It revolutionized aviation and with its distinctive hump is still regarded as an attraction in the sky: The Boeing 747 – once the world’s largest airliner, celebrated as the “Queen of the Skies”. But after more than 50 years, the US manufacturer is finally discontinuing the legendary jumbo jet. The last of the newly built 747s were handed over to Atlas Air on Tuesday (local time) in a farewell ceremony at Boeing’s Everett factory, near Seattle.
lack of demand
Boeing had already announced in 2020 that it would end production of the 747. This was not a surprise: the group had long thought of discarding the classic aircraft due to lack of demand. Airlines now prefer smaller, more economical machines.
The giant aircraft completed its maiden flight in 1969 and, about a year later, the first example entered regular service with the then American airline Pan Am. According to Boeing, the first 747 was built in less than 28 months and was the work of a total of more than 50,000 employees, who have since been nicknamed “Incredibles”. The jumbo was – despite a troubled debut at PanAm in January 1970 – a huge success. The double-decker 747 fascinated the masses with its unique silhouette like almost no other jet and made longer flights accessible to the general public.
In total, Boeing built 1,574 747 jumbo jets for more than 100 customers in about 55 years. One of the most important was Lufthansa, whose boss Carsten Spohr gave a speech at the farewell party. However, the 747 has long been considered a discontinued model, more recently it was only built as a freighter version. This is also the case with the latest example that has now been delivered to Atlas Air. With the latest 747-8 passenger variant, which has a longer upper deck, new wings and more fuel-efficient engines and offers space for more than 600 people, Boeing has only managed to score points with a few airlines. Most long-haul airlines now use models that are not as big as the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” and 777 and Airbus A350.
Very expensive
Huge machines like the Boeing 747 with its four engines are now considered by many airlines to be too expensive to operate. Also, they can only be used up to capacity on routes with high demand. The same problem also existed with the double-decker Airbus A380, which replaced Boeing’s jumbo jet with capacity for up to 853 passengers after the turn of the millennium as the largest passenger plane in the world. In early 2019, Airbus management decided to halt production of the jet in 2021 due to lack of demand – just some 14 years after its first scheduled flight. However, the A380, which was decommissioned in the corona pandemic, made a surprising comeback last year.
One thing is certain: the farewell party, attended by a number of Everett employees and business partners, was a welcome change for Boeing. The US aerospace giant is in deep crisis. Currently, Boeing’s most sought-after aircraft model, the 737 Max, has been grounded for about a year and a half after two devastating accidents due to technical defects. The debacle surrounding the medium-haul jet and problems with other models such as the “Dreamliner” brought Boeing four consecutive annual losses and ensured that the American aircraft maker lost market leadership and was now almost overtaken by arch-rivals Airbus.
The fact that Boeing approached the 747 Hercules project in the 1960s was thanks to a handshake agreement between then-boss William Allen and his PanAm colleague Juan Trippe. “If you buy it, I’ll build it,” Allen told Trippe. In fact, Boeing applied to the jumbo for an order from the US military – but it was outbid by rival Lockheed. The special upstairs cockpit design that gave the 747 its cult character was also due to the misconception that smaller supersonic aircraft like the Concorde would shape passenger aviation. The 747 was therefore designed to double as a cargo plane.
small revival
Over the next five decades, Boeing’s jumbo served not only as a passenger and cargo jet – a special version carried the space shuttle for NASA, another is Air Force One, developed on behalf of the Pentagon. This high-tech flying fortress for US presidents is a prestige project for Boeing, but it has caused a lot of problems in recent years. Boeing had agreed in 2018 under former boss Dennis Muilenburg with then-President Donald Trump to build the new Air Force One, but costs got out of control. In April 2022, Muilenburg’s successor Dave Calhoun acknowledged that the deal resulted in billions in charges and that Boeing “probably” shouldn’t have gone into it.
Boeing manager Kim Smith described the last delivery of the legendary jumbo in an interview with US broadcaster CNBC in Everett as “very surreal”. “For the first time in over 50 years, we won’t have a 747 at this plant.” The aircraft type won’t disappear from the sky when production ends, but the 747 is also becoming rarer there. US airlines United and Delta dropped them from their fleets years ago. After the corona pandemic brought international air traffic to a standstill in 2020, so did Qantas and British Airways. There has only been a limited revival of the 747 in the cargo area due to the recovery from the Corona crisis and the resulting shortage of aircraft – as experienced by the Airbus A380.