I know less about the airframe differences across the -400 and -8, but I can say the 747-8 represented a major upgrade in Flight Management Software.
I re-wrote the Central Maintenance System (portion inside the FMS) in C from scratch because no one had the original detailed design documents. The original -400 code was written in Pascal if I'm remembering correctly. I gleamed what I could from the source and relied on unit tests to get the rest of the way there based on what I knew of the protocol itself.
The entire FMS software was completely re-written in C++ and using modern object oriented patterns (at the time). Probably the most fun I've had over my now 20'ish year career. Of course Boeing was pissed with the delays this caused because the airframe wasn't a major change. I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out. Personal opinion, this was a large part of what led to the MAX situation.
I feel like people on HN who have comfortable passive incomes from stocks or other sources forget that people need a paycheck to sustain their lifestyles.
I very much depend on my pay check to sustain my life in the long run, although worker protections and a small (!) nest egg make it so I wouldn’t have to put up with this kind of abuse. I see employment as an agreement for a set number of hours of my expertise in exchange for a fee. End of transaction.
The real world is slightly less black and white of course, but that’s the gist of it.
You can always find another job, even if it's worse than your current one. A prick who thinks my family is less important than a transportation project, and has the audacity to assert that to me, can do the project himself or in the company of spineless worms.
I guarantee I am closer to the situation than you are. I have many heard similar, and worse statements, from executives of The Boeing Company many times in my career. Every single Boeing CEO that has left the company in the past 30 years has either been fired, or resigned in disgrace, for their various ethical, moral, and business management failures.
That’s 5 flamed out CEOs since 1996.
Does it shock you that a CEO who is on the record for preferring that his employees “Cower under their desks” in fear of him would also require that their employees prioritize the schedule of a flying barge over their child’s personal life?
Or how about "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm" - can this statement by former CEO Harry Stonecipher be justified as anything other than evil, in the context of the damage and injury that has been caused by intentionally reducing Boeing’s engineering capability?
Not just human decency. We all know that some CEOs will sacrifice your child for their goal. In fact, many people are ready to sacrifice other people children as long as they are distant enough, war wouldn't be a thing if we didn't.
But saying it out loud is another thing, it is, to me, a terrible blunder in terms of communication, and executives who talk like that should 100% get fired. They are the face of the company, what they say and how they say it matters. Maybe it matters even more than the technical part of their job. If they get a pass for saying things like that, that's even worse, because it means that it is what the shareholders and customers want to hear.
See the guidelines “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
Just because this story points out that one executive many years ago said something very unsavory is not a generalization for all executives.
I don't know why it's so hard to believe. It's well established that people say (and do) very nasty stuff when under stress (see: war). It's also well established that people with power tend to minimize the distress of those less powerful. Between these two, how hard is it to imagine that some mandarin at Boeing would say something like this if he thinks his bonus/summer house/childrens' private school tuition are in jeopardy?
Of course there is not zero percent chance executive said it. If you dont believe so, you never listened to what people including executives actually say in practice.
Awesome. Was this part of the NG FMS program?
I find it interesting how the 747 FMS is newer than the 777s yet due to type similarity retains legacy features.
> "no one had the original detailed design documents"
Is this normal for a comany like Boeing? It's not my area, but I would have guessed they would keep the documentation for everything on a product as important as a 747.
Not avionics, but I've spent most of my career in medical devices. A project's Design History File would indeed have the detailed design documentation of the system. The problem would be that word "detailed." The relevant standards state that the documentation should be sufficient for a normally-skilled engineer to recreate the (software) system, but how stringently that is applied can be very hand-wavy. And then there's the problem of drift where the software changes and the docs are updated, but perhaps not as precisely as they should be, and different people have different levels of documentation rigor. Well, you can see how it ends up 20 years later.
I'm actually dealing with exactly this problem on an old project right now :-(
Anyone interested should read Joe Sutter's book, 747. Sutter was the lead engineer for the development of the 747 and he has some awesome stories.
One interesting story is that Juan Trippe (CEO of PanAm) wanted Boeing to create a double-decker airplane. He was enamored with the idea of "ocean liners" cruising the sky. But Sutter (and other engineers) knew that it would be impossible to create what he wanted, so instead they proposed a wide-body aircraft (10 seats across). Nevertheless, Trippe insisted on a double-decker design.
The engineers then created two cabin mockups. One for a double decker, which was basically two narrow-body cabins stacked on top of each other. The other was the wide-body of the 747. Once Trippe saw the trade off, he realized that the spacious cabin of the 747 was the way to go.
But even then, when he saw the second level where the pilots go, he insisted on putting passengers up there too.
I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
I'm kind of torn between the top deck and the nose seats.
I've flown British Airways's business class on the upper deck, and I've flown Qantas' business class which is all on the lower deck starting at the nose. I wasn't quite at the front, but I was close enough to see the slightly more forward facing windows. I always thought it'd be great to sit in that first row and have that more forward facing view.
I had a blast on BA's though, as I was young and blowing through a bunch of airline miles on a transatlantic flight with my now wife. Getting to sit backwards on a plane was a little fun change too. Those BA seats (their last generation business class) are pretty bad by business class standards, even at the time, but they were alright on the narrower upper deck of a 747.
It's a shame, as I don't think I'll likely ever fly in a 747 again. I rarely fly Korean Air or Lufthansa, and I've got no plans to fly Air China.
I will say though, I really didn't like flying the 747 in economy. I did with Qantas a couple times, and it was noticeably louder and less pleasant than their A380s which had started flying at the time.
So my recommendation: fly a 747 at the front or upper deck if you can in business or first, at least once if you've never had the chance. Avoid it if you're flying economy. Most other wide body jets will be newer, quieter, and all around more pleasant.
I would have to imagine that the newer 747-8 would have the much lower pressurization and other comfort standards of its generation of aircraft in the 2000s; the problem is that it didn't really sell so most people did not get to fly in one.
> I would have to imagine that the newer 747-8 would have the much lower pressurization
Two small corrections:
1) If it would have had a change in internal pressurization, the -8 would have a higher pressurization to allow for a lower cabin altitude pressure.
2) The -8 does not have a higher pressurization, because they did not change the fuselage construction. Newer airplanes have lower cabin-altitudes thanks to the use of composite materials, allowing for better fatigue properties.
The -8 also has a lower maximum certified altitude than the -400. The -400 can go to 45,100 feet, the -8 is limited to 43,100 feet.
This is actually because the -8 wing is MORE efficient than yhe -400. There is a regulation that in case of a pressurization failure the airplane has to be able to descend below 15,000 feet in a certain time. The -8 wing has less drag, so it is easier to overspeed in descent, and they had to limit the maximum operation altitude to compensate.
I hated the top deck when flying east from NY to London. The rising sun poured in every time a crew member opened the cockpit door, waking me up. Best seat for me was the single one in the lower deck at the very nose of the aircraft.
The 747 was a great aircraft to fly in though. The tower of power effect on take-off really reassured you that you were going to get where you were going.
BA used to fly the on the Moscow to London route once a day. I remeber vividly the late night a320 flight was cancelled and we were stuck in the lounge until the early morning flight about 6 hours later.
Somewhere over the North Sea I decided to give the on board phone a go, and it worked. A early call to let my wife know I’d made it (there were only a few seats left on the morning flight and 180 passengers to fit on).
Next time I flew it the phones weren’t working, and it wasn’t long until they’d all been removed, so I’m glad I got to tick that off my list.
Likely my last 747 flight ever was far less salubrious. I was supposed to be flying Toronto to jfk to Heathrow, but the Toronto flight was cancelled and I got downgraded to economy and put on a 747 to Amsterdam.
> The tower of power effect on take-off really reassured you that you were going to get where you were going.
I have the memory of being struck by how much the overhead storage compartments were shaking at takeoff. Not reassuring at all, but they stopped shaking once we got off the ground.
On a normal takeoff, a 4 engine aircraft has less excess power available than a 2 engine aircraft. Aircraft engines are sized to provide a minimum climb gradient with a single engine inoperative. A twin engine aircraft with an with an engine failure had lost 50% of its power. A quad with an engine failure is only down 25%. So the twin’s engines are oversized to compensate.
There was quite a kick when the engines spooled up. I flew mainly SFO/LAX to SYD and the few minutes of full thrust you just kind of sat back in your seat and didn't try to do anything.
More or less. I remember the first time I flew in a tri-jet (after a 747), I was a bit worried on take-off about how we were still on the ground as the end of the runway approached.
To clarify slightly, I first heard "tower of power" used to describe the Saturn V. So two icons of the late 60s.
I had a round trip BOS↔LHR that was 747 eastbound, 777 westbound; I ended up on the upper deck of the 747, which was fascinating as an otherwise casual flyer. One especially memorable bit was landing - you're basically three stories up and suddenly the wheels are on the ground, and you're still three stories up :-)
(I'm still happy to have traded that for planes with a much higher cabin pressure-altitude - and would trade even further for business-class transatlantic non-cruise ships. But it was definitely fun to have had the experience.)
A higher pressure-altitude or a higher pressure? Can't imagine what's good about a higher pressure-altitude. Less creaking making you less worried the plane will explode?
Higher cabin pressure, but it is marketed in pressure-corresponding-to-altitude; Norwegian Airlines for example keeps their cabins at 6000ft, ie. equivalent atmospheric pressure to being at 6000ft. (Looks like "equivalent effective cabin altitude" or just "cabin altitude" is the more accurate term.) So yeah, I worded that backwards, higher pressure, lower altitude, is more comfortable for passengers (me) especially on longer flights.
> I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
I used to fly frequently between SYD-LAX in business class on Qantas B744s. 11K (top deck, right hand side exit row window seat) was one of the best seats in the house.
The only passengers who had it better were those downstairs in First, where the curvature of the nose pretty much let them see out the front of the aircraft through the “side” windows.
One thing I remember from his book is that the 747 was initially of secondary importance within Boeing, behind the SST. This wasn't Boeing's flagship, so to speak, until SST was canceled.
This seems like an odd version of the story. My understanding is Boeing designed lots of military aircraft, not all reached production. The 747 is the result of some of that design work.
You should read the book, if you're interested. From the book (p.84):
"Time and time again there appears in print the logical but false assumption that Boeing took its losing military C-5 bid and revamped it as the commercial 747. In fact, the 747 would be an entirely original design that owes nothing to the C-5."
That said, in the same chapter he talks about how GE developed a high-bypass turbofan engine for the C-5 and it was only because they had such an engine that the 747 became possible.
But really my only point is that you should read the book if you're interested.
> only because they had such an engine that the 747 became possible.
Many engine manufacturers were experimenting with high-bypass ratios; Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce. GE was just first to production. If they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
I understand that the payload typically drives the design, and the wings drive (or rather, limit) the generational improvements. Aircraft are reengined quite often.
That was also said about the B-707, which was supposed to have some parts commonality with
their KC-135 Stratotanker built for the USAF. But as development progressed, the
airliner and the tanker diverged.
The B-747 went through a similar process. Boeing was proposing a big cargo aircraft to the USAF (the CX-HLS), but that was never built. Lockheed got the C-5 contract instead, which satisfied the USAF's need for a really big cargo plane.
So the B-747 was built as a commercial plane, mostly to Pan Am's requirements.
Military-civilian commonality was mostly wishful thinking at the management levels, as it turned out.
It still does happen though, so not totally wishful thinking - but it seems to go the other way, commercial to miliary e.g. like the KC-30A tanker which are converted from standard commercial A330-200s (and as I understand the new version will be from A330neos).
Nose loading was the reason the 747 had the aircrew sit on the top floor. It was thought that the SST project would displace all extent subsonic airliners, so the 747 was designed to be easily configured for freight after a short timeframe serving pax.
My memory of the 747 was that it was originally the military who paid for the design. They wanted an aircraft that could be loaded from the front. This led to the bubble at the front of the plane. For whatever reason, the military didn't bite so they repurposed it as a commercial aircraft.
The upper deck was really intended as a first class lounge and I think I was up there once. But obviously wasn't very economical and got turned into business class seating once that came in.
Qantas (I think, it’s possible it was BA) used the upper deck for economy and it was my favourite place to sit. The window seat had a little locker between your seat and the window (the curvature of the fuselage meant the seat couldn’t be right up against the window). It was a great place to keep all your stuff accessible without having to bother the aisle seat to get up to the overhead storage.
It’s such a beautiful plane. Despite having worked for Airbus, the 747 triggers emotions for me that the A380 simply doesn’t. It represents an era of aerospace engineering that will not come back (in many cases probably for the better - but still!)
As an aside, if anyone is going to Southern Germany, it's worth going to Technik Museum Speyer, where you can really go into the guts of the 747. They also have a Russian Buran space shuttle.
The next day you could go to Technik Museum Sinnsheim, which is about half an hour from Speyer, and has both a Concorde and a Tupolev Tu-144 (both of which you can go inside).
The thing you neglect to mention is that the Speyer 747 is suspended 30 meters above the ground. It's breathtaking.
Fair. We had been to Sinnsheim a couple of times before Speyer. In Sinnsheim, they have the Concorde/Tu-144 on poles on top of one of the buildings. So, the 30 meters high suspension of the 747 was not so impressive anymore I guess :).
The museums are also great for kids. We went several times with our daughter and she loved it every time.
It was the last aircraft designed using a slide rule and conventional drafting --- the conventional wisdom is that if one printed up a compleat set of blueprints and loaded it on the plane it would be too heavy to take off, though of course, the anticipation was that it would soon be replaced by supersonic passenger aircraft, so it was designed to be easily converted to cargo.
Amazing aircraft, well-deserving of the "Queen of the Skies" moniker, I can still vividly remember going up to the upper deck and cockpit and the view out of the front/side windows.
My lead engineer at Boeing, Burt Berlin, showed me his (paper) design notebook for the 747. All done with a slide rule. He was an engineer's engineer, and a super nice guy.
There's an old quip about aircraft design that "a plane isn’t ready to fly until the documentation is heavier than the airplane". Can't find a source for it though.
It’s beautiful because Boeing started, not with the smallest, but with the largest plane possible. Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde, a completely orthogonal project to round up everyone’s identical patriotism, and both projects were absolutely beautiful in their own way!
Oh gracious no, Airbus started with the utilitarian A300 widebody twin[1].
Concorde was Sud Aviation and BAC joint venture, nothing to do with Airbus which didn't even exist at that time.
[1]The original A300A might have been interesting, having a fuselage as wide as the much later 777, but Airbus got cold feet and scaled it down to the dull and worthy A300B. Every Airbus widebody until the A380 was constrained by that decision.
Well. If you squint a little, Sud Aviation and BAC + others became Airbus. Airbus was first a consortium and then a proper successor (through a merger) to several European aircraft manufacturers. Sud Aviation's acquirer Aérospatiale was an initial member of the Airbus consortium and BAC's acquirer British Aerospace joined slightly later in 1979.
I'm just a layman, but somehow Airbus doesn't embody the airplane magic.. yet I'm very curious what this means to you. Any easy to grasp details you could describe ?
But really, it was just about four-engine planes becoming too expensive to run. Two-engine planes won. 777 burns 30% less fuel per passenger and has almost the same cabin width. And top level became a flop because it's too narrow for a first class cabin by today's standards and all other uses for them make no sense. Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition in which C-5 Galaxy won: it was meant to be a cargo plane with a small - top floor - passenger cabin.
I'd guess they'll continue in cargo service for many more years, just as the DC10 and MD11 did (despite the grounding after the Louisville crash, I expect they will fly again before finally being retired).
> Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition
Yes, but it turns out the hump is great for area ruling (aerodynamic drag reduction at transonic speeds), as observed by the 747-300's extended hump giving lower drag (but higher weight, of course) than the short-hump versions.
Ah. It was based on a series of performance graphs from Boeing, dating back to my aircraft-design days where that very question was discussed and I was baffled enough by the contradiction to ask for detailed clarifications to the presenting professor.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to those old notes, and couldn't quickly find what I was looking for online.
So for now, due to lack of proper supporting arguments, I would say: scratch that.
The Cd is normally normalized by the wing area, and the wing planform was the same between the 747-200 and 747-300. So if the Cd was lower for the -300, the total drag should be assumed to be smaller.
I think the top floor is there because the crew cabin has to be high so the nose can swing up. The cables and wiring from the cabin can't be easily disconnected to allow such access. You will notice other large cargo variants of airliners load cargo only through the side of the fuselage.
Yes and no. The C5 has an upper level too. The whole setup solves a lot of problems at once. Opening nose makes for faster cargo operations which the military cares about for a bunch of reasons. There are usually people associated with military cargo so might as well seat them up there.
Any large cargo aircraft has primary loading inline with centerline, side doors just aren't efficient. It's either via front, via rear or both.
Me321/323 was I think first heavy cargo with nose clamshell doors, but after that everyone settled on nose rising up, clamshell rear. It also had the top deck.
I understand that for the 747, they initially just had a cockpit bulge atop the fuselage. However, this created too much drag, which they reduced by extending the bulge aft. They didn't need this space for flight operations, so it was naturally then used for additional passenger space.
For context, when the 747 was being developed, simultaneously Boeing was developing the SST, Britain and France were developing Concorde, and the Soviets had their own supersonic Tupolevs in development. Boeing was anticipating that supersonic aircraft would render the subsonic 747 obsolete for passengers overnight, so it was designed to be easily convertible to freight.
Isn't that because the twins are designed to a higher standard, due to regulations such as ETOPS? It's not something inherent in two vs four engine designs?
I remember when the US Navy was rejecting single engine aircraft, and the F135 had be be proven literally bulletproof before they would even look at the F-35.
While true, aircraft fatality statistics generally are not split that way.
The 747 is a safe aircraft, but there have been a lot of fatalities associated with it, due to pilot error, terrorism, improper repair/maintenance, etc.
Not sure if you ever make it over to HKG but there are quite a few cargo 747s that still seem to be making the rounds. CX and others have them on the GA / cargo side, and when on Lantau you often see (and hear!) them on final or takeoff.
I think CX would hate to retire them because from what I understand their load capacity is unparalleled. And you can load horses in them! There'll always be money from that for HAECO to keep them aloft.
It's even better when you're at the bus terminal at HKIA and watching them fly overhead...
Engines became reliable enough for regulators to allow two engine planes to cross large bodies of water. (ETOPS) That's what really killed 4 engine planes.
Is this because of something analogous to an expected value calculation? Like the increased probability of failure of a single engine when carrying 4, combined with the lower excess power per engine, means that the safety margin of a 4 engine plane is worse? Or is it something to do with the doubling of the number of critical parts that could fail? I'm struggling to come up with a workable argument why 2 is safer, it seems counterintuitive. I don't have enough of the puzzle.
EDIT: Never mind, I see you wrote more down below about this. It's increased risk of a catastrophic engine failure bringing down the entire plane, not an engine simply dying and forcing a landing. Four engines = twice as many chances for that to happen.
There's an enormous amount of energy in a jet engine with that spinning turbine. Then there's all the heat, fuel, and fire in it. When that energy lets go, you don't want to be anywhere near it.
It's amazing that jet engines work at all! Yet the safety record of the engines is incredibly good.
> Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful.
If this article is going to be so poetic, I'm not sure I can continue reading it. Let's just stop for a moment and remember that the 747's, er, distinctive shape wasn't some designer's fancy, it was dictated by necessity: while it was being designed, Boeing feared that in the near future all (long-distance) passenger travel would be supersonic, so it wanted the 747 to also be attractive as a freighter, so they added the possibility of loading cargo from the front, so the cockpit had to be moved up. Simple as that. Of course, the supersonic revolution didn't happen, instead the 747 ushered in the era of widebody jets, and all the fond memories it created now make it look beautiful to the nostalgic. But in the end, Boeing's engineers were proven right: currently there are around 300 747s still in operation, but only 29 of them are passenger variants.
Ok, moving on...
> Most 747 routes spanned oceans and continents, giving travelers a speedier option than the Queen Mary had across the Atlantic, or the California Zephyr across the West.
You've got your Boeing planes mixed up there buddy! That was the 707, not the 747. The Queen Mary was retired in 1967, and the 747 first flew in 1969, so there obviously was no timespan where the one was an alternative to the other.
> In the cabin, the heft makes the plane feel almost still, even at 500 miles an hour and 35,000 feet; it is the only plane I have ever flown in whose takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses.
And "takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses" is quite an exaggeration for both the 747 and A380. They are nice to fly, but takeoff and landings are definitely perceptible. Unless the author was black-out drunk for both takeoff and landing.
One interesting thing is that the 747 was born as a temporary transition product, from a failed proposal after Boeing lost the competition against the C-5 Galaxy.
In the era when Joe Sutter designed it, almost the whole world believed that supersonic passenger aviation was right in front of us. Boeing put almost all of its core resources into the Mach 2 Boeing 2707. The Jumbo Jet was only a temporary plan based on a freighter foundation from the beginning. Its later conversion to cargo use was deeply considered from the start (which makes its situation today much better than the A380).
What happened later we all know. The Tu-144 fell from the sky over Paris. Concorde barely entered service because Britain and France did not want to pay cancellation penalties. Boeing was almost dragged down by the 2707. And the 747 became Boeing’s savior.
Ironically, as engine bypass ratios increased, newer airliners became more and more fuel-efficient, also slower and slower. This former "slow temporary backup freighter" is now the highest and fastest mainline airliner in the sky, able to fly above 40,000 feet and cruise close to Mach 1.
Another perhaps sad point is that before 9/11, the Jumbo Jet dominated the sky of large aircraft. So almost all the well-known bomb attacks people can easily remember were on 747.
The US was still very much involved in its development and testing, so I think we can still chalk it up as a win for multi-country collaboration, eh :3
> The US was still very much involved in its development and testing
... Wait, how was that? The Concorde was essentially the Franco-British entry in what was once a rather fierce international race to build a supersonic passenger jet (then seen as the future); the US entries were the (failed) Lockheed L-2000 and Boeing 2707.
If the US had been open to collaboration, it is likely that the UK would’ve gone in with them, and we might live in an alternate universe where there was a UK/US Concorde-ish thing, and maybe a French mini-Concorde (the French design which got subsumed into Concorde was particularly small, only 70 passengers). In our universe, though, US manufacturers were sceptical of working with BAC because they believed that govt funding for a foreign design would be hard to come by.
This is such an absurd statement. What US aerospace has created post 1969 is nothing short of remarkable in comparison. (And we can be proud of the Apollo era too.)
> What US aerospace has created post 1969 is nothing short of remarkable in comparison. (And we can be proud of the Apollo era too.)
What are you referring to?
If you want to chart progress over time, consider this: In 1919, people were still flying biplanes and civilian aviation barely existed. Fifty years later, in 1969, you've got the 747 -- consider the progress made over those fifty years! Fifty years from then, in 2019, you've still got the 747 -- alongside, as the article notes, smaller and less remarkable aircraft "that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable."
The efficiency and the safety. Modern planes are disgustingly safe to the point that hull loss is almost unheard of. For 50 years the industry has optimized for safety and fuel efficiency. And the modern machines are marvels in that.
True, but still incremental improvements over proven designs - maybe a sign of very strict safety standards making new designs and differentiation more expensive than just the development.
For very rational economic reasons, underpinned by the same fundamental physical principle that makes my car more fuel-efficient doing 60 instead of 85.
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.
I flew 747 last month with Lufthansa and asked one of the crew how long they will keep it in operation. «I retire in two years so I don’t care» a very German response but at least they hadn’t made any announcement that he seem to be aware of.
Always fun to be on the second floor despite the seat configuration being a bit dated.
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.
On the A380 you get to enjoy the higher ceiling also in economy. It does make quite a difference for how cramped you feel, even though the leg room might be the same.
And both B747 and A380 fly much calmer than the smaller, lighter widebodies, which is equally nice for passengers on all classes.
The A380 is probably the smoothest flying plane I've been in, but in my experience it has one slightly annoying behavior quirk that degrades from my ability to enjoy it. Granted, I've only flown in one a few times, so I may have just been unlucky. But at cruise, the autopilot surges and coasts on a slow repeating schedule. Ease off and float for a bit, get just a little bit low and throttle up slightly to catch it, rinse and repeat. Not terribly noticeable when awake, but when I try to sleep I'm acutely aware of that sensation.
So far my personal favorite is the 787. About the only thing 'bad' I can say about it is that all the mechanical bits are kinda loud, like the flaps and stuff, and are very noisy inside the cabin. But it cruises so nice, and the lower pressurization altitude and increase in humidity is noticeable on a long flight.
I've done a lot of travelling between Australia and Europe via Dubai on the A380, and I've definitely noticed the same thing, you can really feel it. You can also see it on the interactive map thing on the ones that have the 'virtual cockpit' view - the vertical speed goes positive for a bit, then back to zero, then negative for a bit, then back to zero, and repeat, all 10 hours or so of cruise on the long leg!
The 787 is nice but I find the seat width quite cramped in economy, and unfortunately premium economy isn't great value either to pay or for points upgrade on any of the airlines I fly...
Granted, like any widebody it's a bit less claustrophobic. But the personal space, the legroom, the size of the lavatories, etc. is no better at least to my recollection; I've only flown on a 747 a handful of times and it's been at least 10 years.
No, it is much nicer than the 737/A320 class. Just thinking of the curve of a 737 makes my neck knot up. Bigger planes like the 747/757/767/777 are much more comfortable as well as modern planes like the A220/E195. 737 class planes are so ubiquitous that many passengers have no idea another experience is possible.
I always do, but, just this Saturday, due to some air-traffic meltdown (perfectly understandable considering the heat wave), we had our aircraft swapped for a slightly smaller one, and I had to renegotiate seats to be together with my kid.
The 767 2-3-2 layout is my favorite, with only 1 middle seat per row, yet still two aisles so you can use one while the other is blocked, or walk little loops if it's not.
The 737 is noticeably louder than other planes on the ground and in the passenger cabin and especially for the pilot. 787/A350 and the A220 have a higher cabin pressure and better air quality that helps you feel better. It could be that most of my wide body experience was going over the Atlantic on 747s in the 1990s and a few times circa 2012 flying 767s on the JFK-LAX route which felt luxurious. As I see it, I’d rather fly coach on a better plane than “first” on a worse plane. (e.g. first on a 737 is like business on a widebody, in an A380 first-class is crazy over the top) 737 first still has your ears ringing, under-oxygenated, feeling cramped inside a small cylinder, etc. Luggage bins are nicer on a big plane too.
I’d take first in anything, even crappy fake “first,” over coach in anything. Additional personal room trumps everything else for me. I don’t really care how big the fuselage is, I care how hard my knees are crammed into the seat in front of me.
I had a long haul flight from DFW-SYD that had plenty of empty seats to the point they offered an upgrade to guarantee you'd be the only person in the row. Best spent $100 ever related to airfare.
This is or was a feature on Air New Zealand. You could buy three adjacent seats and call it a SkyCouch where two people can lie down and cuddle. Not sure how much the seats actually transformed into a couch. They were also very clear that clothes must remain on.
I only ever flew on the upper deck in coach configuration, and the last time I did that was about twenty five years ago on SAA. It wasn't anything special, but it was a little quieter.
I've flown upper deck on a 747 in Business (BA Club World).
It felt like a private jet up there, very cool. And that's even with the awful club world seats where you had to step over your neighbour to get to the aisle.
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.
Lol imagine sitting through 8 hours of agony for no reason. Do you actually enjoy flying? I'm sure I would find it agony even if I had the Emirates suite with the bedroom and shower (which is still more cramped than a 50 euro hotel room)
I would at least explore the city for a few days to have a break.
The only flying I enjoy is when I'm the one in the front left hand seat holding the yoke :)
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.
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.
If this is truly on your bucket list, you should be able to pull it off.
I just asked my favorite stochastic parrot to find the cheapest flight from SFO on a 747 to anywhere. It found a one-way flight on Lufthansa for $500. If you can, I'd encourage you to spring for a business class flight on the top deck (probably $4000 one-way).
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.
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.
And the context of the different regulatory environment. Those fancy cabins in the 60s/70s were because prices/routes were controlled by government. Unable to compete on price, airlines competed on luxury. Which, at the time, largely boiled down to who which had the shortest miniskirts in the TV ads.
Today's flying cattlecar hell is the result of the opposite, a dramatic market-driven race to the bottom of quality... followed by a price bounce to see how much money they can pull out of use before we give up and drive.
The day we have self-driving cars good enough that we can sleep, domestic air travel is dead. Ill take 10 hours curlled up in the back seat of my car rather than the 10+ hours it takes getting to/from airports for a domestic flight.
Seriously it is embarrassing how under developed trains are in the US. Yes there are some routes that don’t make sense but there are tons that do. It makes no sense. We’ve simply resigned to this general feeling of “well everything is probably too far apart and even if they aren’t it’s just not going to happen.”
there is a large, well connected domestic auto industry that wants Americans to keep driving bigger and more gas guzzling cars because that's the only thing they know how to sell to Americans these days.
Though this is not really limited to the legacy automakers; the Hyperloop was a media stunt to try and divert investment away from transit, and in some places, it actually worked.
Trains will also be killed by fully autonomous cars. Trains still need stations, loading times, tickets, horrible food, waiting in lobbies, luggage limits, government ID ... check in. Trains are literally unable to ever deliver door-to-door transport. And, in north america, biulding tens of thousands of stations (one in every small town) plus millions of miles of track ... it just isnt going to happen in our lifetimes.
Train travel is not this horrible experience you’re implying. When I’m in DC I swipe a card, walk on, walk off. Same with New York and Amsterdam. Even Netherlands into France is walk on/walk off - they recommend you get there 20min early. Luggage limits? First off, how often do you need to haul multiple suitcases and bags? Even then, I have walked on to trains with multiple suitcases. It is definitely not a big deal. This reads to me like how whenever bikes come up suddenly everyone has to haul a refrigerator uphill in the rain.
Autonomous cars would absolutely be the most convenient, comfortable experience. But it is incredibly inefficient/wasteful and it will never be economical. Trains are a great way to travel. Also, how far are you expecting autonomous cars to take you? I can’t imagine it’s economical after more than a couple of miles. It’s certainly wasteful out the gate because everyone expects to have their own cars in the US in particular. And not everything needs to be door to door, nor do we need trains for literally every town in the US. These are all absurd bars you’re setting that no one is calling for. You’re basically saying “trains aren’t luxurious enough for me and don’t go literally everywhere so therefore they should be killed.”
There’s also the wrinkle that we keep being promised they’re about to be here and yet we’ve seen very minimal deployment of any kind so far. I just don’t think personal, autonomous cars are going to be here in any reasonable timeframe, if for no other reason then how litigious the US is, and trains are just far more efficient at the end of the day for most cases.
Edit: forgot the food and waiting around… at least you have food available to you at a train station. If you’re in a car stuck in traffic, you just have to grin and bear it with no options. There’s also nothing stopping you from packing your own food, while eating in a vehicle isn’t yours is generally frowned upon in a car.
> When I’m in DC I swipe a card, walk on, walk off. Same with New York and Amsterdam. Even Netherlands into France is walk on/walk off
What train did you take to France? Everytime I go to Belgium I have to be careful to pick a train that doesn't require me to book a ticket on a specific train. I really like the "I'll get the next train whenever I reach the station" that domestic trains have. For long distance international trains that seems to only still be available to a limited set of trains to Belgium.
Eurostar. Buy tickets online, walk up to gate, QR code beeps on a little scanner, walk onto train. That was it. No TSA-like security experience, no person checking anything (except one guy who walked around on the train and scanned one ticket which registered all our tickets at once, pretty uneventful). UK is a notable exception but they’re also kind of insane about government surveillance/security, especially post-brexit. Also not EU.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to require you to buy tickets ahead of time when you’re going to other countries. All travel requires this and taking autonomous cars across countries is generally not a realistic option nor will it be except in edge cases (and for deep pockets).
Anyway point is daily train travel is generally easy and affordable. It’s not this grueling, burdensome process in places that have actually invested in it. It can be a great way to move lots of people consistently, and a lot of the US would benefit from it. Sooo many cities with crazy traffic between them forcing what should be a 30-60min trip into hours. A train would rip between these places.
Daily commuter trains between Austin/dallas/Houston for instance would be great. Austin to Dallas is a 3-4hr drive. A TGV, decades old tech, would do it in 60min flat. Could you imagine?
The Channel Tunnel has security checks because it's a 30km undersea tunnel, and separates an island country with a different approach to weapons to its neighbour. There are no security checks on any other trains in the UK.
It's also not necessary (in Europe) to buy tickets any differently when crossing borders. Advance-purchase tickets are used for long-distance high-speed trains where they don't want people sitting, or wish to spread the demand throughout the day to avoid crowding — that applies whether or not a border is crossed.
I can buy a ticket (paper or electronic) moments before the train from Copenhagen to Malmö leaves, since it's a medium-distance regional train without reserved seating.
Sure, but when the 747 was new and gas was a few cents a gallon?
An airplane is a very efficient way to move people. There is no ground friction, the route is pretty direct, and once the airplane is loaded 100 passenger-miles a gallon is not unreasonable.
Even today the EU has to ban short-haul flights along rail corridors because jets are still competitive. I say this as someone who likes trains and chooses them whenever possible.
Yes, because airports and everything around is heavily subsidized and there is no tax on jet fuel.
"There is no ground friction"
And that argument is not so strong considering that air friction grows quadratic with speed.
And considering side effects like climate change - contrails combined with lots of other chemicals in the jet fuel are really not helping, their effect is worse than just the CO2 released which is also already huge.
So high speed trains are superior in almost every way - once a rail network is build. That is the advantage of planes - they just require start and landing strip.
I cannot fathom why you think airport subsidies matter here. Airports are way, way cheaper than HSR.
Yeah drag grows quadratically with speed but reduces with altitude. At 40k ft a modern jet delivers up to 150 pmpg.
Yes the carbon emissions argument is a good one, and I personally prefer taking trains when they're available. I think that people are not appreciative enough of how efficient air travel is.
I just don’t understand how anybody can take a domestic flight and go “yeah, that sounds way better than a train.“ Even the worst train experience is better than a midtier plane experience. Plus unless you’re traveling particularly far, once you factor in all the nonsense of getting to an airport, through security, then out of the airport when you arrive, train is often the faster method.
I don’t need a plane to travel 1-10mi and long distance trains are on the whole far more pleasant than domestic flights. Plus you don’t have to get there 90min-2hr early to go through invasive security theater.
I bet if you pay the equivalent 60s/70s dollars to fly today you'll get much better service than back then! Modern first class cabins are a class above what was available back then.
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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We would all have been better off if Boeing had replaced the 737 with the 757 as intended. Its quieter, more comfortable, and a better aircraft all around.
> 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.
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.
This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America. Because as long as there is anything to criticize about America (which there always will be), some people simply cannot make a single truly positive statement about America, or even things that happened in or came from America.
Slate is even worse than The Atlantic in this regard.
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
Right can’t say a single word without bringing up Left first! What’s their obsession with them? Why they seek constant validation from Left? Pretty clear who’s hateful! Given the current mess, it’s also clear who hates America.
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
The right gets away with it because they are disingenuous children who argue in bad faith. Don't blame the people criticizing the US; those criticisms are usually valid and reasonable. The right needs to remember that being able to criticize the government/country was a founding principle of the US, and that just because someone says something critical, it doesn't mean hate. Seriously, it's like they have a child's level of discourse.
(In reality, they know exactly what they're doing, of course. The hypocrisy and simple ragebait is entirely the point. It's just bad faith bullshit.)
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
This is a form of victim blaming. The right side of American politics gets away with it not because the left complains, but because the right doesn’t get punished at the polls for doing it.
They don’t get punished at the polls because people accept, or are at least willing to entertain the implication, that the left wing dislikes America. And what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician? Would you want to work for a CEO who publicly disdains the company? (Gil Amelio’s infamous quote about steering the sinking Apple ship comes to mind.)
As long as the Democratic base insists on caveating every American achievement with the Omnicause, it will keep playing into the Gingrichian rhetoric.
> what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician?
I don't know? Ask everyone who voted for a second Grump term. Every one of his rambles is some kind of sour puss complaint about our country, and yet people are still lapping it up!
I'd say the better framework is constructive versus destructive. The average American just doesn't want to think about constructive solutions or constructive criticism. The nuance required for incremental improvement is just too much work. But tell them you're going to smash things and hurt people, and they'll buy right in. It's essentially pan-religious fundamentalism.
Of course then the corpos are all too happy to step in with their own constructive but proprietary and anti-individual-liberty solutions. Which points back to the real motives for why the destructive memes end up being so popularized to begin with - destruction creates a power vacuum for the corpos to step into, while constructive governmental solutions get corrupted by lobbyists to overtly benefit corpos.
> what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician?
I really dislike the concept of "patriotism". What does it even mean? I think you'll get different answers if you get different people.
If people think that being critical of the US makes someone "unpatriotic", then that's their problem. If that makes a critical politician less electable, so be it. The alternative -- politicians censoring themselves and pretending everything is amazing -- is much worse.
And I'm not sure where the right is coming from anyway. The whole concept of MAGA is that the US kinda sucks right now and Trump is the savior who will fix it. If anyone has been critical of the US, it's been Trump and the MAGA crowd. But of course hypocrisy is never a problem for the right.
For those that were attracted to it, Trump presented the idea that America and it's people are good at good at their core, and this can be brought back.
Those same people view rhetoric from the other side as saying America is and was fundamentally evil and corrupt. They take this personally as a condemnation of them and their family.
I looked up Gil Amelio’s “infamous” quote and it doesn’t seem incorrect given what Apple was going through at the time. Steve Jobs had just sold 1.5 million shares of Apple stock and tanked the stock, would you accuse Steve Jobs of hating Apple?
Toxic positivity is when you can’t criticize something even when it deserves criticism. Is America full of brilliant people? Yes. Is it in a steep decline at the moment? Also yes. Apple thrived because Steve Jobs did a coup and steered the ship. America needs the same, but not from an incompetent nincompoop like the current moron.
Ironically, it's this ritual self-flagellation that helped elect Trump.
Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America. And if you don't trust the media, then it's a lot easier to believe Trump's lies.
I feel like it's the other way around: Trump got elected because he was extremely critical of the US, and spun that as "America sucks right now because the liberals have ruined it".
And beyond that, he just said the right words to people who were not doing so well in the economy. Lies, of course, but very seductive lies, and for a while I even felt bad for some Trump voters for getting sucked into those lies. And then of course he leaned into the popular right-wing culture-war stuff.
(No longer, though: at some point you lose the ability to say "but I thought he would help me!" after the 500th time he hasn't helped you like he said he would.)
Both sides said that "America sucks right now". I think Trump said "Let's go back to when America was great" whereas liberals said, "America was never great, so we need to keep changing."
Worse, it was easy for some liberals to slide from "America was never great" to "and it's the fault of [white people|cis people|males]"
I'm not endorsing any of those views--I just think that's how some people perceived it.
> Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America.
I would argue they lost faith because the media constantly lies and distorts the truth to promote the ideology of capital. They are elite and disconnected, absolutely, just not in a left wing way, but a corpo-capitalist way (which only looks “left” if you’re to the right of capital).
eh, no that's false. They promote the ideology of ad revenue at most, which causes audience capture, which on the left means anti-capital crazy talk like pro-theocracy, anti-growth and other weird shit.
Social media promotes ad revenue (engagement). That's why it's full of brainrot slop and outrage bait. Legacy media promotes ideologies consistent with its owners, which is why for instance it downplays bad stuff Israel does and upplays bad stuff Iran does.
> Legacy media promotes ideologies consistent with its owners, which is why for instance it downplays bad stuff Israel does and upplays bad stuff Iran does.
Partly true, but also mostly wrong. It's all about the business model. Owners doing what you say can only do so much if the business model is based on selling ads and no one gets a salary if they don't attack jews enough for their audience.
The claim that Israels bad actions are down played is pretty doubtful. I always see 10x or more negative reporting of Israel compared to what I happen to know about the conflicts. Like in Swedish media it's always "Israel attacks Lebanon" but never ever "Hizbollah attacks Israel", even though that's what happens first.
To pile on, it dont think this attitude is productive. For every person that finds it motivation for positive change, there are two that take the criticism as face value and g8ve up or lean into it.
It is like basic child psychology. It is hard to get child to develop constructively by telling them they are awful and worthless.
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.
And that's my point: Your answers are far more interesting than Ian Bogost's throwaway assertion that America just wasn't ambitious enough and that aircraft engineering peaked with the 747.
You could say that engineering excellence at GE (and competition with RR and P&W) led to ETOPS which made it less attractive to simply build larger airplanes with 3+ engines. Why send one 747 per day when you can send multiple A330s or 767s, accommodating more schedules?
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 longer
We might still reach a point in a few decades where capacity constraints at major airports make larger quadjets economically viable again. That was the thesis behind the Airbus A380, and it didn't work. But is it possible that they weren't so much wrong as just too early?
"Didn't work" meaning did not result in 5,000 orders. The aircraft in use by the middle east and asian airlines (and Qantas) are doing fine. They are also less economic than the modern 2 engine widebodies, despite being more economic than a 747 on the same route, with higher comfort levels and less intrusive engine noise.
They just didn't turn out to fit the emerging economics of flight. They "work" fine.
I think they mean work out for airbus.
Financially was a huge program disaster. It sold half the number of airframes needed for cost break even in nominal value, before accounting for the cost of capital. This also doesnt account for billions in illegal EU government
subsidies.
I wasn't trying to get into a comparison with US, but do think they they are relevant to the financial accounting of the 380 programing. Airbus got some 15 odd billion in launch aid that was to be paid back through sales that never occurred.
I love the plane itself. It is my top choice for transatlantic flight. Businesses class is fantastic. If you get a window, they have stow cabinets big enough for my backpack, laptop, and street shoes.
So the point was that they had massive sunk costs which couldn't be recovered. The legality or otherwise of the EU subsidies is a bit beside the point.
It's absolutely one of my favourites to fly on. I'll miss it when they replace it with the 2 engine widebodies. Economics just didn't work out for a good idea.
(A re-engined 747 with something quieter, and with better cabin pressure and humidity could also have worked but Boeing were never going there)
It is very tiring. I get why Europeans might enjoy taking shots at us (though at one point I'd have said it was more of a good natured ribbing, given that Europe's history is also many Americans' history), and I fully understand the armies of bots spreading invective ... but the constant dogging on America by our own citizens is sad. I'm sure a lot of this outcome is intentional, but nobody fights back.
America is many things, has done many things. Some great, some not so much. Americans themselves should at least be honest about seeing the good parts even if nobody else will admit it. And if we're going to keep progressing forward we need people to be on board in good faith.
Not American but I feel the sentiment. I'm planning to change nationality soon as 'my' own country is also on the same right-wing conservative track. I'm not interested in making things better anymore. I just want to break with them forever. They deserve no more admiration or loyalty.
I don't believe in national pride or even of sports teams. My loyalty is always conditional, as long as my ethics align.
Yes, some people have that viewpoint. Very transactional. I think there was a time when I might have agreed. But as I have gotten older I've gained more of an appreciation for shared mythology and how it promotes social cohesion.
Historically in many places religion has been a primary source of shared mythology. In America, despite prominent Christian religions, a strong historical shared mythology has been of our own founding. It does not matter that it is myth, it matters that it is shared.
What I want is when an American citizen goes into that theater at the US House of Representatives before the tour and watches the short film about the founding of the country, they should come out of it damn near shedding tears of pride in how great we are. Bullshit or not, the American Creed is a source of unity. That is failing, and I am sad to see it.
When everyone becomes strictly transactional, society has failed.
To me it's really because they have broken that promise. Governments take advantage of that cohesion. It's not really because of the transactionality to my benefit but just because what they stand for is a net negative for society and the world.
Consider the military. Few wars are actually worth giving one's life for. Since 1945 basically none. If the Communists had won in Vietnam nothing would have happened to America. Iraq was based on false pretenses, Afghanistan accomplished absolutely nothing. My own country was part of some of these misguided adventures and has some of its own wars where it definitely was the evil aggressor.
Or think of the Nazis who exploited the very concept of this nationalism to destroy half the world.
So no. I do think it helps social cohesion but when a state is using that cohesion for evil it does not deserve to be followed.
I think we should outgrow this petty follow the leader attitude and think for ourselves.
I share your disillusionment, but my preferred response would be Americans coming together and deciding that actually, we do care, and we do want a better society for everyone, a better government, less corruption, etc. I am not suggesting that everyone needs to subscribe to my idea of better, either, I am just saying that we could improve things just be getting a majority of people acting in good faith and having real discussions about the issues we face. A healthy debate where winning means everybody wins, and losing just means you rework and improve your ideas and arguments and keep on participating.
Man I'm an idealist today. Okay that's just about every day, thankfully. But nihilism sometimes tries to consume me too.
True they did in the end but my point is, nothing bad happened.
Like, why did America even get involved in that shit anyway? It was a French problem (and really, it was fair they wanted to kick the French colonisers out).
I think labeling all things right-wing as bad is part of the problem. The left goes too far, and pushes people to the right. That's why Trump got back into power.
What is something the right wing supports that you would say is good, by contrast?
Sometimes I hear that it is because the right wing is perceived as strong on the economy, despite the facts showing that the left wing consistently performs better. Or that the right wing has better foreign policy chops, despite consistently starting wars. Or that the right wing is about smaller, limited government, despite consistently using government power to push their social agenda.
I feel like this partly a counter reaction. To some US people endlessly glazing the US and endless saying 'best country'. In general the attitude in the US seems to think that anything not rooted in US experience is bad. You can literally feel audience stop listening when somebody giving a speech says 'In X country they do Y because its better based on Z analysis'. And then you have an army of Americans show up telling every possible reason (no matter how irrelevant) why X country is not like the US at all.
I feel like in Europe its much more normal to say, Switzerland is doing X very well, Sweden is going Y very well and so on. Or even the US is doing Z better.
> I'm sure a lot of this outcome is intentional, but nobody fights back.
Well.. some people do in fact fight back. You'll hear it on the Waking Up podcast for example. The issue is that Trump is also, on the surface, fighting back. Except he's destroying America instead of making it great.
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.
What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail.
When I started my own business, everyone thought it was doomed to failure. Friends, enemies, acquaintances, all of them.
Except my dad. He believed in me, though he had no idea what I was doing.
Musk is in good company with the crazy people who build the first tunnel under the Thames, the nuts who laid the first transatlantic people, the morons who dug the Panama Canal, and the fools who built the first transcontinental railroad.
I have a certainty that I don't want to make a bet predicated on SpaceX needing to generate revenue from their AI products that is equivalent to several thousand dollars for every human in a middle income and up country.
I'd bet in SpaceX. I'll not bet on musk grafting in a failing AI business for financial shenanigans.
Unless SpaceX knows something about thermodynamics that no one else knows, we can be pretty fucking sure that they have an incompetent mouthpiece or they are committing securities fraud.
I'm not sure I get it. Obviously, computers can work in space--a Starlink satellite is basically a computer with a radio attached. Satellites use radiators for cooling without violating any laws of physics.
I assume you think that SpaceX will never be able to build/deploy a radiator big enough? But that's not a physics/thermodynamics question, that's an engineering question. And I think SpaceX has some pretty good engineers.
Help me out and tell me how you can be so sure it will never work.
You could also launch people from LA to NYC via rockets instead of using airplanes without violating any laws of physics. But we don’t, because we have airplanes already. What problem are data centers in space solving? Cooling is probably the hardest issue to deal with for data centers, so why would you give up convective cooling you get for free on Earth?
I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space. The utility of satellite internet has been known for decades before Starlink came around.
A hedge that as it gets harder to build datacenters in communities over water, power, noise, space, tax, etc reasons that space is a new frontier for them. Consider that solar power works better in space.
Also, satellites may be able to do processing of data in-orbit.
>I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space.
You just mentioned it - cooling. Consider Starlink a POC of radiating computer heat in space. A datacenter would need a scaled-up version, but it is not impossible, although it could be impractical if the cost of compute doesn't rise enough.
You agree that space data centers are physically possible, but you just don't think they will be economical (i.e., cheaper than terrestrial data centers). Is that right?
I don't know if they will be economical. But that will depend on a whole bunch of questions that nobody knows the answer to: How will the demand for AI grow? How much will opposition to terrestrial data centers increase the price? How cheaply can SpaceX launch mass? How cheaply can SpaceX build data center satelliters?
Maybe you know all those answers. If so, I envy your stock portfolio.
They won't be economical for many reasons - one of them is cooling. Putting several kilowatts of radiators on a Starlink satellite is a justified cost because the Starlink satellite must be in space. Putting a hundred megawatts of radiators on your AI DC in space is ridiculous because that's too big of a radiator (how do you keep it structurally sound?), air cooling on the ground is a million times better and there's no good reason for it to be in space.
Again, “What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail”.
I doubt you’ve done enough investigation to conclude that. Watching a couple a YouTube videos about how data centers in space are dumb doesn’t count.
For one, it’s not one big hundred megawatt-scale datacenter, but many smaller rack-sized satellites.
Two, there are many trade offs SpaceX can make to reduce the overall cost. The radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so anything they can do to increase the temperature drastically reduces the size of the radiators, including custom silicon, heat pumps, etc. There’s also novel radiator technology like liquid droplet radiators that could be worth developing.
Third, there are reasons to put it in space: solar panel efficiency, no cost for land, less regulation, no NIMBYs, etc.
Materials other than silicon would be an interesting idea, but I doubt even SpaceX is that crazy.
Not only does cooling increase with 4th power of temperature as you said, but power is abundant, so it may actually be practical to use more power to run chips of a different material at a higher temperature. That's a great idea, if it can actually be pulled off.
There's nothing inherent about electronics that makes it stop working around 120 degrees - that's just the practical limit of silicon. Other materials can withstand higher temps but may not be as practical in other respects like bandgaps.
The Union Pacific Railroad (the eastern half of the transcontinental railroad) also caused the financial crisis of 1873 (due to construction costs and various corruption and bribery around financing them). It then went bankrupt in 1893.
So, yes, it transformed the country. That didn't necessarily benefit the stockholders and bondholders.
Right, but four years later was definitely caused by the problem of (and shenanigans around) financing the original construction. Even if you want to say that 1893 was too late to be relevant, 1873 wasn't. It was the problem of financing the original construction that damaged the entire US economy.
Ok, but the problem with this comparison is that SpaceX is trying to avoid building any infrastructure at all. They are obsessed with the launch vehicle and basically have zero plans doing anything on Mars or the Moon once they get there.
If you look at the competitors like say Blue Origin, you see that they have an entire lunar architecture mapped out that wouldn't be feasible without the infrastructure they're planning to build.
You also constantly hear from Musk and SpaceX fans that the moon is a distraction and that the transfer of techniques, etc, from the Moon to Mars is minimal because the ISRU resources and processes are different. From an outsiders perspective, the reality distortion is unbelievable.
Needing to send a different box to the surface of a gravity well doesn't really change anything, fundamentally speaking. You still need power generators, a power grid, communication infrastructure, habitats, life support systems, rovers/excavators to dig out the materials, launch pads, etc. The astronauts get to train on the Moon and come back to their families and perhaps wait until the kids leave the nest, before they commence their deadly one way trip to Mars.
Now after the merger and IPO, SpaceX has become a deeply underwhelming company if you care about space. Starship has been a massive failure and I'm being tired of being told that SpaceX has a proven track record and therefore you should expect them to accomplish something by going complete against the development ethos that their proven track record is based upon. Maybe its not clear, but from my perspective, SpaceX has already become the incumbent it claims to fight against.
For the average SpaceX fan, the Falcon 9 isn't something to be proud of, but rather something to retreat to, once it is exposed that the thing that according to them makes the Falcon 9 obsolete does in fact not make it obsolete. The true SpaceX ethos would have delivered a working Starship by now and only afterwards tried to figure out how to make the Mars/Moon promises work.
If SpaceX spent a ton of resources developing Moon and Mars base plane they’d be criticized for not focusing on the launch vehicle. The railroad company also doesn’t necessarily need to be the ones building the towns.
Starship has experienced setbacks but isn’t a “massive failure” by any measure.
Transcontinental railroads weren't fighting against physics.
There's a reason people are pretty sure it won't work and it's not the difficulty of getting them into space or maintening them space or generally protecting them from space. Of course, those are all considerations as well. No, it's the cooling.
I've seen many confident assertions about that issue. Do you think Musk doesn't know about it? People thought you couldn't reuse rockets, either. Or land them on their tails. Or pluck them out of the air with chopsticks.
I'm a different guy... But I think he doesn't care and doesn't need to care. His main product is personal branding and hype -- caring about how it works is hardly relevant.
It's just money laundering. They hide transfers of wealth inside an IPO, buyback etc and tell ludicrous tales so they have a cover story that investors are investing because they believed the tales and not to move money.
The very first 747 is at the flight museum in Seattle. Pretty interesting to walk through it except there’s poweredge servers in the test equipment racks in the main fuselage. Pretty sure dell wasn’t even formed when that plane was in testing hah.
Concorde is exotic, absolutely, but having seen the one at Udvar-Hazy I'm not sure I'd call it beautiful... not being an aircraft designer, my sense for this is of course biased by the way the average commercial jet looks like, well, a commercial jet, and the Concorde looks like someone who was really good at paper airplanes got ahold of the CAD system for the weekend :-)
> Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.
Can some explain why replacing it with more efficient, and still American, jets is somehow a negative for American might, progress, and invention?
I was able to fly business class in 747s to Japan back in the 90s (it was coach to Europe, though). That meant the upper deck and amenities like a sandwich and snack cart that you could just help yourself from. By the 2000s, it was coach everywhere, regardless of the plane.
I don't know, having more color doesn't seem that much more expensive? I guess the fabrics are expensive and stain relatively easily, but if public transport can keep them clean so can airlines IMO. Some fabric seats are over 3 decades old and they're still in a really good shape.
I will miss the 747. Modern planes with less engines feel less safe. I hate all the justifications used to fly long distances across oceans with only 2 engines, or only 1 engine.
More people have died due to one engine falling off a 747 and knocking off the other engine on the same wing than have died due to dual engine failure on an ETOPS certified aircraft
I'm curious about this--wouldn't one expect more engines to be safer?
Unless having more engines increases the chance of certain kinds of accidents? Like maybe the chance of an engine failure damaging the hull goes up with more engines?
Not questioning the justification--I do believe it--I'm just curious about the details.
All else being equal, potentially - although as I mentioned there have been cases where one engine falling off a 4 engine aircraft hit another in the process. But ETOPS certification is based on it being demonstrated that engines are sufficiently reliable that the probability of an independent failure is incredibly unlikely, and also requires that operators have a stricter maintenance process. The only dual engine failures on modern two-engine aircraft I can think of off-hand have been fuel exhaustion (either actually being out of fuel, or ice blocking fuel filters in the case of BA38), and would have affected 4-engine aircraft just as badly.
There's US1549 and FR4102 - are there any others? But yes, the assumption about failures being independent is obviously violated by large flocks of birds, although this has also resulted in the loss of 4-engined aircraft.
Engine failure is very dangerous. 4 engines are twice as likely to have a major failure than 2.
(despite having "fuses" so an engine can depart without taking much of the wing with it, there are many cases of single engine failure bringing down the airplane)
"Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition."
What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this?
The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American.
Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature.
[0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."
You just seem to have a fetish for aircraft with fully or partially rear-mounted engines. I prefer 747 over all of the above, although 757 is my favorite.
IL-62 I particularly dislike. Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard.
> "You just seem to have a fetish for aircraft with fully or partially rear-mounted engines."
Hey, what can I say? I'm more of an ass man.
> "Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard."
I fail to see what this has to do with visual aesthetics, but the safety record of the 747 was not so hot; already excluding the malaise brought on by the fetishes of terrorists and the Evil Empire, of course.
Maybe the Concord and Comet. For the rest of the list I think you'd spend a very long time finding people to agree with you. The soviet ones are even more complicated, the Tu-144 is basically an Ugly Concord.
So or so, Bogost's statement is akin to describing the Amiga 500 as the only beautiful home computer. And that's obviously ridiculous. As for your statement, nah, I won't have to search very long for people agreeing with me on many of the aircraft listed; whole coffee table tomes have been published specifically dealing with the subject of Soviet, French and British classic, especially narrow-body, airliners.
I'm reading through the comments here before reading the actual Atlantic story, so I didn't see the author's name until you mention it:
> Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful.
Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam":
Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view.
(I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)
> "Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today."
The Il-62 and the Tu-154 are still in limited service, for example. Not that it does your pseudoargument any favors anyway, as service history plays obviously absolutely no role in evaluating a design purely on its visual accumen.
The funniest thing is that he's not going to continue using it after office. They plan to hang it in that hotel being called a library when it gets built
I know less about the airframe differences across the -400 and -8, but I can say the 747-8 represented a major upgrade in Flight Management Software.
I re-wrote the Central Maintenance System (portion inside the FMS) in C from scratch because no one had the original detailed design documents. The original -400 code was written in Pascal if I'm remembering correctly. I gleamed what I could from the source and relied on unit tests to get the rest of the way there based on what I knew of the protocol itself.
The entire FMS software was completely re-written in C++ and using modern object oriented patterns (at the time). Probably the most fun I've had over my now 20'ish year career. Of course Boeing was pissed with the delays this caused because the airframe wasn't a major change. I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out. Personal opinion, this was a large part of what led to the MAX situation.
> I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
> Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out.
These two things seem very related.
On a more positive note, awesome to hear an account of the software's evolution from someone who was there.
I hope you replied something like 'No, meeting this project deadline is more important than YOUR child dying, to me this is a paycheck.'
That's what I would've been thinking in the shower 2 days after the conversation, anyway.
I feel like people on HN who have comfortable passive incomes from stocks or other sources forget that people need a paycheck to sustain their lifestyles.
I very much depend on my pay check to sustain my life in the long run, although worker protections and a small (!) nest egg make it so I wouldn’t have to put up with this kind of abuse. I see employment as an agreement for a set number of hours of my expertise in exchange for a fee. End of transaction.
The real world is slightly less black and white of course, but that’s the gist of it.
But if $DAYJOB actually keeps you from your dying kid's bedside, is it still there to "sustain" it? Or is it just leeching into your life?
If having a job is still marginally better than not having it, it's a sign of an efficient labor market.
(Market inefficiencies is where everything that is nice, beautiful, good, human, lives.)
Why do you write '$DAYJOB'?
General nerd slang for "fill in the name of it here" based on coding syntax
so like imagine your day jobs employers name in that part
Many of us live in countries with work legislation that disallowes this kind of management.
I'm told that's communism
Yeah,na common message among late stage capitalists.
It seems the poster was aware of that
"That's what I would've been thinking in the shower 2 days after the conversation, anyway."
You can always find another job, even if it's worse than your current one. A prick who thinks my family is less important than a transportation project, and has the audacity to assert that to me, can do the project himself or in the company of spineless worms.
I'd take a mid-2000's Boeing engineer's salary for an asshole boss. Hell, I've been told worse here on HN.
Plot twist: manager's child flew on a 737 MAX that crashed
We can hope but those types tend to fly in private jets.
I'm shocked people here believe that this was actually said. Or maybe I'm not.
It's laughable, but Hackernews loves a good, "everyone in management is evil" story.
I guarantee I am closer to the situation than you are. I have many heard similar, and worse statements, from executives of The Boeing Company many times in my career. Every single Boeing CEO that has left the company in the past 30 years has either been fired, or resigned in disgrace, for their various ethical, moral, and business management failures.
That’s 5 flamed out CEOs since 1996.
Does it shock you that a CEO who is on the record for preferring that his employees “Cower under their desks” in fear of him would also require that their employees prioritize the schedule of a flying barge over their child’s personal life?
https://mynorthwest.com/local/boeing-ceo-apologizes-for-sayi...
Or how about "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm" - can this statement by former CEO Harry Stonecipher be justified as anything other than evil, in the context of the damage and injury that has been caused by intentionally reducing Boeing’s engineering capability?
That executive has lost any human decency and should be fired.
Not just human decency. We all know that some CEOs will sacrifice your child for their goal. In fact, many people are ready to sacrifice other people children as long as they are distant enough, war wouldn't be a thing if we didn't.
But saying it out loud is another thing, it is, to me, a terrible blunder in terms of communication, and executives who talk like that should 100% get fired. They are the face of the company, what they say and how they say it matters. Maybe it matters even more than the technical part of their job. If they get a pass for saying things like that, that's even worse, because it means that it is what the shareholders and customers want to hear.
[flagged]
Do you have any reason to back up your claims?
See the guidelines “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
Just because this story points out that one executive many years ago said something very unsavory is not a generalization for all executives.
I don't know why it's so hard to believe. It's well established that people say (and do) very nasty stuff when under stress (see: war). It's also well established that people with power tend to minimize the distress of those less powerful. Between these two, how hard is it to imagine that some mandarin at Boeing would say something like this if he thinks his bonus/summer house/childrens' private school tuition are in jeopardy?
Of course there is not zero percent chance executive said it. If you dont believe so, you never listened to what people including executives actually say in practice.
Trying to insult OP does not make an argument.
> If you dont believe so, you never listened to what people including executives actually say in practice.
Yes.
> "I feel liberated," one top banker told the paper. "We can say 'retard' and 'pussy' without the fear of getting cancelled.… It's a new dawn."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-win-tech-bros-celebrating-1...
> I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
Given Boeings later history this is pretty chilling...
> Boeing (from MD originally)
This class of manager is the cause of most of Boeing’s woes.
This class of manager is the cause of most of society's woes imo
This sort of person, given any power, makes everyone's life worse
Awesome. Was this part of the NG FMS program? I find it interesting how the 747 FMS is newer than the 777s yet due to type similarity retains legacy features.
"Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
What was the context? Did someone’s child die?
I wouldn't think so. Most likely using a crass phrase to instill a feeling of urgency.
Probably didn't work. Remembered though.
> "no one had the original detailed design documents"
Is this normal for a comany like Boeing? It's not my area, but I would have guessed they would keep the documentation for everything on a product as important as a 747.
Not avionics, but I've spent most of my career in medical devices. A project's Design History File would indeed have the detailed design documentation of the system. The problem would be that word "detailed." The relevant standards state that the documentation should be sufficient for a normally-skilled engineer to recreate the (software) system, but how stringently that is applied can be very hand-wavy. And then there's the problem of drift where the software changes and the docs are updated, but perhaps not as precisely as they should be, and different people have different levels of documentation rigor. Well, you can see how it ends up 20 years later.
I'm actually dealing with exactly this problem on an old project right now :-(
> The original -400 code was written in Pascal if I'm remembering correctly.
Could it have been Ada 83?
Anyone interested should read Joe Sutter's book, 747. Sutter was the lead engineer for the development of the 747 and he has some awesome stories.
One interesting story is that Juan Trippe (CEO of PanAm) wanted Boeing to create a double-decker airplane. He was enamored with the idea of "ocean liners" cruising the sky. But Sutter (and other engineers) knew that it would be impossible to create what he wanted, so instead they proposed a wide-body aircraft (10 seats across). Nevertheless, Trippe insisted on a double-decker design.
The engineers then created two cabin mockups. One for a double decker, which was basically two narrow-body cabins stacked on top of each other. The other was the wide-body of the 747. Once Trippe saw the trade off, he realized that the spacious cabin of the 747 was the way to go.
But even then, when he saw the second level where the pilots go, he insisted on putting passengers up there too.
I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
I'm kind of torn between the top deck and the nose seats.
I've flown British Airways's business class on the upper deck, and I've flown Qantas' business class which is all on the lower deck starting at the nose. I wasn't quite at the front, but I was close enough to see the slightly more forward facing windows. I always thought it'd be great to sit in that first row and have that more forward facing view.
I had a blast on BA's though, as I was young and blowing through a bunch of airline miles on a transatlantic flight with my now wife. Getting to sit backwards on a plane was a little fun change too. Those BA seats (their last generation business class) are pretty bad by business class standards, even at the time, but they were alright on the narrower upper deck of a 747.
It's a shame, as I don't think I'll likely ever fly in a 747 again. I rarely fly Korean Air or Lufthansa, and I've got no plans to fly Air China.
I will say though, I really didn't like flying the 747 in economy. I did with Qantas a couple times, and it was noticeably louder and less pleasant than their A380s which had started flying at the time.
So my recommendation: fly a 747 at the front or upper deck if you can in business or first, at least once if you've never had the chance. Avoid it if you're flying economy. Most other wide body jets will be newer, quieter, and all around more pleasant.
I would have to imagine that the newer 747-8 would have the much lower pressurization and other comfort standards of its generation of aircraft in the 2000s; the problem is that it didn't really sell so most people did not get to fly in one.
> I would have to imagine that the newer 747-8 would have the much lower pressurization
Two small corrections:
1) If it would have had a change in internal pressurization, the -8 would have a higher pressurization to allow for a lower cabin altitude pressure.
2) The -8 does not have a higher pressurization, because they did not change the fuselage construction. Newer airplanes have lower cabin-altitudes thanks to the use of composite materials, allowing for better fatigue properties.
The -8 also has a lower maximum certified altitude than the -400. The -400 can go to 45,100 feet, the -8 is limited to 43,100 feet.
This is actually because the -8 wing is MORE efficient than yhe -400. There is a regulation that in case of a pressurization failure the airplane has to be able to descend below 15,000 feet in a certain time. The -8 wing has less drag, so it is easier to overspeed in descent, and they had to limit the maximum operation altitude to compensate.
Interesting! I did not know that, thanks!
I hated the top deck when flying east from NY to London. The rising sun poured in every time a crew member opened the cockpit door, waking me up. Best seat for me was the single one in the lower deck at the very nose of the aircraft.
The 747 was a great aircraft to fly in though. The tower of power effect on take-off really reassured you that you were going to get where you were going.
BA used to fly the on the Moscow to London route once a day. I remeber vividly the late night a320 flight was cancelled and we were stuck in the lounge until the early morning flight about 6 hours later.
Somewhere over the North Sea I decided to give the on board phone a go, and it worked. A early call to let my wife know I’d made it (there were only a few seats left on the morning flight and 180 passengers to fit on).
Next time I flew it the phones weren’t working, and it wasn’t long until they’d all been removed, so I’m glad I got to tick that off my list.
Likely my last 747 flight ever was far less salubrious. I was supposed to be flying Toronto to jfk to Heathrow, but the Toronto flight was cancelled and I got downgraded to economy and put on a 747 to Amsterdam.
> The tower of power effect on take-off really reassured you that you were going to get where you were going.
I have the memory of being struck by how much the overhead storage compartments were shaking at takeoff. Not reassuring at all, but they stopped shaking once we got off the ground.
What do you mean by this tower of power effect? Was it just that the 747 had a more powerful take-off or something due to 4 engines?
On a normal takeoff, a 4 engine aircraft has less excess power available than a 2 engine aircraft. Aircraft engines are sized to provide a minimum climb gradient with a single engine inoperative. A twin engine aircraft with an with an engine failure had lost 50% of its power. A quad with an engine failure is only down 25%. So the twin’s engines are oversized to compensate.
There was quite a kick when the engines spooled up. I flew mainly SFO/LAX to SYD and the few minutes of full thrust you just kind of sat back in your seat and didn't try to do anything.
More or less. I remember the first time I flew in a tri-jet (after a 747), I was a bit worried on take-off about how we were still on the ground as the end of the runway approached.
To clarify slightly, I first heard "tower of power" used to describe the Saturn V. So two icons of the late 60s.
We got front lower deck seats once when I was a kid. My sister and I had extra open floor space for playing. It was great.
Oh no - you were THOSE kids.
Actually we weren't (& aren't) able to afford this kind of thing. Dad worked for the airline & somehow got this perk, just once.
I had a round trip BOS↔LHR that was 747 eastbound, 777 westbound; I ended up on the upper deck of the 747, which was fascinating as an otherwise casual flyer. One especially memorable bit was landing - you're basically three stories up and suddenly the wheels are on the ground, and you're still three stories up :-)
(I'm still happy to have traded that for planes with a much higher cabin pressure-altitude - and would trade even further for business-class transatlantic non-cruise ships. But it was definitely fun to have had the experience.)
A higher pressure-altitude or a higher pressure? Can't imagine what's good about a higher pressure-altitude. Less creaking making you less worried the plane will explode?
Higher cabin pressure, but it is marketed in pressure-corresponding-to-altitude; Norwegian Airlines for example keeps their cabins at 6000ft, ie. equivalent atmospheric pressure to being at 6000ft. (Looks like "equivalent effective cabin altitude" or just "cabin altitude" is the more accurate term.) So yeah, I worded that backwards, higher pressure, lower altitude, is more comfortable for passengers (me) especially on longer flights.
> I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
I used to fly frequently between SYD-LAX in business class on Qantas B744s. 11K (top deck, right hand side exit row window seat) was one of the best seats in the house.
The only passengers who had it better were those downstairs in First, where the curvature of the nose pretty much let them see out the front of the aircraft through the “side” windows.
One thing I remember from his book is that the 747 was initially of secondary importance within Boeing, behind the SST. This wasn't Boeing's flagship, so to speak, until SST was canceled.
This seems like an odd version of the story. My understanding is Boeing designed lots of military aircraft, not all reached production. The 747 is the result of some of that design work.
You should read the book, if you're interested. From the book (p.84):
"Time and time again there appears in print the logical but false assumption that Boeing took its losing military C-5 bid and revamped it as the commercial 747. In fact, the 747 would be an entirely original design that owes nothing to the C-5."
That said, in the same chapter he talks about how GE developed a high-bypass turbofan engine for the C-5 and it was only because they had such an engine that the 747 became possible.
But really my only point is that you should read the book if you're interested.
> only because they had such an engine that the 747 became possible.
Many engine manufacturers were experimenting with high-bypass ratios; Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce. GE was just first to production. If they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
The engines drive the design.
I understand that the payload typically drives the design, and the wings drive (or rather, limit) the generational improvements. Aircraft are reengined quite often.
That was also said about the B-707, which was supposed to have some parts commonality with their KC-135 Stratotanker built for the USAF. But as development progressed, the airliner and the tanker diverged.
The B-747 went through a similar process. Boeing was proposing a big cargo aircraft to the USAF (the CX-HLS), but that was never built. Lockheed got the C-5 contract instead, which satisfied the USAF's need for a really big cargo plane. So the B-747 was built as a commercial plane, mostly to Pan Am's requirements.
Military-civilian commonality was mostly wishful thinking at the management levels, as it turned out.
It still does happen though, so not totally wishful thinking - but it seems to go the other way, commercial to miliary e.g. like the KC-30A tanker which are converted from standard commercial A330-200s (and as I understand the new version will be from A330neos).
The 707 was redesigned with a wider fuselage to carry the number of passengers the airlines wanted.
The Lockheed L-100 Hercules does exist and is apparently a civilian C-130
You're going to love the TU-114!
That makes sense because a high cockpit also combines well with nose loading which some military freighters have.
Nose loading was the reason the 747 had the aircrew sit on the top floor. It was thought that the SST project would displace all extent subsonic airliners, so the 747 was designed to be easily configured for freight after a short timeframe serving pax.
My memory of the 747 was that it was originally the military who paid for the design. They wanted an aircraft that could be loaded from the front. This led to the bubble at the front of the plane. For whatever reason, the military didn't bite so they repurposed it as a commercial aircraft.
The upper deck was really intended as a first class lounge and I think I was up there once. But obviously wasn't very economical and got turned into business class seating once that came in.
Qantas (I think, it’s possible it was BA) used the upper deck for economy and it was my favourite place to sit. The window seat had a little locker between your seat and the window (the curvature of the fuselage meant the seat couldn’t be right up against the window). It was a great place to keep all your stuff accessible without having to bother the aisle seat to get up to the overhead storage.
Highly recommended, too. I was completely captivated by this when I was an elementary school student.
I sat under and in front of the pilots once. Also highly recommended.
It’s such a beautiful plane. Despite having worked for Airbus, the 747 triggers emotions for me that the A380 simply doesn’t. It represents an era of aerospace engineering that will not come back (in many cases probably for the better - but still!)
As an aside, if anyone is going to Southern Germany, it's worth going to Technik Museum Speyer, where you can really go into the guts of the 747. They also have a Russian Buran space shuttle.
The next day you could go to Technik Museum Sinnsheim, which is about half an hour from Speyer, and has both a Concorde and a Tupolev Tu-144 (both of which you can go inside).
All truly marvels of engineering.
I've been to this museum, it's absolutely incredible. It's their version of the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.
The thing you neglect to mention is that the Speyer 747 is suspended 30 meters above the ground. It's breathtaking.
https://simpleflying.com/technik-museum-speyer-lufthansa-boe...
The thing you neglect to mention is that the Speyer 747 is suspended 30 meters above the ground. It's breathtaking.
Fair. We had been to Sinnsheim a couple of times before Speyer. In Sinnsheim, they have the Concorde/Tu-144 on poles on top of one of the buildings. So, the 30 meters high suspension of the 747 was not so impressive anymore I guess :).
The museums are also great for kids. We went several times with our daughter and she loved it every time.
Don’t forget to top it off with a visit to the Hermann Oberth Museum near Nuremberg.
Very interesting! Looks like nice museums to go to. When I DuckDuckGo these museums, they seem to be related somehow!? https://www.technik-museum.de/
I recently visited Stuttgart to go to the Mercedes Benz Museum. They too have a lot of technical stuff of course, and history. Really recommend it!
It was the last aircraft designed using a slide rule and conventional drafting --- the conventional wisdom is that if one printed up a compleat set of blueprints and loaded it on the plane it would be too heavy to take off, though of course, the anticipation was that it would soon be replaced by supersonic passenger aircraft, so it was designed to be easily converted to cargo.
Amazing aircraft, well-deserving of the "Queen of the Skies" moniker, I can still vividly remember going up to the upper deck and cockpit and the view out of the front/side windows.
My lead engineer at Boeing, Burt Berlin, showed me his (paper) design notebook for the 747. All done with a slide rule. He was an engineer's engineer, and a super nice guy.
There's an old quip about aircraft design that "a plane isn’t ready to fly until the documentation is heavier than the airplane". Can't find a source for it though.
It’s beautiful because Boeing started, not with the smallest, but with the largest plane possible. Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde, a completely orthogonal project to round up everyone’s identical patriotism, and both projects were absolutely beautiful in their own way!
> Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde
Oh gracious no, Airbus started with the utilitarian A300 widebody twin[1].
Concorde was Sud Aviation and BAC joint venture, nothing to do with Airbus which didn't even exist at that time.
[1]The original A300A might have been interesting, having a fuselage as wide as the much later 777, but Airbus got cold feet and scaled it down to the dull and worthy A300B. Every Airbus widebody until the A380 was constrained by that decision.
Well. If you squint a little, Sud Aviation and BAC + others became Airbus. Airbus was first a consortium and then a proper successor (through a merger) to several European aircraft manufacturers. Sud Aviation's acquirer Aérospatiale was an initial member of the Airbus consortium and BAC's acquirer British Aerospace joined slightly later in 1979.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#History has a diagram of all the predecessor companies.
Flew one from Chicago to Tokyo quite a few years back, what a great flight that was!
Was it on Flying Tiger? I worked on cargo 747's for them in another lifetime; they had a daily Chicago-Tokyo 747 cargo flight.
More likely United I'd say
I'm just a layman, but somehow Airbus doesn't embody the airplane magic.. yet I'm very curious what this means to you. Any easy to grasp details you could describe ?
But really, it was just about four-engine planes becoming too expensive to run. Two-engine planes won. 777 burns 30% less fuel per passenger and has almost the same cabin width. And top level became a flop because it's too narrow for a first class cabin by today's standards and all other uses for them make no sense. Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition in which C-5 Galaxy won: it was meant to be a cargo plane with a small - top floor - passenger cabin.
I'd guess they'll continue in cargo service for many more years, just as the DC10 and MD11 did (despite the grounding after the Louisville crash, I expect they will fly again before finally being retired).
Fedex continues to fly the MD11; UPS retired their fleet.
Yes. There are recently built 747-8's that will in service for a couple more decades.
> Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition
Yes, but it turns out the hump is great for area ruling (aerodynamic drag reduction at transonic speeds), as observed by the 747-300's extended hump giving lower drag (but higher weight, of course) than the short-hump versions.
Slightly pedantic, but this is not completely correct.
It had a lower Cd with the extended hump, but it still had a higher drag, due to the larger wetted area.
Could you expand upon that for us interested laymen?
Ah. It was based on a series of performance graphs from Boeing, dating back to my aircraft-design days where that very question was discussed and I was baffled enough by the contradiction to ask for detailed clarifications to the presenting professor.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to those old notes, and couldn't quickly find what I was looking for online.
So for now, due to lack of proper supporting arguments, I would say: scratch that.
The Cd is normally normalized by the wing area, and the wing planform was the same between the 747-200 and 747-300. So if the Cd was lower for the -300, the total drag should be assumed to be smaller.
I think the top floor is there because the crew cabin has to be high so the nose can swing up. The cables and wiring from the cabin can't be easily disconnected to allow such access. You will notice other large cargo variants of airliners load cargo only through the side of the fuselage.
Yes and no. The C5 has an upper level too. The whole setup solves a lot of problems at once. Opening nose makes for faster cargo operations which the military cares about for a bunch of reasons. There are usually people associated with military cargo so might as well seat them up there.
Any large cargo aircraft has primary loading inline with centerline, side doors just aren't efficient. It's either via front, via rear or both.
Me321/323 was I think first heavy cargo with nose clamshell doors, but after that everyone settled on nose rising up, clamshell rear. It also had the top deck.
I understand that for the 747, they initially just had a cockpit bulge atop the fuselage. However, this created too much drag, which they reduced by extending the bulge aft. They didn't need this space for flight operations, so it was naturally then used for additional passenger space.
This is correct.
For context, when the 747 was being developed, simultaneously Boeing was developing the SST, Britain and France were developing Concorde, and the Soviets had their own supersonic Tupolevs in development. Boeing was anticipating that supersonic aircraft would render the subsonic 747 obsolete for passengers overnight, so it was designed to be easily convertible to freight.
And interestingly, the Tu-144 flew passengers before the Concorde did!
> it was just about four-engine planes becoming too expensive to run
Four engines are also less safe than twin engines. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but Boeing did the math and made the case.
Isn't that because the twins are designed to a higher standard, due to regulations such as ETOPS? It's not something inherent in two vs four engine designs?
I remember when the US Navy was rejecting single engine aircraft, and the F135 had be be proven literally bulletproof before they would even look at the F-35.
Engine designs get better and better over time, and tend to become new minimums in safety standards.
My understanding is that the 747 has the highest safety record of any commercial plane. Is that not true?
Hard to beat other planes that have not had fatal crashes or hull losses, especially when you consider the Tenerife crash.
The Tenerife crash was due to pilot error, not any problem with the 747.
While true, aircraft fatality statistics generally are not split that way.
The 747 is a safe aircraft, but there have been a lot of fatalities associated with it, due to pilot error, terrorism, improper repair/maintenance, etc.
Can you link to the source?
My time working on Flight Controls at Boeing.
Not sure if you ever make it over to HKG but there are quite a few cargo 747s that still seem to be making the rounds. CX and others have them on the GA / cargo side, and when on Lantau you often see (and hear!) them on final or takeoff.
I think CX would hate to retire them because from what I understand their load capacity is unparalleled. And you can load horses in them! There'll always be money from that for HAECO to keep them aloft.
It's even better when you're at the bus terminal at HKIA and watching them fly overhead...
My dad took me to Frankfurt AM to watch the first 747 to land there. Wow!
Can you at least explain the reasoning then?
there's a book on this, "How Boeing Defied the Airbus Challenge: An Insider's Account"
I don't know if it lays out the safety math but it goes very deep on twin engine safety and some of the fights over the a340 vs. 777 regulations
Engines became reliable enough for regulators to allow two engine planes to cross large bodies of water. (ETOPS) That's what really killed 4 engine planes.
Twin engines are actually safer than four.
Is this because of something analogous to an expected value calculation? Like the increased probability of failure of a single engine when carrying 4, combined with the lower excess power per engine, means that the safety margin of a 4 engine plane is worse? Or is it something to do with the doubling of the number of critical parts that could fail? I'm struggling to come up with a workable argument why 2 is safer, it seems counterintuitive. I don't have enough of the puzzle.
EDIT: Never mind, I see you wrote more down below about this. It's increased risk of a catastrophic engine failure bringing down the entire plane, not an engine simply dying and forcing a landing. Four engines = twice as many chances for that to happen.
There's an enormous amount of energy in a jet engine with that spinning turbine. Then there's all the heat, fuel, and fire in it. When that energy lets go, you don't want to be anywhere near it.
It's amazing that jet engines work at all! Yet the safety record of the engines is incredibly good.
But twins typically have even larger turbines, no?
High bypass fans are newer engine designs, nothing to do with being used in twins.
Though in general, a new engine design necessitates a new wing design, which means a new airplane.
> Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful.
If this article is going to be so poetic, I'm not sure I can continue reading it. Let's just stop for a moment and remember that the 747's, er, distinctive shape wasn't some designer's fancy, it was dictated by necessity: while it was being designed, Boeing feared that in the near future all (long-distance) passenger travel would be supersonic, so it wanted the 747 to also be attractive as a freighter, so they added the possibility of loading cargo from the front, so the cockpit had to be moved up. Simple as that. Of course, the supersonic revolution didn't happen, instead the 747 ushered in the era of widebody jets, and all the fond memories it created now make it look beautiful to the nostalgic. But in the end, Boeing's engineers were proven right: currently there are around 300 747s still in operation, but only 29 of them are passenger variants.
Ok, moving on...
> Most 747 routes spanned oceans and continents, giving travelers a speedier option than the Queen Mary had across the Atlantic, or the California Zephyr across the West.
You've got your Boeing planes mixed up there buddy! That was the 707, not the 747. The Queen Mary was retired in 1967, and the 747 first flew in 1969, so there obviously was no timespan where the one was an alternative to the other.
Also:
> In the cabin, the heft makes the plane feel almost still, even at 500 miles an hour and 35,000 feet; it is the only plane I have ever flown in whose takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses.
"Only"? Not "First"? Ever flown an A380?
And "takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses" is quite an exaggeration for both the 747 and A380. They are nice to fly, but takeoff and landings are definitely perceptible. Unless the author was black-out drunk for both takeoff and landing.
One interesting thing is that the 747 was born as a temporary transition product, from a failed proposal after Boeing lost the competition against the C-5 Galaxy.
In the era when Joe Sutter designed it, almost the whole world believed that supersonic passenger aviation was right in front of us. Boeing put almost all of its core resources into the Mach 2 Boeing 2707. The Jumbo Jet was only a temporary plan based on a freighter foundation from the beginning. Its later conversion to cargo use was deeply considered from the start (which makes its situation today much better than the A380).
What happened later we all know. The Tu-144 fell from the sky over Paris. Concorde barely entered service because Britain and France did not want to pay cancellation penalties. Boeing was almost dragged down by the 2707. And the 747 became Boeing’s savior.
Ironically, as engine bypass ratios increased, newer airliners became more and more fuel-efficient, also slower and slower. This former "slow temporary backup freighter" is now the highest and fastest mainline airliner in the sky, able to fly above 40,000 feet and cruise close to Mach 1.
Another perhaps sad point is that before 9/11, the Jumbo Jet dominated the sky of large aircraft. So almost all the well-known bomb attacks people can easily remember were on 747.
Qantas gave its final 747s a nice send-off too, back in July 2020, flying its final commercial 747 flight as QF7474.
https://www.qantas747.com/
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-...
1969 was truly the pinnacle of US aerospace industry - Concord, Boeing 747 and Apollo 11 all happened during this year.
The Concorde wasn't made in the US. It was a UK/France partnership.
My bad! Global aerospace industry then.
The US was still very much involved in its development and testing, so I think we can still chalk it up as a win for multi-country collaboration, eh :3
The biggest impact the US had on Concorde was banning it from flying supersonic overland.
> The US was still very much involved in its development and testing
... Wait, how was that? The Concorde was essentially the Franco-British entry in what was once a rather fierce international race to build a supersonic passenger jet (then seen as the future); the US entries were the (failed) Lockheed L-2000 and Boeing 2707.
If the US had been open to collaboration, it is likely that the UK would’ve gone in with them, and we might live in an alternate universe where there was a UK/US Concorde-ish thing, and maybe a French mini-Concorde (the French design which got subsumed into Concorde was particularly small, only 70 passengers). In our universe, though, US manufacturers were sceptical of working with BAC because they believed that govt funding for a foreign design would be hard to come by.
Jeez it's on the Wikipedia page, not sure why you wouldn't consider these things "direct involvement":
- NASA Skylancer built to validate wing design and improve landings.
- NASA simulations at Ames that predicted ground effect pitch issues that was incorporated into pilot training.
Concorde wasn't the US aerospace industry.
This is such an absurd statement. What US aerospace has created post 1969 is nothing short of remarkable in comparison. (And we can be proud of the Apollo era too.)
> This is such an absurd statement.
Oh come on, it's hardly "absurd."
> What US aerospace has created post 1969 is nothing short of remarkable in comparison. (And we can be proud of the Apollo era too.)
What are you referring to?
If you want to chart progress over time, consider this: In 1919, people were still flying biplanes and civilian aviation barely existed. Fifty years later, in 1969, you've got the 747 -- consider the progress made over those fifty years! Fifty years from then, in 2019, you've still got the 747 -- alongside, as the article notes, smaller and less remarkable aircraft "that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable."
So what, pray tell, is so remarkable?
The onboard WiFi was terrible prior to 1970.
And no internet access!
That's just an epoch issue. Set the date to 2003 and it should work.
The efficiency and the safety. Modern planes are disgustingly safe to the point that hull loss is almost unheard of. For 50 years the industry has optimized for safety and fuel efficiency. And the modern machines are marvels in that.
True, but still incremental improvements over proven designs - maybe a sign of very strict safety standards making new designs and differentiation more expensive than just the development.
Or more likely, that’s exactly how you make incredibly safe systems.
Not by introducing clean sheet unproven designs but by taking what works and improving any deficiencies over and over again.
Today’s airliners cruise slower than a 747.
For very rational economic reasons, underpinned by the same fundamental physical principle that makes my car more fuel-efficient doing 60 instead of 85.
Not due to any technical limitation, and that is just one single metric.
But they do so much more efficiently, and the speed difference is minimal (Boeing 747-8 cruises at 706 mph, 787 Dreamliner at 690 mph).
There’s nothing sexy about incremental efficiency advances.
https://archive.is/PZO0r
Somehow archive.is has mostly stopped working for me on many mainstream sites (Bloomberg, NYT, WSJ, etc...).
Guess I probably wont get a chance to fly on one, flying on the 747 was on my bucket list.
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
I flew 747 last month with Lufthansa and asked one of the crew how long they will keep it in operation. «I retire in two years so I don’t care» a very German response but at least they hadn’t made any announcement that he seem to be aware of.
Always fun to be on the second floor despite the seat configuration being a bit dated.
Oh nice, that makes finding a flight on a 747 so much easier! Sounds like I have an excuse to visit Germany next year.
A good excuse:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48710175
Lufthansa first class on the 747 is definitely something to try once.
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.
Yeah economy class on a 747 sucks as much as it does on any other airliner.
On the A380 you get to enjoy the higher ceiling also in economy. It does make quite a difference for how cramped you feel, even though the leg room might be the same.
And both B747 and A380 fly much calmer than the smaller, lighter widebodies, which is equally nice for passengers on all classes.
The A380 is probably the smoothest flying plane I've been in, but in my experience it has one slightly annoying behavior quirk that degrades from my ability to enjoy it. Granted, I've only flown in one a few times, so I may have just been unlucky. But at cruise, the autopilot surges and coasts on a slow repeating schedule. Ease off and float for a bit, get just a little bit low and throttle up slightly to catch it, rinse and repeat. Not terribly noticeable when awake, but when I try to sleep I'm acutely aware of that sensation.
So far my personal favorite is the 787. About the only thing 'bad' I can say about it is that all the mechanical bits are kinda loud, like the flaps and stuff, and are very noisy inside the cabin. But it cruises so nice, and the lower pressurization altitude and increase in humidity is noticeable on a long flight.
I've done a lot of travelling between Australia and Europe via Dubai on the A380, and I've definitely noticed the same thing, you can really feel it. You can also see it on the interactive map thing on the ones that have the 'virtual cockpit' view - the vertical speed goes positive for a bit, then back to zero, then negative for a bit, then back to zero, and repeat, all 10 hours or so of cruise on the long leg!
The 787 is nice but I find the seat width quite cramped in economy, and unfortunately premium economy isn't great value either to pay or for points upgrade on any of the airlines I fly...
Granted, like any widebody it's a bit less claustrophobic. But the personal space, the legroom, the size of the lavatories, etc. is no better at least to my recollection; I've only flown on a 747 a handful of times and it's been at least 10 years.
No, it is much nicer than the 737/A320 class. Just thinking of the curve of a 737 makes my neck knot up. Bigger planes like the 747/757/767/777 are much more comfortable as well as modern planes like the A220/E195. 737 class planes are so ubiquitous that many passengers have no idea another experience is possible.
My dislike for widebody airliners is that the odds of getting a window seat are much smaller.
What’s even the point of flying if you can’t look at the world from up high?
Reserve your seat then. Doesn’t cost that much on most airlines.
I always do, but, just this Saturday, due to some air-traffic meltdown (perfectly understandable considering the heat wave), we had our aircraft swapped for a slightly smaller one, and I had to renegotiate seats to be together with my kid.
The 767 2-3-2 layout is my favorite, with only 1 middle seat per row, yet still two aisles so you can use one while the other is blocked, or walk little loops if it's not.
Wife and I just flew on an A330 in a 2-4-2 economy layout. With both of the outboard seats on one side, it was not bad.
I’ve flown on a wide variety of planes, and never found any difference in comfort from the plane itself. It’s all about the seats.
The 737 is noticeably louder than other planes on the ground and in the passenger cabin and especially for the pilot. 787/A350 and the A220 have a higher cabin pressure and better air quality that helps you feel better. It could be that most of my wide body experience was going over the Atlantic on 747s in the 1990s and a few times circa 2012 flying 767s on the JFK-LAX route which felt luxurious. As I see it, I’d rather fly coach on a better plane than “first” on a worse plane. (e.g. first on a 737 is like business on a widebody, in an A380 first-class is crazy over the top) 737 first still has your ears ringing, under-oxygenated, feeling cramped inside a small cylinder, etc. Luggage bins are nicer on a big plane too.
I’d take first in anything, even crappy fake “first,” over coach in anything. Additional personal room trumps everything else for me. I don’t really care how big the fuselage is, I care how hard my knees are crammed into the seat in front of me.
[dead]
[dead]
One time I got an entire center row of 5 seats going from Seattle->Heathrow overnight.
I had a long haul flight from DFW-SYD that had plenty of empty seats to the point they offered an upgrade to guarantee you'd be the only person in the row. Best spent $100 ever related to airfare.
This is or was a feature on Air New Zealand. You could buy three adjacent seats and call it a SkyCouch where two people can lie down and cuddle. Not sure how much the seats actually transformed into a couch. They were also very clear that clothes must remain on.
One time I was on a 747 YYZ→LHR with a total of 14 passengers.
I had that SF to Heathrow once, though I recollect four seats? Only time I’ve ever had a lie-flat bed on an aircraft.
3-4-3 and 3-5-3 are relatively common on 747 and 777 IIRC.
> Upper deck, perhaps a different story.
I only ever flew on the upper deck in coach configuration, and the last time I did that was about twenty five years ago on SAA. It wasn't anything special, but it was a little quieter.
I've flown upper deck on a 747 in Business (BA Club World).
It felt like a private jet up there, very cool. And that's even with the awful club world seats where you had to step over your neighbour to get to the aisle.
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.
Lol imagine sitting through 8 hours of agony for no reason. Do you actually enjoy flying? I'm sure I would find it agony even if I had the Emirates suite with the bedroom and shower (which is still more cramped than a 50 euro hotel room)
I would at least explore the city for a few days to have a break.
The only flying I enjoy is when I'm the one in the front left hand seat holding the yoke :)
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.
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.
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.
Flying on one in August, upper deck, courtesy of a lowball points redemption through United.
If this is truly on your bucket list, you should be able to pull it off.
I just asked my favorite stochastic parrot to find the cheapest flight from SFO on a 747 to anywhere. It found a one-way flight on Lufthansa for $500. If you can, I'd encourage you to spring for a business class flight on the top deck (probably $4000 one-way).
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.
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.
And the context of the different regulatory environment. Those fancy cabins in the 60s/70s were because prices/routes were controlled by government. Unable to compete on price, airlines competed on luxury. Which, at the time, largely boiled down to who which had the shortest miniskirts in the TV ads.
Today's flying cattlecar hell is the result of the opposite, a dramatic market-driven race to the bottom of quality... followed by a price bounce to see how much money they can pull out of use before we give up and drive.
The day we have self-driving cars good enough that we can sleep, domestic air travel is dead. Ill take 10 hours curlled up in the back seat of my car rather than the 10+ hours it takes getting to/from airports for a domestic flight.
Or we could just build trains (in the US, other wealthy places seem to already get this)
Seriously it is embarrassing how under developed trains are in the US. Yes there are some routes that don’t make sense but there are tons that do. It makes no sense. We’ve simply resigned to this general feeling of “well everything is probably too far apart and even if they aren’t it’s just not going to happen.”
there is a large, well connected domestic auto industry that wants Americans to keep driving bigger and more gas guzzling cars because that's the only thing they know how to sell to Americans these days.
Though this is not really limited to the legacy automakers; the Hyperloop was a media stunt to try and divert investment away from transit, and in some places, it actually worked.
Trains will also be killed by fully autonomous cars. Trains still need stations, loading times, tickets, horrible food, waiting in lobbies, luggage limits, government ID ... check in. Trains are literally unable to ever deliver door-to-door transport. And, in north america, biulding tens of thousands of stations (one in every small town) plus millions of miles of track ... it just isnt going to happen in our lifetimes.
Train travel is not this horrible experience you’re implying. When I’m in DC I swipe a card, walk on, walk off. Same with New York and Amsterdam. Even Netherlands into France is walk on/walk off - they recommend you get there 20min early. Luggage limits? First off, how often do you need to haul multiple suitcases and bags? Even then, I have walked on to trains with multiple suitcases. It is definitely not a big deal. This reads to me like how whenever bikes come up suddenly everyone has to haul a refrigerator uphill in the rain.
Autonomous cars would absolutely be the most convenient, comfortable experience. But it is incredibly inefficient/wasteful and it will never be economical. Trains are a great way to travel. Also, how far are you expecting autonomous cars to take you? I can’t imagine it’s economical after more than a couple of miles. It’s certainly wasteful out the gate because everyone expects to have their own cars in the US in particular. And not everything needs to be door to door, nor do we need trains for literally every town in the US. These are all absurd bars you’re setting that no one is calling for. You’re basically saying “trains aren’t luxurious enough for me and don’t go literally everywhere so therefore they should be killed.”
There’s also the wrinkle that we keep being promised they’re about to be here and yet we’ve seen very minimal deployment of any kind so far. I just don’t think personal, autonomous cars are going to be here in any reasonable timeframe, if for no other reason then how litigious the US is, and trains are just far more efficient at the end of the day for most cases.
Edit: forgot the food and waiting around… at least you have food available to you at a train station. If you’re in a car stuck in traffic, you just have to grin and bear it with no options. There’s also nothing stopping you from packing your own food, while eating in a vehicle isn’t yours is generally frowned upon in a car.
> When I’m in DC I swipe a card, walk on, walk off. Same with New York and Amsterdam. Even Netherlands into France is walk on/walk off
What train did you take to France? Everytime I go to Belgium I have to be careful to pick a train that doesn't require me to book a ticket on a specific train. I really like the "I'll get the next train whenever I reach the station" that domestic trains have. For long distance international trains that seems to only still be available to a limited set of trains to Belgium.
Eurostar. Buy tickets online, walk up to gate, QR code beeps on a little scanner, walk onto train. That was it. No TSA-like security experience, no person checking anything (except one guy who walked around on the train and scanned one ticket which registered all our tickets at once, pretty uneventful). UK is a notable exception but they’re also kind of insane about government surveillance/security, especially post-brexit. Also not EU.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to require you to buy tickets ahead of time when you’re going to other countries. All travel requires this and taking autonomous cars across countries is generally not a realistic option nor will it be except in edge cases (and for deep pockets).
Anyway point is daily train travel is generally easy and affordable. It’s not this grueling, burdensome process in places that have actually invested in it. It can be a great way to move lots of people consistently, and a lot of the US would benefit from it. Sooo many cities with crazy traffic between them forcing what should be a 30-60min trip into hours. A train would rip between these places.
Daily commuter trains between Austin/dallas/Houston for instance would be great. Austin to Dallas is a 3-4hr drive. A TGV, decades old tech, would do it in 60min flat. Could you imagine?
Oh, okay. I misunderstood what you meant by walk on/walk off.
I find the exact planning ahead of time more annoying than a security checkpoint, so was hoping you found a better solution.
The Channel Tunnel has security checks because it's a 30km undersea tunnel, and separates an island country with a different approach to weapons to its neighbour. There are no security checks on any other trains in the UK.
It's also not necessary (in Europe) to buy tickets any differently when crossing borders. Advance-purchase tickets are used for long-distance high-speed trains where they don't want people sitting, or wish to spread the demand throughout the day to avoid crowding — that applies whether or not a border is crossed.
I can buy a ticket (paper or electronic) moments before the train from Copenhagen to Malmö leaves, since it's a medium-distance regional train without reserved seating.
Duly noted
Sure, but when the 747 was new and gas was a few cents a gallon?
An airplane is a very efficient way to move people. There is no ground friction, the route is pretty direct, and once the airplane is loaded 100 passenger-miles a gallon is not unreasonable.
Even today the EU has to ban short-haul flights along rail corridors because jets are still competitive. I say this as someone who likes trains and chooses them whenever possible.
"because jets are still competitive"
Yes, because airports and everything around is heavily subsidized and there is no tax on jet fuel.
"There is no ground friction"
And that argument is not so strong considering that air friction grows quadratic with speed.
And considering side effects like climate change - contrails combined with lots of other chemicals in the jet fuel are really not helping, their effect is worse than just the CO2 released which is also already huge.
So high speed trains are superior in almost every way - once a rail network is build. That is the advantage of planes - they just require start and landing strip.
I cannot fathom why you think airport subsidies matter here. Airports are way, way cheaper than HSR.
Yeah drag grows quadratically with speed but reduces with altitude. At 40k ft a modern jet delivers up to 150 pmpg.
Yes the carbon emissions argument is a good one, and I personally prefer taking trains when they're available. I think that people are not appreciative enough of how efficient air travel is.
I just don’t understand how anybody can take a domestic flight and go “yeah, that sounds way better than a train.“ Even the worst train experience is better than a midtier plane experience. Plus unless you’re traveling particularly far, once you factor in all the nonsense of getting to an airport, through security, then out of the airport when you arrive, train is often the faster method.
I don’t need a plane to travel 1-10mi and long distance trains are on the whole far more pleasant than domestic flights. Plus you don’t have to get there 90min-2hr early to go through invasive security theater.
I bet if you pay the equivalent 60s/70s dollars to fly today you'll get much better service than back then! Modern first class cabins are a class above what was available back then.
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!
Air travel has also become ~100x safer on a per-passenger basis:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's one pilot's view of the glamorous days of the past: https://youtu.be/JjKSAp2ssY8?t=433
Poor safety was a big problem, too.
We would all have been better off if Boeing had replaced the 737 with the 757 as intended. Its quieter, more comfortable, and a better aircraft all around.
[dead]
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.
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.
Considering who the current face of the country is and how we are acting on the world stage, it’s the least they can do.
This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America. Because as long as there is anything to criticize about America (which there always will be), some people simply cannot make a single truly positive statement about America, or even things that happened in or came from America.
Slate is even worse than The Atlantic in this regard.
Finally the explanation for why the Trump campaign slogan "Keep America Great" resonated so well against that kind of opposition backdrop.
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
Right can’t say a single word without bringing up Left first! What’s their obsession with them? Why they seek constant validation from Left? Pretty clear who’s hateful! Given the current mess, it’s also clear who hates America.
Also, liberals aren't the left.
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
The right gets away with it because they are disingenuous children who argue in bad faith. Don't blame the people criticizing the US; those criticisms are usually valid and reasonable. The right needs to remember that being able to criticize the government/country was a founding principle of the US, and that just because someone says something critical, it doesn't mean hate. Seriously, it's like they have a child's level of discourse.
(In reality, they know exactly what they're doing, of course. The hypocrisy and simple ragebait is entirely the point. It's just bad faith bullshit.)
they literally made a positive statement in the quote you're talking about
> This is why the right gets away with saying liberals hate America.
This is a form of victim blaming. The right side of American politics gets away with it not because the left complains, but because the right doesn’t get punished at the polls for doing it.
They don’t get punished at the polls because people accept, or are at least willing to entertain the implication, that the left wing dislikes America. And what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician? Would you want to work for a CEO who publicly disdains the company? (Gil Amelio’s infamous quote about steering the sinking Apple ship comes to mind.)
As long as the Democratic base insists on caveating every American achievement with the Omnicause, it will keep playing into the Gingrichian rhetoric.
> what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician?
I don't know? Ask everyone who voted for a second Grump term. Every one of his rambles is some kind of sour puss complaint about our country, and yet people are still lapping it up!
I'd say the better framework is constructive versus destructive. The average American just doesn't want to think about constructive solutions or constructive criticism. The nuance required for incremental improvement is just too much work. But tell them you're going to smash things and hurt people, and they'll buy right in. It's essentially pan-religious fundamentalism.
Of course then the corpos are all too happy to step in with their own constructive but proprietary and anti-individual-liberty solutions. Which points back to the real motives for why the destructive memes end up being so popularized to begin with - destruction creates a power vacuum for the corpos to step into, while constructive governmental solutions get corrupted by lobbyists to overtly benefit corpos.
> what sense does it make to vote for an unpatriotic politician?
I really dislike the concept of "patriotism". What does it even mean? I think you'll get different answers if you get different people.
If people think that being critical of the US makes someone "unpatriotic", then that's their problem. If that makes a critical politician less electable, so be it. The alternative -- politicians censoring themselves and pretending everything is amazing -- is much worse.
And I'm not sure where the right is coming from anyway. The whole concept of MAGA is that the US kinda sucks right now and Trump is the savior who will fix it. If anyone has been critical of the US, it's been Trump and the MAGA crowd. But of course hypocrisy is never a problem for the right.
I think it mostly about perspective of history.
For those that were attracted to it, Trump presented the idea that America and it's people are good at good at their core, and this can be brought back.
Those same people view rhetoric from the other side as saying America is and was fundamentally evil and corrupt. They take this personally as a condemnation of them and their family.
He only presented that idea to a certain slice of Americans. If you were a Haitian American, you probably ate cats and dogs according to him.
I looked up Gil Amelio’s “infamous” quote and it doesn’t seem incorrect given what Apple was going through at the time. Steve Jobs had just sold 1.5 million shares of Apple stock and tanked the stock, would you accuse Steve Jobs of hating Apple?
Toxic positivity is when you can’t criticize something even when it deserves criticism. Is America full of brilliant people? Yes. Is it in a steep decline at the moment? Also yes. Apple thrived because Steve Jobs did a coup and steered the ship. America needs the same, but not from an incompetent nincompoop like the current moron.
How is this kind of ritual flagellation supposed to mitigate Trump though?
Ironically, it's this ritual self-flagellation that helped elect Trump.
Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America. And if you don't trust the media, then it's a lot easier to believe Trump's lies.
I feel like it's the other way around: Trump got elected because he was extremely critical of the US, and spun that as "America sucks right now because the liberals have ruined it".
And beyond that, he just said the right words to people who were not doing so well in the economy. Lies, of course, but very seductive lies, and for a while I even felt bad for some Trump voters for getting sucked into those lies. And then of course he leaned into the popular right-wing culture-war stuff.
(No longer, though: at some point you lose the ability to say "but I thought he would help me!" after the 500th time he hasn't helped you like he said he would.)
Agreed!
Both sides said that "America sucks right now". I think Trump said "Let's go back to when America was great" whereas liberals said, "America was never great, so we need to keep changing."
Worse, it was easy for some liberals to slide from "America was never great" to "and it's the fault of [white people|cis people|males]"
I'm not endorsing any of those views--I just think that's how some people perceived it.
> Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America.
I would argue they lost faith because the media constantly lies and distorts the truth to promote the ideology of capital. They are elite and disconnected, absolutely, just not in a left wing way, but a corpo-capitalist way (which only looks “left” if you’re to the right of capital).
> constantly lies and distorts the truth
sure
> to promote the ideology of capital
eh, no that's false. They promote the ideology of ad revenue at most, which causes audience capture, which on the left means anti-capital crazy talk like pro-theocracy, anti-growth and other weird shit.
Social media promotes ad revenue (engagement). That's why it's full of brainrot slop and outrage bait. Legacy media promotes ideologies consistent with its owners, which is why for instance it downplays bad stuff Israel does and upplays bad stuff Iran does.
> Legacy media promotes ideologies consistent with its owners, which is why for instance it downplays bad stuff Israel does and upplays bad stuff Iran does.
Partly true, but also mostly wrong. It's all about the business model. Owners doing what you say can only do so much if the business model is based on selling ads and no one gets a salary if they don't attack jews enough for their audience.
The claim that Israels bad actions are down played is pretty doubtful. I always see 10x or more negative reporting of Israel compared to what I happen to know about the conflicts. Like in Swedish media it's always "Israel attacks Lebanon" but never ever "Hizbollah attacks Israel", even though that's what happens first.
The business model isn't based on selling ads any more. The primary source of revenue is accepting payment to run or block certain topics
Wow. ENORMOUS citation needed for that one.
To pile on, it dont think this attitude is productive. For every person that finds it motivation for positive change, there are two that take the criticism as face value and g8ve up or lean into it.
It is like basic child psychology. It is hard to get child to develop constructively by telling them they are awful and worthless.
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.
> Boeing never build a larger passenger airplane
1. there wasn't demand for one - airliner designs are driven by the customers
2. the airport terminals would have to be rebuilt
3. the runways would have to be redone to support the weight
> why the Concorde is no longer flying
It lost prodigious amounts of money on every flight. The Concorde was a prestige project, not a practical one.
> Why did the progression from the Wright brothers to the 747 not continue for the next fifty years?
The 747 is far more technologically primitive than today's airliners. Take a good close look at the wing shape of the two, for starters.
And that's my point: Your answers are far more interesting than Ian Bogost's throwaway assertion that America just wasn't ambitious enough and that aircraft engineering peaked with the 747.
You could say that engineering excellence at GE (and competition with RR and P&W) led to ETOPS which made it less attractive to simply build larger airplanes with 3+ engines. Why send one 747 per day when you can send multiple A330s or 767s, accommodating more schedules?
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 longer
We might still reach a point in a few decades where capacity constraints at major airports make larger quadjets economically viable again. That was the thesis behind the Airbus A380, and it didn't work. But is it possible that they weren't so much wrong as just too early?
"Didn't work" meaning did not result in 5,000 orders. The aircraft in use by the middle east and asian airlines (and Qantas) are doing fine. They are also less economic than the modern 2 engine widebodies, despite being more economic than a 747 on the same route, with higher comfort levels and less intrusive engine noise.
They just didn't turn out to fit the emerging economics of flight. They "work" fine.
I think what they mean is the A380 never made airbus any money. It makes plenty of money for many airlines
Thanks. Good clarification, makes sense to me now I grokked context.
I think they mean work out for airbus. Financially was a huge program disaster. It sold half the number of airframes needed for cost break even in nominal value, before accounting for the cost of capital. This also doesnt account for billions in illegal EU government subsidies.
> billions in illegal EU government subsidies.
I think this is a bit gratuitous. It's not like Boeing doesn't receive massive subsidies. I'm not disputing that subsidies exist.
WTO said "both sides" and you are on a TKO because the fine to Europe was bigger than the fine to the US.
I wasn't trying to get into a comparison with US, but do think they they are relevant to the financial accounting of the 380 programing. Airbus got some 15 odd billion in launch aid that was to be paid back through sales that never occurred.
I love the plane itself. It is my top choice for transatlantic flight. Businesses class is fantastic. If you get a window, they have stow cabinets big enough for my backpack, laptop, and street shoes.
So the point was that they had massive sunk costs which couldn't be recovered. The legality or otherwise of the EU subsidies is a bit beside the point.
It's absolutely one of my favourites to fly on. I'll miss it when they replace it with the 2 engine widebodies. Economics just didn't work out for a good idea.
(A re-engined 747 with something quieter, and with better cabin pressure and humidity could also have worked but Boeing were never going there)
> that was to be paid back through sales that never occurred.
That just sounds like a state investment
America is currently leading the way in both commercial aerospace and AI simultaneously. This feels like a decade old article.
Just off the top of my head, I can come up with a dozen American accomplishments that would have blown the minds of 747 engineers:
The Internet
Hubble Space Telescope
Google
Deep Blue beating Kasparov
iPhone
Human Genome Project
F-22/B-2/F-35 stealth tech
Falcon Heavy dual booster landings
Waymo
Starship live re-entry video via Starlink
ChatGPT
B-52 still flying
Shoot, I should've replied under this comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714519
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.
It is very tiring. I get why Europeans might enjoy taking shots at us (though at one point I'd have said it was more of a good natured ribbing, given that Europe's history is also many Americans' history), and I fully understand the armies of bots spreading invective ... but the constant dogging on America by our own citizens is sad. I'm sure a lot of this outcome is intentional, but nobody fights back.
America is many things, has done many things. Some great, some not so much. Americans themselves should at least be honest about seeing the good parts even if nobody else will admit it. And if we're going to keep progressing forward we need people to be on board in good faith.
/soapbox rant over
Not American but I feel the sentiment. I'm planning to change nationality soon as 'my' own country is also on the same right-wing conservative track. I'm not interested in making things better anymore. I just want to break with them forever. They deserve no more admiration or loyalty.
I don't believe in national pride or even of sports teams. My loyalty is always conditional, as long as my ethics align.
I can imagine some Americans feel that way too.
Yes, some people have that viewpoint. Very transactional. I think there was a time when I might have agreed. But as I have gotten older I've gained more of an appreciation for shared mythology and how it promotes social cohesion.
Historically in many places religion has been a primary source of shared mythology. In America, despite prominent Christian religions, a strong historical shared mythology has been of our own founding. It does not matter that it is myth, it matters that it is shared.
What I want is when an American citizen goes into that theater at the US House of Representatives before the tour and watches the short film about the founding of the country, they should come out of it damn near shedding tears of pride in how great we are. Bullshit or not, the American Creed is a source of unity. That is failing, and I am sad to see it.
When everyone becomes strictly transactional, society has failed.
To me it's really because they have broken that promise. Governments take advantage of that cohesion. It's not really because of the transactionality to my benefit but just because what they stand for is a net negative for society and the world.
Consider the military. Few wars are actually worth giving one's life for. Since 1945 basically none. If the Communists had won in Vietnam nothing would have happened to America. Iraq was based on false pretenses, Afghanistan accomplished absolutely nothing. My own country was part of some of these misguided adventures and has some of its own wars where it definitely was the evil aggressor.
Or think of the Nazis who exploited the very concept of this nationalism to destroy half the world.
So no. I do think it helps social cohesion but when a state is using that cohesion for evil it does not deserve to be followed.
I think we should outgrow this petty follow the leader attitude and think for ourselves.
I share your disillusionment, but my preferred response would be Americans coming together and deciding that actually, we do care, and we do want a better society for everyone, a better government, less corruption, etc. I am not suggesting that everyone needs to subscribe to my idea of better, either, I am just saying that we could improve things just be getting a majority of people acting in good faith and having real discussions about the issues we face. A healthy debate where winning means everybody wins, and losing just means you rework and improve your ideas and arguments and keep on participating.
Man I'm an idealist today. Okay that's just about every day, thankfully. But nihilism sometimes tries to consume me too.
Oh yeah I'm not an idealist. Or a team player (that much was clear I think). I'm more a 'fuck society' type like in Mr. Robot :)
I like to work with others to make things better but they have to be aligned in values. I don't do unconditional loyalty stuff.
> If the Communists had won in Vietnam nothing would have happened to America
They did.
True they did in the end but my point is, nothing bad happened.
Like, why did America even get involved in that shit anyway? It was a French problem (and really, it was fair they wanted to kick the French colonisers out).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion btw
I had not read that, thank you for sharing!
I think labeling all things right-wing as bad is part of the problem. The left goes too far, and pushes people to the right. That's why Trump got back into power.
It is because it is all bad at least to me.The right has crossed so many red lines for me that it's just no longer possible to work with them.
What is something the right wing supports that you would say is good, by contrast?
Sometimes I hear that it is because the right wing is perceived as strong on the economy, despite the facts showing that the left wing consistently performs better. Or that the right wing has better foreign policy chops, despite consistently starting wars. Or that the right wing is about smaller, limited government, despite consistently using government power to push their social agenda.
Maybe it was the pronouns thing.
I feel like this partly a counter reaction. To some US people endlessly glazing the US and endless saying 'best country'. In general the attitude in the US seems to think that anything not rooted in US experience is bad. You can literally feel audience stop listening when somebody giving a speech says 'In X country they do Y because its better based on Z analysis'. And then you have an army of Americans show up telling every possible reason (no matter how irrelevant) why X country is not like the US at all.
I feel like in Europe its much more normal to say, Switzerland is doing X very well, Sweden is going Y very well and so on. Or even the US is doing Z better.
> I'm sure a lot of this outcome is intentional, but nobody fights back.
Well.. some people do in fact fight back. You'll hear it on the Waking Up podcast for example. The issue is that Trump is also, on the surface, fighting back. Except he's destroying America instead of making it great.
Agreed. A lot of my countrymen have forgotten that America generally kicks ass, it's sad to see.
In what ways is America currently kicking ass?
Good case in point of my original comment.
We've given up on the next generation of technology and choose to wallow in sweet hydrocarbons.
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.
Let’s revisit this comment in 5 years. I’m not convinced HN critics know more about this than SpaceX does.
What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail.
No one can predict the future, and it's absolutely possible that orbital datacenters will fail (either for technology or business reasons).
But:
1. Without a time machine, we cannot be certain.
2. If forced to choose, I would rather root for their success and be wrong than root for their failure and be right.
What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail.
When I started my own business, everyone thought it was doomed to failure. Friends, enemies, acquaintances, all of them.
Except my dad. He believed in me, though he had no idea what I was doing.
Musk is in good company with the crazy people who build the first tunnel under the Thames, the nuts who laid the first transatlantic people, the morons who dug the Panama Canal, and the fools who built the first transcontinental railroad.
Me, I bought me some SPCX.
A bit strange that you started you comment with the exact same sentence as the previous commenter.
They're just quoting it but typo'ed the >
I was confused at first too.
Yup. I've done that before.
I have a certainty that I don't want to make a bet predicated on SpaceX needing to generate revenue from their AI products that is equivalent to several thousand dollars for every human in a middle income and up country.
I'd bet in SpaceX. I'll not bet on musk grafting in a failing AI business for financial shenanigans.
Unless SpaceX knows something about thermodynamics that no one else knows, we can be pretty fucking sure that they have an incompetent mouthpiece or they are committing securities fraud.
I'm not sure I get it. Obviously, computers can work in space--a Starlink satellite is basically a computer with a radio attached. Satellites use radiators for cooling without violating any laws of physics.
I assume you think that SpaceX will never be able to build/deploy a radiator big enough? But that's not a physics/thermodynamics question, that's an engineering question. And I think SpaceX has some pretty good engineers.
Help me out and tell me how you can be so sure it will never work.
You could also launch people from LA to NYC via rockets instead of using airplanes without violating any laws of physics. But we don’t, because we have airplanes already. What problem are data centers in space solving? Cooling is probably the hardest issue to deal with for data centers, so why would you give up convective cooling you get for free on Earth?
I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space. The utility of satellite internet has been known for decades before Starlink came around.
>What problem are data centers in space solving?
A hedge that as it gets harder to build datacenters in communities over water, power, noise, space, tax, etc reasons that space is a new frontier for them. Consider that solar power works better in space.
Also, satellites may be able to do processing of data in-orbit.
>I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space.
You just mentioned it - cooling. Consider Starlink a POC of radiating computer heat in space. A datacenter would need a scaled-up version, but it is not impossible, although it could be impractical if the cost of compute doesn't rise enough.
That's a different argument.
You agree that space data centers are physically possible, but you just don't think they will be economical (i.e., cheaper than terrestrial data centers). Is that right?
I don't know if they will be economical. But that will depend on a whole bunch of questions that nobody knows the answer to: How will the demand for AI grow? How much will opposition to terrestrial data centers increase the price? How cheaply can SpaceX launch mass? How cheaply can SpaceX build data center satelliters?
Maybe you know all those answers. If so, I envy your stock portfolio.
They won't be economical for many reasons - one of them is cooling. Putting several kilowatts of radiators on a Starlink satellite is a justified cost because the Starlink satellite must be in space. Putting a hundred megawatts of radiators on your AI DC in space is ridiculous because that's too big of a radiator (how do you keep it structurally sound?), air cooling on the ground is a million times better and there's no good reason for it to be in space.
> won’t be
Again, “What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail”.
I doubt you’ve done enough investigation to conclude that. Watching a couple a YouTube videos about how data centers in space are dumb doesn’t count.
For one, it’s not one big hundred megawatt-scale datacenter, but many smaller rack-sized satellites.
Two, there are many trade offs SpaceX can make to reduce the overall cost. The radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so anything they can do to increase the temperature drastically reduces the size of the radiators, including custom silicon, heat pumps, etc. There’s also novel radiator technology like liquid droplet radiators that could be worth developing.
Third, there are reasons to put it in space: solar panel efficiency, no cost for land, less regulation, no NIMBYs, etc.
Materials other than silicon would be an interesting idea, but I doubt even SpaceX is that crazy.
Not only does cooling increase with 4th power of temperature as you said, but power is abundant, so it may actually be practical to use more power to run chips of a different material at a higher temperature. That's a great idea, if it can actually be pulled off.
There's nothing inherent about electronics that makes it stop working around 120 degrees - that's just the practical limit of silicon. Other materials can withstand higher temps but may not be as practical in other respects like bandgaps.
When the first transcontinental railroad was proposed and being built, it was beset with controversy and skepticism.
But when it opened, it exceeded the wildest expectations of its most optimistic boosters. It transformed the country overnight.
A similar thing happened with the first transatlantic cable.
The Union Pacific Railroad (the eastern half of the transcontinental railroad) also caused the financial crisis of 1873 (due to construction costs and various corruption and bribery around financing them). It then went bankrupt in 1893.
So, yes, it transformed the country. That didn't necessarily benefit the stockholders and bondholders.
1. It finished the railroad in 1869. 1873 was four years later. 1893 was 24 years later - a generation.
2. Check out "Nothing Like It in the World" by Ambrose.
Right, but four years later was definitely caused by the problem of (and shenanigans around) financing the original construction. Even if you want to say that 1893 was too late to be relevant, 1873 wasn't. It was the problem of financing the original construction that damaged the entire US economy.
Ok, but the problem with this comparison is that SpaceX is trying to avoid building any infrastructure at all. They are obsessed with the launch vehicle and basically have zero plans doing anything on Mars or the Moon once they get there.
If you look at the competitors like say Blue Origin, you see that they have an entire lunar architecture mapped out that wouldn't be feasible without the infrastructure they're planning to build.
You also constantly hear from Musk and SpaceX fans that the moon is a distraction and that the transfer of techniques, etc, from the Moon to Mars is minimal because the ISRU resources and processes are different. From an outsiders perspective, the reality distortion is unbelievable.
Needing to send a different box to the surface of a gravity well doesn't really change anything, fundamentally speaking. You still need power generators, a power grid, communication infrastructure, habitats, life support systems, rovers/excavators to dig out the materials, launch pads, etc. The astronauts get to train on the Moon and come back to their families and perhaps wait until the kids leave the nest, before they commence their deadly one way trip to Mars.
Now after the merger and IPO, SpaceX has become a deeply underwhelming company if you care about space. Starship has been a massive failure and I'm being tired of being told that SpaceX has a proven track record and therefore you should expect them to accomplish something by going complete against the development ethos that their proven track record is based upon. Maybe its not clear, but from my perspective, SpaceX has already become the incumbent it claims to fight against.
For the average SpaceX fan, the Falcon 9 isn't something to be proud of, but rather something to retreat to, once it is exposed that the thing that according to them makes the Falcon 9 obsolete does in fact not make it obsolete. The true SpaceX ethos would have delivered a working Starship by now and only afterwards tried to figure out how to make the Mars/Moon promises work.
Wow so much to unpack here.
If SpaceX spent a ton of resources developing Moon and Mars base plane they’d be criticized for not focusing on the launch vehicle. The railroad company also doesn’t necessarily need to be the ones building the towns.
Starship has experienced setbacks but isn’t a “massive failure” by any measure.
Transcontinental railroads weren't fighting against physics.
There's a reason people are pretty sure it won't work and it's not the difficulty of getting them into space or maintening them space or generally protecting them from space. Of course, those are all considerations as well. No, it's the cooling.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
> cooling
I've seen many confident assertions about that issue. Do you think Musk doesn't know about it? People thought you couldn't reuse rockets, either. Or land them on their tails. Or pluck them out of the air with chopsticks.
I'm a different guy... But I think he doesn't care and doesn't need to care. His main product is personal branding and hype -- caring about how it works is hardly relevant.
Or launch atop an unprotected flat slab of concrete
It's just money laundering. They hide transfers of wealth inside an IPO, buyback etc and tell ludicrous tales so they have a cover story that investors are investing because they believed the tales and not to move money.
To me, any 747 without a space shuttle on top of it looks naked
The very first 747 is at the flight museum in Seattle. Pretty interesting to walk through it except there’s poweredge servers in the test equipment racks in the main fuselage. Pretty sure dell wasn’t even formed when that plane was in testing hah.
> the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful
Concorde?
Concorde is exotic, absolutely, but having seen the one at Udvar-Hazy I'm not sure I'd call it beautiful... not being an aircraft designer, my sense for this is of course biased by the way the average commercial jet looks like, well, a commercial jet, and the Concorde looks like someone who was really good at paper airplanes got ahold of the CAD system for the weekend :-)
> Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.
Can some explain why replacing it with more efficient, and still American, jets is somehow a negative for American might, progress, and invention?
I was able to fly business class in 747s to Japan back in the 90s (it was coach to Europe, though). That meant the upper deck and amenities like a sandwich and snack cart that you could just help yourself from. By the 2000s, it was coach everywhere, regardless of the plane.
Those interiors look so much more pleasing than the ones we have right now even in business / premium economy class and I am not even that old!
Flying is much cheaper today. People want low prices over more comfort. They vote with their wallets.
I don't know, having more color doesn't seem that much more expensive? I guess the fabrics are expensive and stain relatively easily, but if public transport can keep them clean so can airlines IMO. Some fabric seats are over 3 decades old and they're still in a really good shape.
Maybe it looks better because there are only 9 seats in an aisle in the picture compared to standard 10 nowadays?
10?! That's news to me. I had to fly american airlines and there was still 9.. oh it has been more than half a decade.
Public transport can’t keep them clean. BART famously had disgusting carpets until the 2010s.
If a poor second world country can have clean seats on public transport surely...
> They are just metal tubes with wings.
The 787 would beg to differ. It is an engineering achievement on par with the 747.
Just a shame the airlines mostly opted for an interior that ignores obesity rates and the existence of shoulders
Lufthansa still flies a 747-8 between FRA and SFO.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH454
I booked it once when I couldn’t find a direct flight from AMS to SFO.
I will miss the 747. Modern planes with less engines feel less safe. I hate all the justifications used to fly long distances across oceans with only 2 engines, or only 1 engine.
More people have died due to one engine falling off a 747 and knocking off the other engine on the same wing than have died due to dual engine failure on an ETOPS certified aircraft
You mean the justification that they are, in fact, just as safe?
I'm curious about this--wouldn't one expect more engines to be safer?
Unless having more engines increases the chance of certain kinds of accidents? Like maybe the chance of an engine failure damaging the hull goes up with more engines?
Not questioning the justification--I do believe it--I'm just curious about the details.
All else being equal, potentially - although as I mentioned there have been cases where one engine falling off a 4 engine aircraft hit another in the process. But ETOPS certification is based on it being demonstrated that engines are sufficiently reliable that the probability of an independent failure is incredibly unlikely, and also requires that operators have a stricter maintenance process. The only dual engine failures on modern two-engine aircraft I can think of off-hand have been fuel exhaustion (either actually being out of fuel, or ice blocking fuel filters in the case of BA38), and would have affected 4-engine aircraft just as badly.
No, the highest risk for dual engine failure is bird strike.
There's US1549 and FR4102 - are there any others? But yes, the assumption about failures being independent is obviously violated by large flocks of birds, although this has also resulted in the loss of 4-engined aircraft.
Which is not and never will be an issue for airliners transiting oceans under ETOPS.
It is at takeoff and landing, applies equally to ETOPS or otherwise.
> I hate all the justifications used to fly long distances across oceans with only 2 engines, or only 1 engine.
Which is why I specified that it’s equally as safe for airlines operating under ETOPS.
Engine failure is very dangerous. 4 engines are twice as likely to have a major failure than 2.
(despite having "fuses" so an engine can depart without taking much of the wing with it, there are many cases of single engine failure bringing down the airplane)
There have been zero lives and airframes lost due to independent double engine failure during trans-oceanic ETOPS.
> Wouldn't one expect more engines to be safer?
Right, the more engines the better…
to see sofas on a plane feels weird when they ask u wear seat belts all the time now due to risks from turbluence (clear air turbulence apparently!).
I realize this might be an unpopular opinion but I never liked the look of the "hump" created by the upper deck of the 747.
At least it’s distinctive. Most planes look like scaled versions of the 737 - similar shape, similar proportions…
What?! It makes it look like a giant fighter jet
America begins its final descent
"Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition."
What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this?
The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American.
Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature.
[0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."
Paywalled.
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
> "[...] the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful."
Pathetic drivel. There's legion of commercial airliners that are more beautiful than the 747.
At least it’s not an up/down scaled 737… I’d say it looks nicer than the 777 replacing it, or the 380 that tried it.
Concorde, Tu-144, L-1011 TriStar, Il-62, Tu-154, SE 210 Caravelle, de Havilland DH.106 Comet and Vickers VC10 are all much sexier. Just for starters.
You just seem to have a fetish for aircraft with fully or partially rear-mounted engines. I prefer 747 over all of the above, although 757 is my favorite.
IL-62 I particularly dislike. Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard.
> "You just seem to have a fetish for aircraft with fully or partially rear-mounted engines."
Hey, what can I say? I'm more of an ass man.
> "Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard."
I fail to see what this has to do with visual aesthetics, but the safety record of the 747 was not so hot; already excluding the malaise brought on by the fetishes of terrorists and the Evil Empire, of course.
Maybe the Concord and Comet. For the rest of the list I think you'd spend a very long time finding people to agree with you. The soviet ones are even more complicated, the Tu-144 is basically an Ugly Concord.
So or so, Bogost's statement is akin to describing the Amiga 500 as the only beautiful home computer. And that's obviously ridiculous. As for your statement, nah, I won't have to search very long for people agreeing with me on many of the aircraft listed; whole coffee table tomes have been published specifically dealing with the subject of Soviet, French and British classic, especially narrow-body, airliners.
I'm reading through the comments here before reading the actual Atlantic story, so I didn't see the author's name until you mention it:
> Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful.
Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view.
(I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)
Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today. That is why I will always love the 747.
> "Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today."
The Il-62 and the Tu-154 are still in limited service, for example. Not that it does your pseudoargument any favors anyway, as service history plays obviously absolutely no role in evaluating a design purely on its visual accumen.
Oh, you misunderstand--I'm not arguing anything. What planes you love in the confines of your own mind is none of my business. It's a free country!
I'm just sharing my love of the 747, since that's what the article is about.
Someday, when they write a glowing retrospective of the Il-62, I promise not to post about how it's one of the ugliest jets I've seen.
we'll always have QatarForceOne (747-8)
well as long as Congress doesn't let him keep it, hopefully
BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance program to refurbish it
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25B_Bridge
It was a private bribe, he's not giving it back. He's probably not even leaving the White House in 2 years either.
At least he is not going to live forever. He seems really fucked up lately.
They'll stuff him and then use the autopen.
The funniest thing is that he's not going to continue using it after office. They plan to hang it in that hotel being called a library when it gets built
Not on his own will at least.