourselves into a Cessna, rumbled down the runway of my hometown airport in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and lifted into an autumn-blue Berkshire sky.
Recent news reports have suggested that the last 747s in passenger service with United States airlines will be retired this year. It’s worth noting that other 747s – including refurbished, newer and cargo versions – will fly for years to come. New passenger 747s took flight as recently as this summer, and cargo models continue to roll off the assembly line. Nevertheless, as many 747 pilots start to ponder which aircraft we’ll fly next, it is a good time to reflect on the outsize importance of the plane known as “Queen of the Skies”.
For those who grew up under 747-crossed skies, it can be hard to appreciate how revolutionary the jet’s dimensions were when it first (and improbably, to some observers) got airborne in 1969. The inaugural model, the 747-100, was the world’s first wide-bodied airliner. The jet weighed hundreds of thousands of kilograms more than its predecessors, and carried more than twice as many passengers.
Aviation historian Martin Bowman has written that during the 747’s first takeoff, in February 1969 from Paine Field in Everett, Washington, the blast of its engines knocked over a photographer. Indeed, the jet’s elephantine proportions were both a gift and a challenge to the travel industry. Peter Walter, who retired in 2011 after 47 years in ground-based aviation jobs, shared with me his memories of the day the 747 first came to the airport in Freeport, Bahamas. “The aircraft did not look all that big on the runway, but once it was on the ramp it looked enormous,” he wrote.
The hopes and fears of the era that gave us the 747 can seem distant. Nor is it easy, in the age of the internet, to feel the same awe at the 747’s ability to shrink and connect the world. Looking back, it’s perhaps enough to marvel at the billions of reunions, migrations, exchanges and collaborations of all manner that were made possible, or at least more affordable, by this aircraft. Today, the equivalent of around half the planet’s population has flown on a 747.
If the 747’s place in history is assured, so, too, it seems, is its cultural stature. The 747 also endures as a symbol of speed, escape and, frankly, sexiness, one that, along with the pleasingly palindromic rhythm of its number-name, has appealed in particular to singers. A 747 playlist might include Prince (“you are flying aboard the seduction 747”) and Joni Mitchell, who gave perhaps my favourite tribute to 747s (“over geometric farms”.)
The jet also seems certain to be remembered as an icon of modern design. “This is one of the great ones,” said Charles Lindbergh of the aircraft that many consider to be uniquely good-looking. I am surely not the first to speculate that the jet’s distinctive hump (fashioned to facilitate cargo-loading in a future that many expected to be dominated by supersonic passenger jets) suggests the graceful head of an avian archetype. Frequently, looking up from my cockpit paperwork, I’ll spot sev- eral passengers in the terminal photographing the very jet in which I am sitting. I often see even senior 747 pilots disembark the aircraft that they’ve just spent 11 hours flying to Cape Town or Los Angeles, and then pause, turn around and photograph it.
Indeed, the jet may be most esteemed by those who have been lucky enough to fly it. The very first to do so, the test pilot Jack Waddell, described it as “a pilot’s dream” and a “twofinger airplane” – one that can be flown with just the forefinger and thumb on the control wheel. Personally, I find the aircraft to be both smooth and manoeuverable, a joy to fly.
Like every 747 pilot since, Waddell also took a keen interest in how the plane looked. Remarkably, he did so even as he was piloting the new jet on that first-ever flight. “What kind of a looking ship is this from out there, Paul?” he said over the radio to Paul Bennett, a pilot in the “chase” aircraft that was following the newborn 747 through the skies of the Pacific Northwest. The reply from Bennett echoes through aviation history: “It’s very good looking, Jack. Fantastic!”
Many 747 pilots feel the same, and are pleased, but not surprised, to hear that the British architect Norman Foster once named the aircraft his favourite building of the 20th century.
Foster has plenty of company. At the start of my first book, a sort of love letter to my job as a pilot, I invited readers to send me their favourite window seat photographs. Many also wrote to share their particular passion for the 747. One reader detailed his first 747 flight, on Alitalia, bound for Rome in 1971. “I have been hooked ever since,” he said.
When Foster emailed me, he also attached a transcript of remarks he made about the 747 in a 1991 BBC documentary.
“I suppose it’s the grandeur, the scale; it’s heroic, it’s also pure sculpture,” he said then of the jet. “It does not really need to fly, it could sit on the ground, it could be in a museum.”