I will never fly on a Boeing 747 again.
That’s pretty hard for me to take because I’ve had a very long relationship with this airplane – more than 50 years, in fact, since I first boarded one in its first year of operating, 1970.
And it’s been a deeper relationship than it is for most people. For me it became far more than a machine. Its very form and presence and, yes, personality, embody the character of the people who created it, a bunch of remarkable engineers I got to know in the course of writing a book about it—a book in which I set out to catch the spirit of a magic moment when America could startle the world with audacious achievements.
The 747 became known as Boeing’s moonshot. It was imagined and executed concurrently with NASA’s Apollo missions to land a man on the moon. Of course, it did not match the moon landing as a high point in human endeavor, but it did have huge consequences here on Earth.
The 747 became in a very real sense the world’s first universal traveling machine. Its economics were such that, for the first time, flying in a jet across the oceans became within the means of millions of people.
This was something new in the human experience: to be able to overfly continents and oceans with the same ease and nonchalance as a trip on a train. So easy that one ocean, the Atlantic, was referred to as “the pond.”
And that’s where the final blow has fallen. British Airways, the only airline still operating the 747 between Britain and the U.S., has just announced the permanent grounding of its fleet of 28 jumbos.
The collapse of international travel in the pandemic has forced airlines to ground both types of jumbo jet, the 747 and the larger and more modern Airbus A380. There is not the demand to fill the seats.
But for the 747, because of its age, the dire situation has accelerated what was already inevitable. BA’s 747s are 23 years old. Compared to the latest, smaller twin-engine jets, they guzzle gas, and fall short on environmental grounds. They had flown into their sunset.
There is a poignant irony here. The 747 was never intended to fly for 50 years. It was regarded as a stopgap until a new supersonic jet, funded by the U.S. government and developed by Boeing, could replace it in the game of shrinking the globe.
That was the plan of Juan Trippe, the imperious boss of the world’s most innovative airline, Pan Am, who, together with Boeing’s boss, William Allen, launched the 747 on little more than a handshake during a weekend fishing trip together.
The reason why the 747 has that distinctive hump at the nose is that Trippe saw the airplane’s final role as a cargo carrier, like an airborne Mack truck, and the cockpit was placed above the cabin so that the cargo could be loaded through the nose.
As it turned out, that plan was a leap too far. No one has yet figured out how to make a supersonic passenger jet viable. Concorde, the only supersonic jet ever to fly scheduled services across the Atlantic, by BA and Air France, was retired in 2003 after 27 years in which it served as a very sexy loss-leader for those airlines, but there was no successor.
Perhaps the 747’s greatest gift to passengers was that its main cabin was so wide and high that it removed the sense of being seated in a tube. Everything in our future as travelers, even the largest of twin-aisle jets, can’t match that spatial advantage.
Today, alas, it’s impossible to look at the astonishing creation of the 747 without reflecting on the kind of company Boeing was then and has now become. There seems almost no connection between the two.
The answer lies in the kind of people involved.
In the mid-1960s Boeing was unchallenged as the company that had, by its sheer nerve and vision, created the basic science on which all future commercial jets were based.
Then the 747 program very nearly bankrupted them. At one point it was swallowing $5 million a day, an enormous toll in those days. But nobody was being reckless. It was a finely calculated risk by people supremely confident in their vision.
I interviewed all the top engineers involved, and they were not by nature risk-takers—especially when it came to safety in an airplane. The safety regime they insisted upon gave the 747 greater protection against failure than any jet before it. It was, after all, going to carry at least 400 passengers, twice as many as in its predecessor.
Contrast this with the litany of flaws that have been uncovered during the investigation into the two crashes of the 737-MAX, in which 346 people were killed.
It has taken 16 months since the 385 MAXs then flying around the world were grounded to get to the point where regulators are able to assess whether the fixes made by Boeing mean that it is now safe to fly again. That might not happen until the end of this year.
There is no single bad actor in this story. It is, instead, another instance of a failed safety culture in which people acting collectively in the service of a corporation—as in the BP oil spill, or big pharma—do things that they would never do in their own lives. At the top of Boeing it was financial engineering that overrode aeronautical engineering, the constant pumping up of the share price becoming more important than investment in future airplanes.
Indeed, the Boeing CEO who launched the 737-MAX program, Jim McNerney, made a point of saying there would be no more moonshots by Boeing—for the sake of saving money the MAX was pushing an aging design one step further rather than creating a clean-sheet, state-of-the-art successor. Inevitably, the outcome was suboptimal, to use a polite euphemism for second-rate.
Many of the board members who supported that decision and the short-termism behind it—including the current CEO, David Calhoun—remain in their positions, which speaks volumes about the current standards of corporate governance.
Boeing can never be the company it was when it delivered the 747. When it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 it became a huge conglomerate combining commercial aviation, military and aerospace businesses.
These days old Boeing hands I know refer to it as “McBoeing” and they openly lament the record of a company that has mismanaged almost everything it has touched—including a new tanker for the Air Force, that is years late, over budget and still not mission-ready, and the Starliner space capsule for NASA that had potentially lethal flaws in its software that caused its unmanned test flight to be aborted.
A company culture is a real thing, not an abstract concept, and it can make or break a business. At best it is a collegiate enterprise based on a shared fundamental ethic of integrity that, at the same time, is willing to reach to the limits of what is possible to be the best in its field.
As we bid farewell to the Boeing 747, an all-American game-changer that in its life has carried around 3.5 billion passengers, it’s a good time to hope that Boeing, along with America, will regain the qualities that made moonshots possible rather than a challenge to be ducked.