The 747, 50 Years On
In 1970, the Boeing 747 made its first passenger flight. No one would have imagined its impact on air travel half a century later.
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In the early morning of January 22, 1970, 335 passengers boarded Pan American World Airways Flight 2 at Terminal 3 of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, bound for Heathrow Airport in London. The flight had been scheduled to depart the night before and by this point was over 6 hours behind schedule, but any irritation on that score would have been largely offset by the excitement of the historic nature of this flight — this was the first passenger flight of Boeing’s latest aircraft model, the Boeing 747. At two-thirds the length of a football field, a tail rising six stories up, and interior dimensions more reminiscent of a large conference room than an aircraft cabin, the 747 was the largest aircraft ever to enter airline service, dwarfing all other existing airliners, and would remain so for the next 37 years.
Just after 2:00 a.m., Clipper Victor (N736PA), the 12th 747 off the production line, departed from New York and headed towards London. 6 hours and 43 minutes later, Clipper Victor touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport at 1:35 p.m. local time, cementing a milestone in aviation history. The completion of the inaugural flight marked the culmination of years of hard work by a team of engineers and test pilots who had been responsible for getting the mammoth 747 designed, built, and into the air safely.
This year, 2020, marks 50 years since the inaugural passenger flight of the Boeing 747. While the atmosphere surrounding talk of its future today is very different from what it was in 1970, the fact that its production line remains open today, 50 years after it entered service, has been a remarkable feat in itself. As of this writing, 1,557 747s have been built. By being able to carry more passengers over longer journeys than before, the 747, in many ways, has played an indispensable role in shaping commercial air travel as we know it today, and despite its dwindling presence, has left a legacy that few other aircraft can rival.
The success of the 747 that is evident today would not have even been dreamed of in the 1960s, during its development. Just over a decade earlier, the de Havilland Comet had made its first flight in 1949. The world’s first commercial jet airliner, it sparked the beginning of the “jet age” in commercial air travel. This was defined by the advent of jet aircraft which were able to fly much faster than the existing piston-engined aircraft, which quickly fell out of favor. All of a sudden, travel times were dramatically shortened. Flying across the Atlantic, which previously required about 16 hours, for example, now only took 7 hours. This was a major leap forward in the history of commercial flying. As the 1960s rolled around, engineers were once again looking to build even faster aircraft, and the attention of leading aircraft manufacturers, including Boeing, turned to supersonic transports, or SSTs for short. By 1962, three supersonic passenger aircraft was well under development: the Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde, the Tupolev Tu-144, and the Boeing 2707. These three aircraft promised to revolutionize commercial air travel once again by cutting travel times even further and were undeniably seen as the future of commercial air travel.
However, at the same time, the demand for air travel soared, with airlines having to add many more flights to cope with the ever-increasing demand. This, coupled with the fact that the largest passenger aircraft at the time carried no more than 200 passengers, led to worsening airport congestion at many of the world’s major gateways, such as New York, London, and Paris. Thus, in 1965, Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American World Airways, or Pan Am for short, asked Boeing to build a passenger aircraft much larger than what was currently available. Pan Am was one of Boeing’s most important customers, has launched the 707, their first jet airliner, in 1958, and Boeing was obligated to look into fulfilling their request. This was the start of a new aircraft program for Boeing, and the 747 project was launched.
Later in 1965, Joseph Sutter, a 44-year-old aerodynamicist who was part of the development team of the Boeing 737, was asked to be the chief engineer of the 747. In his autobiography, Sutter, who passed away in 2016, wrote that he was chosen to lead the development of the 747 as he was “about the only qualified person available”, as the more senior engineers were involved in the development of the Boeing 2707 SST program. Even with Pan Am’s request, it was believed that the 747 would only see limited use as a passenger aircraft, as the future would be one of supersonic aircraft. However, Sutter and his team were quick to see that even when SSTs had taken over passenger transport, airlines would still need a large freighter aircraft to transport air cargo. It was in fact with this goal in mind that led to the development of many key features of the 747 that we see today.
Back then, when people thought of a large aircraft, an image of a double-decker aircraft would invariably come to mind. This was a logical conclusion — after all, it worked well with buses and ships. However, the design team observed that it would be much more difficult to load cargo onto an upper deck. In addition, the oval cross-sections of pressurized aircraft meant that the walls on the upper deck would have to be curved inwards to a significant extent, which would lead to more unusable cargo space when fitting rectangular cargo pallets on that level. Besides that, even in a passenger configuration, it would also be challenging to evacuate passengers from an upper deck in the event of an emergency. These considerations led Sutter and his team to think of other configurations for the 747. They eventually decided that instead of having two floors, the 747 would have a single, extra-wide main deck with two aisles in a passenger configuration, and the widebody aircraft was born.
Apart from this, the design team also thought up other ways to make the 747 a better freighter. They decided that to expedite the loading and unloading of cargo, which would decrease turnaround times, the nose of the 747 would hinge upwards, allowing cargo to be loaded from the front. This, in turn, meant that the cockpit of the 747 would have to be placed above the main deck, with a slight fairing behind it for aerodynamic purposes, giving the 747 its distinctive hump.
In April 1966, Pan Am officially placed the first order for the 747, ordering 25 aircraft, becoming the launch customer of the 747. The proposed 747 would carry nearly 400 passengers in a typical passenger configuration, compared to about 140 for the 707, the next largest jet airliner, and this order would mean a large increase in passenger capacity for the airline. Many other airlines soon placed orders of their own, and by the end of 1967, there were 126 orders for the 747, with most for the passenger version. This had already exceeded the initial expectations of Sutter, who had thought that Boeing would sell “about 50 passenger 747s” in total. Even with these orders, the future of the 747 did not look bright, as almost all airlines which had purchased the 747 had also signed options for either the Concorde or 2707 or in most cases, both of the SSTs.
With the 747 now under contract, the engineering team faced the problem of where it would be built. At the time, Boeing had two plants: one at King County International Airport in southern Seattle, commonly known as Boeing Field, and another at the nearby Renton Municipal Airport. While both these facilities had no problems with producing existing aircraft, the 747 would be too large for either of them. Thus, in 1966, Boeing began the construction of a new factory in Everett, Washington, on the site of Paine Field Airport, for the production of the 747. Today, the Everett factory is the largest building in the world by volume, at 13,385,378 cubic meters, and all of Boeing’s wide-bodied aircraft are assembled in this factory.
This was the location in which crowds gathered around on the 9th of February, 1969, to witness history. Just over four months previously, Boeing had rolled out the first assembled 747 to the public, and many were astonished at the size of the aircraft. At two-thirds the length of a football field and a tail rising six storeys up, the aircraft was two-and-a-half times larger than the largest passenger aircraft existing, prompting many, including family friends of chief engineer Joe Sutter, to doubt whether the 747 could in fact fly. This was the day that those doubts would be put to rest.
Three test pilots at Boeing would be in the cockpit of N7470 for the first flight: Captain Jack Waddell, First Officer Brien Wygle, and Flight Engineer Jesse Wallick. At 11:09 a.m., the four Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines, the first high-bypass turbofan engines to be used on a commercial aircraft, were started in sequence, and the aircraft taxied to the runway. Finally, at 11:35 a.m., the moment everyone had been waiting for arrived. N7470 lifted off gracefully from Paine Field, on its first flight. After flying for 75 minutes with different flight settings tested out, N7470 landed back at Paine Field Airport, and the first flight of the Boeing 747 had been completed, proving to the world that this large aircraft was indeed capable of flight.
For the remainder of 1969, the 747 continued to undergo rigorous flight testing, as launch customer Pan Am was insistent on taking delivery of the first aircraft by the end of the decade. The fleet of test aircraft soon grew to four, of which three would later go on to carry passengers. Flight testing of the 747 proceeded smoothly, the only major hiccup being an incident in which one of the aircraft crash-landed short of the runway at the Renton plant, which was determined to be caused by pilot error. As the decade drew to a close, the first 747 was delivered to Pan Am, on the 22nd of December, 1969, and the inaugural passenger service departed exactly a month later.
With the pervasiveness of long haul, wide-bodied aircraft today, it is easy to forget the significance of the 747, which to most of today’s flying public, seems to be just another aircraft. For a long period of time, after it entered service, the 747 wasn’t just another long haul aircraft, it was the long haul aircraft, capable of flying distances far out matching any other commercial aircraft. In fact, much of its success owes to the fact that until relatively recently, it was the only aircraft capable of flying long transoceanic routes. In other words, any airline that wanted to operate such long routes had to purchase the 747 — there was simply no other choice. Even with such revolutionary performance, airlines soon wanted more out of their 747s, prompting Boeing to develop improved versions of the 747 over time, expanding the capabilities of the 747–100, as the initial version was designated.
In 1971, just a year after the 747 entered commercial service, engine manufacturers developed engines offering even more thrust than those on the 747–100. These higher thrust engines meant that the aircraft would be able to take off while carrying a greater weight, which, if the number of passengers was kept constant, in turn, meant that the aircraft could carry more fuel and fly longer distances. Seizing this opportunity to solidify its dominance of the long-range market, Boeing developed the 747–200, featuring an increased fuel capacity for a greater range. Requests from several European airlines, namely Sabena of Belgium and KLM of the Netherlands, who experienced heavy cargo demand but only moderate passenger demand on their 747 routes, led to the development of a passenger-cargo hybrid configuration of the 747, in which the rear section of the main deck was converted into a cargo hold. This hybrid configuration, dubbed the combi, was primarily offered on the -200 version and designated as the 747–200M, although Boeing conducted modifications of existing 747–100 aircraft that were delivered in a full passenger configuration.
However, even the range of the 747–200 was not enough for some. In 1973, Pan Am and Iran Air made a joint request for an even longer-ranged version of the 747, that would be able to reliably operate nonstop flights between New York and Tokyo as well as New York and Tehran, routes covering about 10,000 kilometers and involving over 14 hours in the air. Carrying the fuel required for the route would require even more powerful engines than had been developed at the time. To meet the new requirements, Boeing developed the 747SP (Special Performance), a significantly shortened version of the existing 747 airframes. The 747SP would be shorter than the baseline 747 by just over 14 meters but would require a larger tail to compensate for the smaller moment generated due to the reduced length of the aircraft. The resulting reduction in airframe weight of the 747SP would allow for greater range and higher cruising speed, becoming the fastest subsonic airliner in service. After entering service with Pan Am in 1976, the 747SP would be operated on many of the world’s longest nonstop flights, and also go on to set speed records for round-the-world flights.
In the early 1970s, Japan began to experience surging passenger demand on its domestic flights, notably between the capital Tokyo and the cities of Sapporo, Osaka, and Fukuoka, which are now among the busiest air routes in the world. The country’s two major airlines, All Nippon Airways (ANA) and Japan Air Lines (JAL), soon found the 130-seater 727s they used on these domestic routes to be far too small. As they turned to Boeing for a larger aircraft, engineers began to look into the feasibility of using the 747 as a short-haul shuttle. The fuselage of an aircraft experiences the most stress on takeoff and landing, as the change in the pressure difference between the inside and outside of the cabin causes it to flex and bend. As it was designed to be a long-haul aircraft, the 747 was only expected to make one or two, at most, flights a day, and was not designed to endure the stresses of frequent takeoffs and landings of a short-haul aircraft. Thus, a short-haul version of the 747 would require reinforcement of the fuselage and wings, as well as its landing gear. Fortunately, no major changes or modifications were assessed to be required, and the first 747SR entered service with JAL in 1973. With 550 economy class seats, these shuttles would fly almost always entirely full on popular Japanese domestic flights. Two of these aircraft would later be modified with a stretched upper deck to accomodate an additional 13 passengers, bringing their passenger capacity up to 563.
When the 747 was first introduced, the small fairing on the upper deck behind the cockpit was primarily used as lounge space. However, more airlines later started using this space for premium passenger seating. Thus, the 747–300 was launched in 1980 and entered service with Swissair three years later, featuring a stretched upper deck to allow for higher passenger capacity, at a slight cost to the aircraft’s range. By 1988, 19 years after the first delivery was made, Boeing had delivered 755 747s to airlines all around the world, an unprecedented number for an aircraft of its size. Normally, at this stage of the production cycle of an aircraft type, a manufacturer would be starting to work on a replacement for the type. However, the story of the 747 was still far from over.
In 1989, the latest version of the 747, the 747–400, entered service with Northwest Airlines. This version featured an increased wingspan and winglets, improving its fuel efficiency and giving it the longest range of any airliner in service, at over 13,000 kilometers. The 747–400 could thus operate many long distance routes reliably, removing the need for many traditionally-used fuel stops on long routes, notably Anchorage and Honolulu on transpacific flights. The 747–400 also featured a glass cockpit, allowing information to be shown to pilots using electronic displays instead of analog gauges. This reduced the number of dials, gauges, and knobs in the cockpit of the 747 from 971 in older versions to just 365 on the 747–400, and effectively eliminated the need for a flight engineer as part of the cockpit crew. A combi version with a rear cargo compartment was also offered, similarly designated the -400M, and a short-ranged shuttle version, the -400D, followed shortly after. The improved performance and operating economics of the 747–400 was well-received by airlines, especially existing 747 customers. A total of 694 were delivered, accounting for just under 45% of all 747 deliveries.
By the late 1980s, airlines were expressing interest in a long-range, widebody aircraft smaller than the 747. While the 747 served them well, it could only be filled on busy hub-to-hub routes, which would likely involve passengers making transfers from these hubs to their final destinations. The airlines figured that they could win over more passengers if they operated more nonstop routes between secondary cities, instead of funneling them through hubs. This resulted in the development of a new generation of aircraft, led by the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 in 1990. Entering service with Finnair, the MD-11 did not experience much success in carrying passengers, owing to performance issues and high fuel consumption. It did, however, go on to become a popular freighter aircraft, and is today a mainstay of the fleets of FedEx and UPS.
A year later, in 1991, Airbus introduced their aircraft for this market, with the A340 making its first flight. Entering service with Lufthansa in 1993, the A340 had a range rivaling the 747–400, and became the first true competitor of the 747 in the long-haul market. Airbus would later further develop the Airbus A340–500 and -600 in the early 2000s, which would become the longest-ranged and the longest airliners in service respectively. Carrying about one-third fewer passengers than a 747, the A340, with four engines, also suffered from high fuel consumption like the MD-11, and did not sell well. Its twin-engined counterpart, the A330, was more successful, though its shorter range limited its ability to compete in the long-haul market.
In 1994, Boeing introduced the 777, a medium haul, twin-engined aircraft targeted at this emerging market. The 777 was the first aircraft type to be granted an ETOPS-180 rating upon introduction, meaning that it was allowed to operate overwater flights up to 180 minutes from a diversion airport on a single engine. This effectively allowed the 777 to fly over 95% of the Earth’s surface, and with the introduction of the 777–200ER, the first long haul version of the 777, in 1997, the 747 had, for the first time in 27 years of service, a serious challenger in the long haul market. Although it carried about one-quarter fewer passengers than a 747–400, the 777 only had two engines and consumed far less fuel than a four-engined 747. Despite being the last of the three new aircraft to debut, the 777 was the clear winner, especially with the introduction of the -200ER, and orders began piling in.
With the success of the 777, it was clear that twin-engined aircraft were the future of long-haul passenger travel. European rival Airbus began a series of performance improvements on their twin-engined A330 to increase its range, and while it ultimately became a highly successful medium-haul aircraft, it was never able to match that of the 747 or 777 and enter the long-haul market. As orders for the 747 began to dry up, Boeing decided to divert more of its resources into further development of the 777 instead of the 747. A stretched version, the 777–300, was introduced, with a passenger capacity virtually matching the 747. Further performance improvements resulted in the 777–300ER, an aircraft with the range and capacity of the 747 but with half the number of engines, entering service with Air France in 2004. In the coming years, airlines began replacing their aging 747–400 aircraft with the new 777, which soon became the best-selling widebody aircraft in the world.
At the same time, seeing as Boeing appeared not too keen on further 747 development, Airbus began developing a new large, long-haul aircraft, even larger than the 747. With two full passenger decks, seating over 500 passengers in a typical airline configuration, and a potential stretch to carry an additional 100 passengers, the new aircraft would overthrow the 747 for the title of the world’s largest passenger airliner. The A380, as it would eventually be named, made its first flight at Toulouse in 2005, and entered airline service with Singapore Airlines two years later, departing Singapore for Sydney on the 25th of October, 2007.
Boeing responded with the 747–8, a stretched 747 with an improved wing and newer, more fuel-efficient engines, making its first flight in 2010. This was in fact the first stretch of the 747 in its then 40-year history, and became the longest airliner in service, at 76.3 meters long. Seating 467 passengers in a typical airline cabin layout, the 747–8 entered passenger service with Lufthansa in 2012.
However, as airlines began transitioning away from the traditional hub-and-spoke system and towards a point-to-point system, the demand for such large aircraft was significantly reduced. This, coupled with the fact that the four engines on the A380 and 747 consumed much more fuel than the twin-engined 777, resulted in many airlines turning away from it, tempting as the prestige of operating the world’s largest airliner must have been. While Dubai-based Emirates found that the A380 fits well with them and placed an order for 162 aircraft (which has since been reduced to 123 units), the A380 found little success elsewhere, eventually receiving a total of 251 orders, with Airbus closing the production line in 2021.
The 747–8 did even worse in this regard. While Boeing estimated that they would sell 300 aircraft, only 154 orders have been made of this writing, a far cry from the 694 747–400s sold. Of these, only 47 have been made for the passenger version. The fates of these two large aircraft have shown that in the world of aviation today, fuel economy takes precedence over size, and has made it all the more clear that the future of long-haul air travel lies in twin-engined aircraft.
However, there remains a silver lining for the venerable 747. While it experiences declining utility as a passenger aircraft, it continues to be a popular freighter aircraft. This can be attributed to the incredible foresight of chief engineer Joe Sutter and his team all the way back in the late 1960s, with their decision of the placement of the 747 cockpits. The elevated cockpit allowed the nose of the aircraft to open upwards and act as a cargo door, allowing for greater flexibility for cargo operators in loading and unloading freight. To this day, the 747 is the only commercial freighter with front-loading capability and has no doubt been a key factor behind its continued success in this area.
Today, long-haul passenger air travel is dominated by twin-engined aircraft, namely the Boeing 777 and 787, as well as the Airbus A350. The 747 has long been retired from the passenger fleets of most airlines who once operated large fleets of them, and the handful still in operation all mostly have their retirement plans lined up. The recent pandemic has all the more prompted airlines to accelerate the retirement of older, less efficient aircraft like the 747. Nevertheless, 50 years since its entry into service, the 747 continues to fly on as a freighter aircraft and can be seen at major cargo hubs all around the world in both the -400F and -8F versions, perhaps a fitting end given the original vision the designers had of this magnificent aircraft.
