Boeing Considers Ending 747 Production: How the Jumbo Jet Rose, and Why It Is Falling | QDaily Business History

A program even Boeing wasn't sure would last became the symbol of intercontinental flight for half a century.

Boeing has begun to consider ending production of the 747 altogether.

From this September, 747 output drops to one aircraft every two months. If orders keep falling, Boeing has said, it will stop building the iconic jet for good.

The news is no surprise. Over the past five years, Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, Air France and Qantas have all held retirement ceremonies for their 747s.

When Air France retired its 747 early this year, it laid on two commemorative farewell flights. The flight numbers were chosen for the occasion — AF744 (for the Boeing 747-400) and AF747 (for the Boeing 747) — and selected staff, executives and important customers were invited aboard.

Not every aircraft gets a send-off like that.

In February 1969, the 747 appeared before the public for the first time. Its double-deck, humped nose was the plane's most obvious marker, and it made the 747 one of the easiest aircraft to pick out on any airport apron.

Carrying more than 500 passengers over a range of more than 10,000 km, the 747 became the main intercontinental aircraft for most of the world's airlines for decades.

In the 50 years between its first order, in 1966, and July of this year, Boeing delivered 1,523 747s of all types.

The 747 was more than twice the size of any other airliner of its time, with a fuselage as tall as a six-story building. The words "jumbo jet" and "wide-body airliner" came into common use with it.

But airlines no longer need that many jumbo jets. The newest version, the 747-8I, has taken just over 50 orders since it arrived in 2010.

The Airbus A380, which took the title of world's largest airliner from the 747, has not sold well either. Since 2001, the A380 has won 393 orders, more than half of them from one carrier, Emirates. No other major airline in the world, Lufthansa and Air France included, owns more than 20 of them.

The Boeing 747 has now been flying for close to 50 years. Its success, and the end of the jumbo-jet age, show how commercial aviation — and the act of getting on a plane — has changed.

The 747 was born in the golden age of the airliner, but nobody took it for the future

The 747 was born in the golden age of the commercial airliner, and its maker, Boeing, was one of the forces driving that age.

The 707, which first flew in December 1957, was America's first jet airliner. Its engines hung under the wings — a layout that is still the first choice for medium and large jet airliners today.

On October 26, 1958, Pan Am began flying the 707 across the Atlantic between New York and Paris, the first time in history that an airliner crossed the Atlantic every day.

Eight years later Boeing brought out an all-new medium-range model, the 737, which became the best-selling airliner in the world. To date, Boeing has delivered more than 9,000 737s, against more than 13,000 orders.

There is even an airline that flies nothing else — Southwest Airlines, the carrier that made the low-cost model work.

Before the 737 became a hit, Boeing was already at work on a new flagship. The 747 was not its first pick.

In that era, only supersonic aircraft counted as the future.

The test aircraft the Pentagon kept pushing said so. So did science fiction.

Take The Man in the High Castle, the classic novel published in January 1962. It describes a world in which Germany won the Second World War and senior Nazi officials could fly from Berlin to New York on an inspection trip in three hours — aboard nuclear-powered supersonic aircraft.

In the real world, France's Sud Aviation and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) began work together on Concorde in the 1950s. The Soviet Union's Tu-144 program started in 1963.

Boeing, several other American airlines and the US government together began the SST program (Supersonic Transportation) to build a supersonic aircraft of their own. A research committee was set up in 1958; every design carried the provisional name Model 733, and the one that survived was Boeing's 2707.

In 1963, Boeing was also bidding on a US military heavy transport program. The military invited Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed and others to bid for the CX-HLS heavy military transport; Lockheed's C-5A took the contract.

Having lost the bid, Boeing wanted to turn its CX-HLS work to civilian use and build a giant freighter or airliner. That is where the 747 came from technically.

Even as it set out to build a big aircraft, Boeing did not treat it as its future. The 747 began as a stopgap: once supersonic airliners were everywhere, Boeing planned to convert the subsonic 747 into a freighter hauling containers.

Key dates in the Boeing 747 program

1963

Boeing plans to build a large passenger-and-cargo aircraft.

1965

Joe Sutter moves from the 737 development team to the 747 program.

1966.04

Pan Am signs an order with Boeing for 25 747s, worth $525 million.

1966.06

Boeing buys 3.15 square kilometers of land in Everett for the 747 factory.

1966.09

Boeing's 747 orders reach nearly $1.8 billion.

1967.01

The first assembly workers arrive on the 747 program.

1968.06

The Pratt & Whitney JT-9D engines for the 747 reach the Everett factory.

1968.09

The first 747 rolls out.

1969.02

The 747 makes a successful first flight.

1969.12

The 747 wins FAA airworthiness certification.

1970.01

The 747 flies its first commercial service.

But from the start, the program answered a new demand from the airlines.

Joe Sutter, the 747's chief engineer, told Air&Space in a 2007 interview that Boeing studied the needs of Pan Am and other carriers very closely while developing the aircraft.

Pan Am was Boeing's largest customer at the time, and the largest airline in the United States.

In 1965, Pan Am's chief executive, Juan Trippe, went to Boeing's president, William M. Allen, and asked Boeing to build Pan Am a large jet airliner more than twice the size of the 707.

"If you build it, I'll buy it," Trippe said.

"If you buy it, I'll build it," Allen answered.

Neither man was joking. In April 1966, Pan Am ordered 25 747s from Boeing for $525 million. The program started at once. Two months later Boeing bought 3.15 square kilometers of land in Everett and began building the 747 factory.

Pan Am expected more than 35 million people to fly international routes, and 200% growth by 1980. The 707 it already had could not carry the traffic it saw coming.

Pan Am also wanted to carry its cheap-fare strategy over to the new aircraft and hold on to its place as America's leading airline. The vice-president for finance even wanted to cut fares between Europe and the United States to about $100. After the 707 fleet went into service, Pan Am had kept the fares of the old propeller era: New York to Paris still cost $272 in economy and $505 in first class.

The first plan for the 747 gave the whole cabin two decks. That could not meet the FAA's escape rules: an American airliner then had to be able to empty its cabin in 90 seconds.

So Joe Sutter changed the design to a single-deck wide body, and before the drawings were signed off he took up Trippe's request and added a short upper deck behind the cockpit, at the nose. That gave the 747 the shape we know — the humped forward fuselage.

In February 1969, watched by thousands of Boeing employees, customers and politicians, the 747-100, on four Pratt & Whitney JT-9D turbofans, made a successful first flight.

The Boeing 747 became the world's first wide-body long-range jet airliner, and it held the title of largest airliner in the world for 37 years, until the Airbus A380 took it.

In January of the following year the first Boeing 747 was handed over to Pan Am, and days later it flew a commercial service from New York to London. First Lady Pat Nixon led the naming ceremony for the aircraft at Washington Dulles International Airport: Clipper Victor.

Joe Sutter led 4,500 engineers and more than 50,000 colleagues in marketing, finance, safety and other departments, and finished the 747's development and flight testing in two and a half years — about 30% faster than aircraft of ordinary size took at the time.

Meanwhile the supersonic airliner Boeing took for its future was going badly, far behind the Soviet and Anglo-French programs.

The Tu-144 flew first, in 1968. Concorde followed with a successful test flight in 1969 and its first commercial service in 1976; cruising at Mach 2, it was the fastest jet airliner in the world.

The Boeing 2707 never left the drawing board. Part of the reason was that the Mach 3 cruise it aimed at was too far ahead of its time.

Money, technical difficulty and environmental objections together were too much: in 1971 the US government announced it would fund the SST program no further. All that is left today is a full-size mock-up of the 2707.

By the 1970s, against a Concorde that flew at twice the speed of sound, the only product Boeing had was the 747, with a top speed below Mach 0.9.

As intercontinental travel opened up to everyone, the 747 beat the supersonic airliners

By the time the 747 first flew, more than 28 airlines had signed orders with Boeing for 167 of them.

Across Concorde's whole 27-year life, 16 were built, of which 14 went into commercial service, and its only buyers were British Airways and Air France — one carrier from each of the two countries that had paid for its development.

After the 1970s, air traffic grew fast. With big aircraft like the 747 in service, more and more people going a long way chose the plane over the train or the ocean liner: an Atlantic crossing by liner took five to seven days, a Boeing 747 eight hours, and tickets kept getting cheaper.

Airlines preferred to put the 747 on long routes, because one flight could take more than 500 passengers from New York to Paris and bring down the cost of carrying each of them.

The 747 put intercontinental travel within reach of ordinary people. Beside it, Concorde — an aircraft of sharp strengths and sharp weaknesses — was much less welcome to airlines.

Concorde could fly New York to Paris in 3 hours 30 minutes; the Boeing 747 needed 8.

But on passengers carried, range and fuel burn, the 747 had the advantage every time. Concorde burned about 3.5 times as much fuel per flight as a 747. And beyond the Atlantic, if Concorde wanted to fly anywhere farther without stopping, its range of about 6,000 km was not enough; it had to refuel on the way. The Boeing 747 could go more than 10,000 km.

Few passengers per trip, heavy fuel burn and a stop en route all made Concorde tickets very expensive.

In the 1990s, a return trip on Concorde between New York and London cost at least $10,000. A Boeing 747 seat of the same period cost about a fifth of that in economy; first class was dearer, around $7,000, and still cheaper than Concorde.

Then the Soviet Union broke up, Eastern European airspace opened step by step, and the shadow of war receded. An airliner shot down by a fighter became less likely, and airlines had more direct routes to choose from.

The new-generation 747 that Boeing brought out at the end of the 1980s, the 747-400, arrived just as tensions eased. Between its launch in 1989 and 2009, Boeing delivered 694 of them — the most ordered 747 of all, and still the most numerous in service.

Beyond its size and its sales, Boeing brought a series of other changes to commercial aviation.

What happened to the 747's upper deck is the story of flying, from luxury to everyday

While it made intercontinental travel cheaper, the first-class lounge on the 747's upper deck also began the era of luxury flying.

Pan Am's 747s had 21 first-class seats, 44 business-class seats — Pan Am called it "Clipper Class," and the first 747 was named Clipper Victor — and 347 in economy. The aircraft had two aisles. First class was laid out 2-2, business class 2-2-2, economy 3-4-3.

The three-class main deck of that 747 was not very different from a 747 today. The upper deck was another matter entirely.

Room to move, close attention from the cabin crew, careful food, furniture and decor arranged to taste — the 747's upper deck was a hotel lifted into the sky.

Thomas Lee, who was on Pan Am's first 747-100 service, described the upper-deck lounge as "something out of The Wizard of Oz". Besides the elegant spiral staircase and the patterned silverware, what surprised him most was the range of dishes at the buffet upstairs.

Airlines decorated their upper decks in many different styles. First-class passengers could sit with the person next to them and talk about how the S&P 500 had been doing lately, or buy someone a glass of champagne and argue about which Broadway musical was the best.

If a passenger could play, there was a piano up there. If you were flying Pan Am, a handsome captain and glamorous flight attendants were waiting for you, exactly as in the television series Pan Am.

None of this survives on today's 747.

Climb to the upper deck of an Air China or United Airlines 747 now and the piano bar and the wide sofas are gone, replaced almost entirely by business-class seats in a 2-2 layout.

A typical 747 first-class flight across an ocean no longer has seats facing each other for conversation. You board, take the welcome drink, eat, sleep, eat again and get off.

Flying is no longer something to boast about. What more money buys now is a better-rested trip.

Take Air China's Boeing 747-400: business-class seats have a 60-inch pitch and recline to 169 degrees. Someone 180 cm tall may find it tight lying down, but the trip will not be a bad one.

First class on a modern 747, as on the original 747-100, is still on the main deck, ahead of the cockpit and closer to the nose than the pilots. On Air China's 747-400, first-class seats have an 80-inch pitch and go flat at 180 degrees.

The private lounge in the sky of decades ago is gone, but the seats themselves on the newer 747s are wider and farther apart than on the 747-100. A seat that lies flat is something no aircraft of the 747-100's day offered.

From the 1970s on, more and more people have kept getting on planes, so it was only natural that airlines turned the 747's upper-deck lounge into business class and sold more tickets, rather than keep an extravagant lounge to please a handful of customers.

Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways asked Boeing for a 747 carrying more than 500 people for domestic routes, to cut unit costs by flying more take-offs and landings. Boeing built them the 747-100SR, all economy seating, with stronger landing gear.

As flying spread, airlines started frequent-flyer programs. Passengers could bank miles to exchange for tickets, climb the membership tiers to spend less time in the check-in queue, or use member services such as airport lounges.

That was the moment airlines began paying attention to people who fly a lot, even if they only ever fly economy.

The first frequent-flyer program in the world came from American Airlines. In 1981, American launched AAdvantage, which let members who met certain conditions claim free tickets or special discounts.

United Airlines, British Airways and Delta Air Lines quickly followed with programs of their own. Today nearly every airline has one.

The size of the 747 reshaped everything from the factory to the airport

A Boeing 747 as tall as a six-story building put pressure on the airports of the day. The New York Times reported in 1969 that the 747 was more than twice the size of any earlier aircraft, and that the jet bridges and tow tractors airports already had could not be used on it.

The 747 also sat higher off the ground than other aircraft, which forced airports to buy newer, better equipment to get bags and meals on board.

Landing, taking off and parking a 747 called for larger aprons and tougher runways. To take this giant, airports had to rebuild and upgrade their runways and the rest of the infrastructure around them.

The 747 factory Boeing built at Everett was the largest aircraft assembly hall in the world at the time, covering more than 300,000 square meters. Even leaving out the space added later for the 767 and 777, Everett is still the largest aircraft assembly plant in the world. The 747 was so big, and Boeing had so little attention and money left over for the building itself, that the first one was assembled in a hall with no roof on it.

After the 747 entered service, building airliners became the business of two companies

Start with the 747 itself, which came in many versions, including some unusual ones.

The main 747 variants and what they cost, plus a few special versions (prices in today's money)

1967

747-100, 366-550 passengers, maximum range 9,800 km, $172 million

1976

747-200, new engines and longer range, 366-550 passengers, maximum range 12,690 km, $166 million

1982

747-300, stretched upper deck, a straight staircase in place of the original spiral one, 412-660 passengers, maximum range 12,400 km, $208 million

1989

747-400, longer range, the three-crew cockpit replaced by a two-crew digital one, 412-660 passengers, maximum range 14,200 km, $471 million

2010

747-8F, a freighter based on the 747-8I, payload 154 tons, $383 million

2011

747-8I, 51 more seats than the 747-400, 16% better fuel efficiency, 467-605 passengers, maximum range 15,000 km, $410 million

Special

747-100SR, a short-range aircraft developed from the 747-100, with a strengthened airframe, seating up to 550 in all-economy layout

Special

VC-25, in service since 1990, better known as Air Force One, the US president's aircraft

Special

SCA, in service since 1977, used by NASA to carry the Space Shuttle, converted from a 747-200; the full name is Shuttle Carrier Aircraft

Other

YAL-1, first flown in 2002, owned by the US military. A chemical laser weapon system fitted to a modified Boeing 747-400F, able to intercept tactical ballistic missiles

Other

Dreamlifter, the Boeing 747 Dreamlifter, in service since 2008. A special-purpose transport built to serve production of the Boeing 787

Besides its regular upgrades to the 747, Boeing built versions to order for the US military and NASA: the VC-25 and the SCA. The first is the familiar "Air Force One"; the second was used by NASA to move the Space Shuttle.

Around the time the 747 was in flight test, Boeing's main rivals were putting most of their development effort into short- and medium-range aircraft.

Sud Aviation's Caravelle and British Aerospace's DH-121 both carried about 200 passengers about 5,000 km.

Lockheed was working on the L-1649, a propeller aircraft with an 18-hour range that could fly from the American West Coast to Europe in one go. Only 44 were built before production stopped, which more or less marked the end of the piston-propeller airliner.

McDonnell Douglas, still able to meet Boeing on equal terms then, brought out a four-engine airliner of its own, the DC-8. After deliveries to United and Delta began in 1959, the market took to it poorly: over the model's 14-year life, only a little more than 500 were sold. Over the same 14 years, 715 737s were delivered.

At about the same time Convair produced the CV 880/990, a little smaller than the DC-8, and the market took to it even less.

In the decade or two on either side of the 747's birth, one manufacturer's aircraft still looked clearly different from another's — the propeller engines and triple tail fins of the Lockheed L-1649, for instance. After Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas in 1996, building airliners came down to Airbus and Boeing, and mainstream medium and large jets began to look more and more alike. Most people cannot tell them apart at a glance.

Airbus was founded in 1970, jointly owned by Europe's two largest military manufacturers, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and British Aerospace. It was set up to take on Boeing and McDonnell Douglas head-on, and its first model, the A300, flew successfully in 1972.

That was also the world's first twin-engine, twin-aisle airliner. The A320 that Airbus brought out later carried fly-by-wire flight controls, a system that lets the pilot give a simple command and have the machine carry out the movement without having to work through everything else.

The A320 is the best-selling Airbus to date. Counting delivered and outstanding orders together, the A320's roughly 16,500 orders put it ahead of the Boeing 737 as the best-selling airliner in the world. The equivalent figure for the 737 is about 13,000.

Today Boeing and Airbus each hold about half of the world's orders for civil aircraft. Sud Aviation later merged with Nord Aviation, in 1970, to form Aérospatiale, which, with part of British Aerospace, became part of the Airbus group.

As for Lockheed: in 1970 it launched the first and only jet airliner in the company's history, the L-1011, of which 250 were built. Weak sales left the company badly in the red, and it left the commercial aircraft business to put its research and its operations back into military products.

A year before Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas in 1996, Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin, the company behind the F-22 and F-35, the frontline fighters of the US military today.

In the end, the giant of the sky was replaced by smaller aircraft

Airlines no longer need that many jumbo jets.

As the technology moved on, modern aircraft could use stronger composite materials and better avionics, and manufacturers formed new ideas about how a fuselage should be designed. With safety assured, airlines increasingly choose aircraft that are cheap to run and easy on the environment.

The aircraft that flies intercontinental routes today is no longer the Boeing 747 but the twin-engine medium wide-body: the Boeing 777 and 787, the Airbus A330 and A350. Most of them carry 350 to 450 passengers, fewer than the 747, but they burn less fuel and fly farther.

The improved 747-8I has taken just over 50 orders so far. The twin-engine 777, by contrast, has sold more than 1,200.

Beyond the aircraft themselves, the tightening cooperation between airline alliances is another important reason the industry no longer favors big aircraft the way it once did.

There are three large alliances in the world today: SkyTeam, Star Alliance and Oneworld.

Airlines in the same alliance can share flight codes and so widen their networks. On a connecting itinerary, different carriers in one alliance let a passenger check a bag through, so it need not be re-checked at the transfer point and can be picked up at the final destination. Often airlines in the same alliance can share maintenance facilities and cut costs that way too.

In a 2015 outlook, Boeing said that before the 777 arrived the 747 had always been the first choice for long-haul flying. But some of the very long routes the 747 flew still needed a stop: a 747 from the eastern United States to China usually had to connect through a West Coast city or through Anchorage, Alaska.

The 777 changed that. The figures show that 140 new routes appeared with it, including transpacific services that leave New York, cross over the Arctic and arrive in Eurasia.

That is mostly because the Boeing 777 has a maximum range of 17,200 km, 21% more than the 747-400 of the same period. A polar route generally needs an aircraft with a range of at least 13,000 km, and the 747-400's 14,200 km left it working hard.

Market share calculated by PlaneStats.com from available seat miles — seats multiplied by distance flown — shows that the Boeing 747 fell by two-thirds between 2009 and April 2015. Over the same period the 777 and the A330 took 60% of the market between them.

Forty years ago, as intercontinental flying spread, the 747 beat the supersonic airliners by costing less to run and flying farther.

Now flying has spread further still, and people are no longer content to connect through a few giant cities; they want to fly to where they are going. This time it is the 747, and the even larger A380, being replaced by lighter, longer-legged relatives of their own.

Cover images from: aerospacetalk, Wallpaperstock, jillian-redosendo