Once the queen of the skies, the 747 will soon be just a flying truck
LOS ANGELES — The wide-bodied Boeing 747 was once known as the queen of the skies, an instantly recognizable behemoth revered for its luxury and spaciousness.
As time passed, however, the original jumbo jet was outstripped by more efficient twin-engine planes.
Now the 747’s days as a passenger plane are numbered. Delta and United — the last two U.S. airlines that fly 747s — have said they will retire those planes from their fleet by the end of the year, 48 years after the jet first took flight.
Today, Boeing Co. produces just six 747s a year. The Chicago-based aerospace giant says it is eyeing the cargo market for new customers.
The winding-down of 747 production is also a reminder of Southern California’s diminished role as a builder of big planes and their parts. The most prominent supplier in the region is a fuselage-panel plant in the Los Angeles-area city of Hawthorne that once employed thousands. Today, the factory has 300 employees.
"The 747 was a fabulous airplane,” said Scott Hamilton, founder of aviation consulting firm Leeham Co. LLC. “But like any technology, it moves on.”
At the time, the big jet represented a spectacular gamble for Boeing.
Up until the 747’s debut, flying was a cramped — or more cramped — experience in narrow-body planes. When the plane rolled off an assembly line in the late 1960s, it was already larger and had longer range than later “airbus” aircraft, such as the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed L-1011.
Aspiring 747 pilots were specially trained to taxi the large aircraft by riding in a mock-up of the plane’s flight deck boosted on three-story-tall stilts in a moving truck. Pilots maneuvered the “simulator” by radioing directions down to the truck driver.
Boeing poured financial resources into the 747’s development, which almost bankrupted the company as cost overruns were exacerbated by a recession that broke just as the plane made its debut, said Suresh Kotha, professor of management at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.
The company had to cut deals with suppliers to produce parts on their own dime. Production began while the massive Everett, Wash., assembly plant was still under construction; the plant’s construction alone cost $200 million, according to the book “Boeing 747: A History.”
Expected orders disappeared, and airlines that did buy the plane opted to install lounges in the 747’s famous hump rather than fill the plane to its 400-seat capacity. American Airlines even placed a piano bar near the back of its planes.
“It had unparalleled spaciousness,” Hamilton said. “The fliers of today are used to stepping on a 747 or 777 that has wide bodies. Back then, you’d step onto the airplane and go, ‘Wow.’”
At the time, commercial aerospace was still a major industry in Southern California.
Northrop Corp. won a Boeing subcontract to produce the plane’s fuselage panels in 1966. The company’s Hawthorne plant made the basic fuselage assemblies, while another facility in the coastal city of Ventura built the structure that connected the fuselage skin with the wing. Plants in Anaheim and Long Beach produced the plane’s flooring.