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The 747 is an amazing engineering achievement. Even more than that, it's an amazing business achievement. The 747 was an "all in", "bet the company" program for Boeing. It took many, many years for the company to break even on its investment, but after that the 747 was a money-making machine for Boeing and for the airlines. When I worked at Boeing in the early 80's, every time a 747 rolled off the assembly line a gigantic paycheck went into the company. (Just walking down the assembly line in the Everett plant was more fun (for me, as an aero nerd) than an E-ticket ride.)
Airlines loved the 747, because it was a money-making machine for them, too. Nobody could compete with the 747 for decades.
The 747 provided the technology and the money to develop the 757, 767, etc.
> Airlines loved the 747, because it was a money-making machine for them, too.
Quite the opposite for most of the 1970s and much of the 1980s. Many smaller national airlines such as Aer Lingus, Air Canada and Sabena bought the 747 for the 'prestige' and its range, but struggled to make any money from it and eventually ditched it for smaller trijets and twins.
KLM managed to keep going by flying them in Combi configuration with half of the main deck given over to cargo.
If you buy one for prestige purposes, of course you're going to lose money. Airplanes only make money when they're packed with payload. An airplane sitting on the ground, or flying half-full, is going to lose money like a firehose drains a tank. But if your logistics are set up to keep the 747 flying as close as possible to 24/7 packed with payload, you can make a crapton of money, which is why Boeing was selling so many.
I never understood why Boeing risked it all on the 747. The Boeing 2707 was supposed to be the future of passenger travel and the 747 was supposed to get relegated to freight. Why risk it all for what was expected to be a stop gap product?
For the first wide body, why not start with something 767 sized? Why start with the biggest?
You answered it yourself: freight. Basically everything about the 747 was optimized around requirements for transporting freight (including fuselage width and placing the flight deck above the main level).
The requirements for the 747 were largely driven by the USAF and then Pan Am. If I understand right, both customers were so influential that Boeing felt it had to accommodate them.
Airplane assembly lines are amazing. I did a tour of the Lockheed atlanta plant and ir blew my mind. Seeing a handful of c130 in line in various states of assembly was mindblowing. The scale of the place is just ridiculous. I can't imagine how the 747 line might have been.
The 747 assembly line is just a thing of beauty. Boeing assembly lines are also spotlessly clean, and meticulously organized. The parts themselves are also very well made, just compare them with auto parts.
Absolutely random note: I had never heard the phrase "E-ticket ride" in my life until earlier today, when one of my dad's buddies mentioned it while we were out golfing and explained the context. Just a few hours later, I see it here. Amusing.
E ticket, is a reference to how Disneyland used to price rides. The most exciting rides like Space Mountain, required an E ticket; this was before the pay-once-ride-anything plan was introduced.
I went to Disneyland for the first time in 1979, and the E ticket was in use then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_ticket
In addition to the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, I think there's also the notion of having a concept move into the scope of awareness.
I'm doing a lot of worldview refactoring, reading and thinking on many subjects and topics. As I start assimilating new models and references, I'm going back to older sources and revisiting them in light of the new models I've been acquiring and developing.
The effect can be profound, with many "familiar" works suddenly taking on highly unexpected dimensions.
My own first exposure to "E-Ticket" came from Julie Brown's "The Homecoming Queen's got a Gun"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xG3yGdQYwqg
(A song and video which probably wouldn't fly today.)
It's odd, for a reason, even as a young kid, the 747 was the de-facto standard for "king of airplanes".
Joe Sutter did a lecture on the Shuttle disaster investigation at the University of Washington shortly after leaving the committee. He gave a memorable explanation of the risks of flying the Space Shuttle, which he described as an experimental vehicle with 700 flight safety-critical parts [1]. "Safety-critical" means that if the part fails you lose the aircraft.
Sutter claimed that thanks to redundant design the 747 had zero flight safety-critical parts. I have never been able to confirm this independently but it has stuck with me ever since. Anyway, he instantly cut through the prevailing NASA propaganda that the shuttle was the beginning of regular travel to low-earth orbit. It was a great talk by a great engineer.
[1] http://www.faa-aircraft-certification.com/faa-definitions.ht....
The 747 is one of mankind's crowning achievements. It's not only a technical marvel but an aesthetic one -- it looks truly beautiful while an A380 looks like it just got punched in the stomach. Along with the massive network of airports, air traffic controllers, mechanics, regulators, pilots, engineers, forensic analysts, financiers, etc... I think that commercial air travel is a more impressive achievement than the moon landing and the 747 its glorious peak moment.
What a great comment. I went through a period in my life where I hardly traveled at all, and more recently I've been traveling frequently for work. I still feel the same childish joy every time I feel the plane leave the ground -- we're actually flying!
And the fact that basically on a whim, I can buy a ticket, show up at an airport, wait a bit, sit on a plane for a while, and then basically show up on the other side of the world in a few hours, what it used to take humans months, or even years, to do, when it became possible at all.
So yeah; from someone who's a geek about it, but outside of the aviation industry: it's cool.
> I still feel the same childish joy every time I feel the plane leave the ground -- we're actually flying!
I aways remember this bit by Louis CK about flying. It is just so true.
I have over 500,000 BIS lifetime miles and I'm still exited by the takeoff roll. Airlines are starting to retire 744s. If you have a chance, find a way to ride in the upper deck. It's quite something!
The Technik Museum in Speyer (Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technik_Museum_Speyer has a 747 (and a Buran). It's a sight to behold.
It throwns over the museum. You can climb the stairs all the way up and see the inner workings of the fuselage and walk on the wing.
The 747 brought global air travel to ordinary people. There was a most definite before and after.
When we emigrated from the UK to New Zealand in the early seventies we flew by 747, my Aunts who had gone out a year earlier had to make the journey by ship.
it looks truly beautiful while an A380 looks like it just got punched in the stomach.
I read the opinion of an aeronautical engineer that the 747 gets its grace from physics, while the A380 goes a little against physics. Apparently, its wings are a little too short for its heft, but the engineers made it work. This is why it costs 50% more to operate per nautical mile, while having 700 nm less range. (Than the 747-8I)
>This is why it costs 50% more to operate per nautical mile
Is that a useful metric? Cost per passenger mile is what matters.
The A380 is larger then the 747, one would expect it to cost more to fly.
I do think the 747 is nicer-looking. The nose of the A380 just doesn't work aesthetically.
I've always felt each 747 flight I've taken has been special. Dunno why. The thing just speaks to me aesthetically.
I'd point to The Concorde. Loud, fast and fantastic until it literally and metaphorically became a flaming wreck.
... Because a DC10 had dropped a chunk of Titanium on the runway.
It just so happens I randomly caught a documentary about the development of the 747 recently. From an engineering perspective it's amazing. A few tidbits:
- it went from an idea on a gold course to engineering prototype in 2.5 years in an era almost without computers
- Boeing had to build what I believe is the world's largest building to make them
- Boeing saw the 747 as a stopgap while their main focus was on the (doomed SST so Sutter had to try to go any resources. With the SST's cancellation and huge development cost it almost bankrupted Boeing.
- all of this was before simulators so they basically had to build one and take off and see how it flew or even if it flew.
- for much of the development there were no engines powerful enough to fly it, eventually a Pratt and Whitney prototype was used that had a nasty habit of exploding for over a year of flight testing before they figured out why. Nowadays engines are so reliable that the four engine design is essentially dead and many planes will serve their entire life never having their engines replaced.
- the distinctive (now iconic) design with the cockpit and upper deck bulging at the front was to fulfill a dual purpose as a cargo plane. You open up the nose and still get the full body height to load and remove cargo.
- when Boeing agreed to make it (because of a Pan Am request) they had no idea what it would look like.
I think the show was an episode of Mighty Aircraft. Well worth watching.
RIP joe Sutter.
Sounds exactly like the documentary on Smithsonian.
http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/747-the-jumbo-revolu...
> Adam Bruckner of the University of Washington’s department of aeronautics and astronautics later described the 747 as “one of the great engineering wonders of the world, like the pyramids of Egypt, the Eiffel Tower or the Panama Canal.”
Absolutely true. It's one of the most beautiful machines of the world, and unlike the Eiffel tower or the great pyramids, it serves a purpose; it's a tool, and the nicest one.
One morning in 1992 I drove a friend to JFK; when he departed, I spent the rest of the day watching 747s take off and land; I just couldn't leave the spot. It was a great day.
> In 1986 President Ronald Reagan appointed him to a panel investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
Richard Feynman was a member of this panel; I wonder if the two got along well?
It's well know that the 747 is extraordinary in terms of engineering. Why? From the naive perspective, it's the-same-thing-only-bigger. I'm not quite that naive, but I'd love to hear an authoritative analysis rather than the popular wisdom.
I would guess that engines powerful and efficient enough to fly a plane so much larger than any predecessors, and to fly it further, would also be a significant achievement.
His book, 747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation, is a good read.
So much happened in aviation between the Wright Flyer's first flight in 1903 and the 747's in 1969. Since then, at least from a passenger experience viewpoint, relatively little has changed.
Is that because most new technologies eventually reach plateaus? Or have unique factors -- like environmental concerns about supersonic travel -- held back progress in aviation?
Very little in the immediate, physical execution of airliners have changed (but very many small things certainly has - and a 747-8 being delivered today is a rather different machine than a -100 rolling of the assembly line in 1970, and the 787 is an amazing machine to fly, the air pressure and humidity controls, enabled by the composite body, make a huge difference).
But prices have dropped steeply, democratising air travel to an unprecedented degree with an unprecedented speed. Practically anyone who can afford to go on holiday at all can afford to fly somewhere, rather than being limited to the range/speed of ground transportation. The kind of trips to Greece/Spain etc that are completely routine these days in northern Europe were once-in-a-lifetime experiences for my (reasonably well to do) grandparents.
Everybody loves hating on Ryanair/Spirit Airlines/increasingly dense economy class layouts, but the fact is that you can in many cases (if you're out early) buy a discounted premium economy ticket (or even if you're lucky business class) for what regular economy tickets would cost just 20 years ago, much less 40, and get a much better product.
Maximum speed and capacity aren't increasing because those aren't problematic factors. Right now the most important place for improvement is in fuel economy, and at that modern planes are doing much better than their 1970s equivalents.
The 747-400 costs $47.34 per nautical mile, the 787-8 only $27.35. Sure it's not as visible to the passengers (except indirectly in the form of cheaper tickets), but that is a huge improvement in an important metric.
The driving force behind new airliner designs is usually fuel efficiency. The 757 used 35% less gas than previous designs, due to engine and wing improvements. The 787 is about 20% better than earlier designs.
When you think about it, those are enormous gains, but the passengers don't see it other than in the ticket price.
You could say the transonic barrier is a big nonlinearity, and that it wasn't worth going further.
Peter Thiel says it's caused by pessimism, and that's a much better explanation.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530901/technology-stalled...
(I'm not related unfortunately. Joe Sutter's father Frank Sutter was born Franc Suhadolc in Slovenia)
Well, there's probably a confluence of causes:
- People got quite nervous about the risks. Sure, there were a lot of highly publicised accidents involving aircraft, but it's still a heck of a lot safer than driving a similar distance (and especially motorcycling). For some reason, the whole world has decided that flying needs to be a huge amount safer than the alternatives, and that has a huge cost.
- Terrorists. You could imagine a world where taking a flight was like taking a bus. It has certain similarities, right? But thanks to various events, everyone's got to go through the security theatre each time they're at an airport. That creates costs.
- Oil prices and environment. Just about when the Concord was getting in the air, oil prices went up. More recently, we've figured out it might not be so wise to put more CO2 in the air. Costs go up.
- Industry organisation. For some reason, a lot of countries decided they needed their own airlines. That's not necessarily economically viable, because a lot of countries are quite small. But there's a whole system of these airlines now, some subsidised, that fragment the industry. I don't know enough about whether there should be fewer airlines, but it certainly feels like it's something that is harder to evolve when various countries are propping up their local carrier.
As for the tech, why shouldn't it just progress? All those costs I've listed would suck money out of research. If things were a bit different, there'd be more people looking at making better planes.
As of late i find that all tech development follows a s curve of sorts.
It starts out flat, then goes near vertical as the idea catch on and all the low handing developments are plucked and marketed.
then it flattens out again as new developments becomes harder, and the market consolidates.
Flight seems to have hit that second flat around the time of the Concorde and the 747.
And electronics seems to be hitting it right now.
a good quote from him (and the article) "“You know things are going to happen,” he explained, “and sometimes it’s going to be severe. You still should be able to come home.”
What boggles my mind is that the 747 and Concorde were designed with slide rules and built by hand without CNC. Not just the airframes but the motors and everything else. They must have had some simple computer simulation, but not much.
I don't want to return to those days but if we had to build software that way it would be much more reliable. It would take longer and have much less functionality too of course.
He did an amazing feat in such a short time in accomplishing the design. There is a fantastic documentary shown on the Smithsonian channel ever few weeks about the design of the 747. If you are interested in this kind of thing, it is well worth the 2 hours watch time. Joe is in it both in current day reflections and footage from the design period. RIP.
I wonder what the limits to airplane size are? Would it be possible to make a version that seats thousands of passengers
A lot of them are system issues: you need a LOT of passengers going point-point, and you need the airport infrastructure.
Consider the A380: it can only fly into airports that have been modified/built for them; takes forever to load/unload passengers, and only works for a few long haul routes. Most airlines are losing money on it (few are in the Qantas/Emirates mode) and thus the order book is not strong. I doubt anyone will build a larger plane.
I think the size limitation is the airports, not the planes.
Before it became a regular sight, there was speculation as to whether or not the A380 was 'too big' for Gatwick
Love how the 747-400 has a max cruising speed of mach .761 (939km/h). That is fast.
And that's of course airspeed, going in the right direction with the jetstream in your back you can go well above 1000 Km/h.
So did they increase the passenger capacity from 360 to 500 without increasing the size?