Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- This article is but one example of a tiresome genre: the paean to the supposed glory days of aviation. Passengers dressed up, dined on caviar, and smoked cigarettes. Stewardesses were sexy, and liquor flowed in the expansive 747 lounge.
These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks.
I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me.
But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account.
Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.
by massysett - The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.by tolciho
- Function over form, or form over function? The endless debate.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you but I understand the merits in cherishing “form” in a world that is - for the most part - devoid of beauty and taste.
by fosk - I hear you, but I do think you are in the minority here. It is human nature to imagine themselves being fabulously wealthy and belonging to the 1% or the 0.1%, and therefore enjoying the privileges of this rarefied club. Such paeans to the glory days of aviation is the same as the glory days of railroading (traveling in your private rail car across country) and the same as the owning and enjoying a trip on your own yacht. Most people are fascinated by the act of fantasizing themselves being so filthy rich in a different era.by kccqzy
- This is a disappointingly cynical take. Sure, it's fine to criticize some of the specifics of this particular article, but the 747 was an engineering marvel for its time, and it was one of the major workhorses of commercial (and in some cases, non-commercial) aviation for a very long time.
We're allowed to be nostalgic for it. I, like you, benefit from the modern age. I never even flew on a plane until I was 19 years old, in 2001, so I never experienced those so-called "glory days". But I think it's important to think about and memorialize those times.
Smoking is bad. Objectifying stewardesses is bad. The whole "fancy party" type atmosphere of those days feels quaint and elitist now. The 747 itself isn't a great plane by today's standards, on several metrics.
But that's fine. We can appreciate it for what it was in its time, and celebrate an aircraft that put in so many hours and miles of service.
by kelnos - They were limited by the tech of the time too. A modern clean sheet redesign of a 747/A380 class airplane would look very different given modern composites and improvements in engine bypass and compression ratio.by Onavo
- I agree with you on the social aspects 100%.
But still, I have a soft spot for the Golden ages of engineering well before my time - like many, I'm an apollo program geek. No matter how many documentaries I watch, books I read, websites I peruse, schematics I try to figure out, it is still beyond astonishing to me that we flew to the moon with 60s technology. I'll continue reading about it for rest of my life and be incorrectly melancholic about the simpler days of engineering :).
While the 747 isn't my kink, it'd adjexent enough thay I think I can understand it - I imagine it's similarly fascinating to think of massive intercontinental airplane designed by slide rule , then flown across Atlantic without computers or gps or ils or any other amenities.
More expensive and breakable and inefficient and polluting and just insane as it also may have been :)
by NikolaNovak - For the money things have actually got better. If you pay the equivalent (adjusted for inflation or compared to wages) of what they were paying back then for an international flight, you're in first class and on a good airline that's hugely better than anything from the 'golden age'. Even business class is cheaper and (again on good airlines) is better than what people had then - the planes are quieter, the seats lie flat, the food is good, lounge access with free food and drinks before and on any stopovers...
It's kind of crazy that people compare the experience on a $1000 transalantic ticket and bemoan that the experience doesn't seem quite as good as something that was costing people the equivalent of 10-20x as much back then!
by stephen_g - I think the context that's missing from this discussion is just how long the 747 was in service. When it was new, pilots didn't directly control the engines - a flight engineer did. There were no moving maps and navigation was done with radio beacons and pilotage (of course, this required lots of fiddling with knobs and a notepad). There were no flight envelope protections, and we knew next to nothing about the dangers of rocketing across the ocean at Mach 0.9. The first encounter between a jetliner and volcanic ash was a 747; despite all four engines flaming out and the whole plane being wreathed in St. Elmo's fire, the pilots were able to safely restart all of them and nobody got hurt. People who love this jet love it because they see the problems it solved and how it kept on rising to the occasion as the world changed around it.
I'm not going to pay 2x ticket prices to keep it alive either, but it is terribly romantic. If human beings are allowed to fall in love with machines this one is as good as any.
by SR2Z - Didn’t read the full article but it starts with
> The jet was perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence. Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition.
End of American ambition? SpaceX landing is rockets… today! That’s apples to apples also, both aerospace. In other fields we have literally taught computers how to talk.
by moojacob - The most interesting thing about SpaceX is how it convinced a lot of otherwise sober people that data centers in space was a $50 septillion addressable market. You might laugh and think I’m joking but a lot of people seriously fell for the nonsense in the public filing, which should’ve been a one way ticket to SEC jail.by jquery
- We've given up on the next generation of technology and choose to wallow in sweet hydrocarbons.by shigawire
- Glad to see your sentiment. I’m so tired of the reflexive self flagellation of a lot of Americans. It’s often based in ignorance.by Rover222
- Shoot, I should've replied under this comment.by rdiddly
- America is currently leading the way in both commercial aerospace and AI simultaneously. This feels like a decade old article.by rayiner
- I find the whole thing a little odd. The 747 seems to be a great aircraft. It's also a quad jet and the change in regulations for ETOPS makes twinjets a no brainer for reducing cost. There's no reason to hurry and up and get rid of them, many will continue in cargo service for many years. But there isn't any reason to build big quad jets any longerby sidewndr46
- I agree with you, and I would have expected Ian Bogost to take a more holistic view.
Talking about why, for example, Boeing never build a larger passenger airplane, or why the Concorde is no longer flying, would actually make for an interesting analysis of technology and business.
Why did the progression from the Wright brothers to the 747 not continue for the next fifty years? The answer has to do with physics and economics rather than lack of American ambition or excellence.
by GMoromisato - The Atlantic writes for its owners as well as its readership, both of whom consider it unsavoury to compliment their homeland without adding multiple caveats.by Leonard_of_Q
- Guess I probably wont get a chance to fly on one, flying on the 747 was on my bucket list.by robotnikman
- Flying on one in August, upper deck, courtesy of a lowball points redemption through United.by dboreham
- I got what was probably my last 747 trip a few years ago on a BA flight from DC to Heathrow.
But I probably missed my chance for an A380. Maybe a Lufthansa flight will pop up that’s affordable. The other airlines mostly operate in the ME or Asia, and no plans for either right now.
by alistairSH - They are beautiful things, but the last few I rode on with BA were absolutely starting to show their age inside prior to BA retiring them in 2020. I think the last passenger models were produced in 2011 and most of BA's 747 fleet was from the mid-90s. The experience was probably better on other carriers towards the end.by giobox
- If it's something you want to do, this is your call to action. (There have been several already)
There's still a few of these in passenger service, so you can easily get it done if it's important to you.
Otherwise, you'll need to figure out how to get on a cargo flight.
by toast0 - Back in the olden days (2015-ish?) KLM was having a really, really cheap business fare sale JFK-AMS; I snagged it with Delta miles (if I recall correctly) - and flew there and back in their 747 in the upper deck (just to take the flight; didn't have anything to do in AMS). It was really quite nice; it was the first and apparently last time I've taken the 744. I'm really glad I was able to do it.by MattRogish
- Somehow I only managed to end up on one of these gorgeous birds once. In seat 64K, NRT-DTW (or was it NRT-MSP?). The main cabin is... nothing to write home about. I was in no hurry to book another 744 leg. Upper deck, perhaps a different story.
Great seat number though.
- Lufthansa still has a number of 747-8 and 747-400 in active operation - while there's evidence that the routes are scaling back, there's at least a few more years to fly one. They're even refurbishing the interiors to have a more competitive long-haul business class offering.
Korean Airlines has a handful of 747-8 in active operation but they're making moves to retire them especially post Asiana merger.
Air China also operates a handful of 747-8 and 747-400 on both international and domestic routes.
FlightsFrom is a great resource to find routes for specific aircraft: https://www.flightsfrom.com/explorer/FRA?aircrafts=747 https://www.flightsfrom.com/explorer/ICN?aircrafts=747
- by spking
- Somehow archive.is has mostly stopped working for me on many mainstream sites (Bloomberg, NYT, WSJ, etc...).by lippihom
- Qantas gave its final 747s a nice send-off too, back in July 2020, flying its final commercial 747 flight as QF7474.
They also had QF7474 trace the Qantas logo in its track along the way, which is so cool and I am surprised I couldn't find it in the official site:
https://www.escape.com.au/destinations/australia/how-qantas-...
by _jackdk_ - 1969 was truly the pinnacle of US aerospace industry - Concord, Boeing 747 and Apollo 11 all happened during this year.by d_silin