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. Boeing decided to re-purpose the CX-HLS as a passenger plane of a hitherto unimaginable size and scale: some versions carry 550 passengers. Thus the ‘widebody’ came into being, with its distinctive double deck and spiral staircase. The upstairs lounge was a detail borrowed from the 377 Stratocruiser, itself a descendant of the B-29 Superfortress bomber. Military ghosts lived on.
If the BA 747s did not feature the much-publicised cocktail bar, sunken love-pits and nightclub lighting, they nonetheless offered upstairs passengers the simulacrum of a private jet. Boeing engineer-designer Milton Heinemann said that for the first time, people felt as if they were travelling ‘in a room, not a tube’. The 747 stats and facts still boggle. Its wingspan of 210 feet is far longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight (a mere 120 feet).
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