The 747 was the last moment of romance in air travel

I felt a genuine pang when British Airways announced that it was retiring its fleet of Boeing 747s, the largest remaining in the world. But the jumbo’s final approach to the elephants’ graveyard in the sky was a long time coming. In the US, United and Delta retired their 747s three years ago. With a mixture of frugality and sentimentality, BA kept them long after new technologies and new demographics made their huge capacity redundant. But the 747 was and remains a favourite of pilots and passengers. It was a friendly machine. Half a century after its first commercial flight, we can see, elegiacally, that it was the end of something old rather than the beginning of something new.

The story begins in 1963 when the US air force issued a specification for the CX-HLS, or ‘Cargo Experimental Heavy Lift System’, a military transport. Boeing lost the contract to a rival but was left with an ambitious design whose vast nose was intended to accommodate tanks and other military equipment.