The 747 is an amazing engineering achievement. Even more than that, it's an amazing business achievement. The 747 was an "all in", "bet the company" program for Boeing. It took many, many years for the company to break even on its investment, but after that the 747 was a money-making machine for Boeing and for the airlines. When I worked at Boeing in the early 80's, every time a 747 rolled off the assembly line a gigantic paycheck went into the company. (Just walking down the assembly line in the Everett plant was more fun (for me, as an aero nerd) than an E-ticket ride.)
Airlines loved the 747, because it was a money-making machine for them, too. Nobody could compete with the 747 for decades.
The 747 provided the technology and the money to develop the 757, 767, etc.
> Airlines loved the 747, because it was a money-making machine for them, too.
Quite the opposite for most of the 1970s and much of the 1980s. Many smaller national airlines such as Aer Lingus, Air Canada and Sabena bought the 747 for the 'prestige' and its range, but struggled to make any money from it and eventually ditched it for smaller trijets and twins.
KLM managed to keep going by flying them in Combi configuration with half of the main deck given over to cargo.
If you buy one for prestige purposes, of course you're going to lose money. Airplanes only make money when they're packed with payload. An airplane sitting on the ground, or flying half-full, is going to lose money like a firehose drains a tank. But if your logistics are set up to keep the 747 flying as close as possible to 24/7 packed with payload, you can make a crapton of money, which is why Boeing was selling so many.
I never understood why Boeing risked it all on the 747. The Boeing 2707 was supposed to be the future of passenger travel and the 747 was supposed to get relegated to freight. Why risk it all for what was expected to be a stop gap product?
For the first wide body, why not start with something 767 sized? Why start with the biggest?
You answered it yourself: freight. Basically everything about the 747 was optimized around requirements for transporting freight (including fuselage width and placing the flight deck above the main level).
The requirements for the 747 were largely driven by the USAF and then Pan Am. If I understand right, both customers were so influential that Boeing felt it had to accommodate them.
Formally, there's the Civil Reserve Air Fleet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Reserve_Air_Fleet and in general these planes can be used in emergencies. The transport planes the US military tends to buy have additional requirements that aren't conducive to civil air fleet profitability.
Airplane assembly lines are amazing. I did a tour of the Lockheed atlanta plant and ir blew my mind. Seeing a handful of c130 in line in various states of assembly was mindblowing. The scale of the place is just ridiculous. I can't imagine how the 747 line might have been.
The 747 assembly line is just a thing of beauty. Boeing assembly lines are also spotlessly clean, and meticulously organized. The parts themselves are also very well made, just compare them with auto parts.
Absolutely random note: I had never heard the phrase "E-ticket ride" in my life until earlier today, when one of my dad's buddies mentioned it while we were out golfing and explained the context. Just a few hours later, I see it here. Amusing.
E ticket, is a reference to how Disneyland used to price rides. The most exciting rides like Space Mountain, required an E ticket; this was before the pay-once-ride-anything plan was introduced.
The outsized effect of Disneyland on the American psyche has always fascinated me. In a lot of ways, Disneyland is synonymous with the idea of the family vacation. I remember reading a fascinating article a few months back about a column Elie Wiesel wrote about his trip to Disneyland [0]:
> I don’t know if a Garden of Eden awaits adults in the hereafter. I do know, though, that there is a Garden of Eden for children here in this life. I know because I myself visited this paradise. I have just returned from there, just passed through its gates, just left the magical kingdom known as Disneyland. And as I bid that kingdom farewell, I understood for the first time the true meaning of the French saying ‘to leave is to die a little’ [partir, c’est mourir un peu]
For a theme park--of all things--to create that sort of effect on its visitors is nothing short of remarkable.
In addition to the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, I think there's also the notion of having a concept move into the scope of awareness.
I'm doing a lot of worldview refactoring, reading and thinking on many subjects and topics. As I start assimilating new models and references, I'm going back to older sources and revisiting them in light of the new models I've been acquiring and developing.
The effect can be profound, with many "familiar" works suddenly taking on highly unexpected dimensions.
My own first exposure to "E-Ticket" came from Julie Brown's "The Homecoming Queen's got a Gun"
If you take "worldview" to be the aggregate of models, premises, axioms, rules-of-thumb, personal and cultural context, etc., etc., you end up with a pretty hairy melenge of crud.
Some of it is useful and accurate. A lot of it isn't. (All models are wrong, some are useful.) Almost all of it has very strong path dependencies. Language itself is problematic as we define things in terms of other things, and if all the ground is soft and/or unstable, then that shifts.
I'm looking at ideas involving progress, models, institutions, limits, and interactions among them. I've been thinking for a while of adding "values" to that list as well.
There are large constraints in discussing this with others, particularly as much of the thinking is novel (though as I dig through dusty and rusty corners I'm finding I'm reinventing a lot of ideas previously considered -- something I find heartening), but moreso, that those who hold the mainstream worldview are heavily vested in it.
There's an as-yet-unwritten essay on apocalyptic thinking. Not in the sense of fire-from-the-sky the world will explode meaning, but in that the roots of the words "revelation", "enlightenment", "apocalypse", "catastrophe", and "revolution", among others, refer to an overturning. "The scales dropped from my eyes". There's a Cupertino mystic I bumped across online (no, not Steve Jobs) who has a really expressive little bit that enlightenment is not in the least comforting. Or to borrow from Arthur C. Clarke's title -- it's a childhood's end.
Solidifying a bit, I'm finding the ecologists far more convincing and reality-based than (most of) the economists. Howard Odum, William Ophuls, Vaclav Smil, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (economist), Herman Daly (ecological economist). But the roots of economic thought, in particular 18th and 19th century, are also pretty fascinating. There's Steuart (almost wholly ignored by Smith), and as a recently discovered example, T. E. Cliffe Leslie, "The Political Economy of Adam Smith" (1870), which does an excellent job of expressing what I've been trying to put my finger on about economics (and all philosophy) being grounded in specific circumstances.
No branch of philosophical doctrine, indeed, can be fairly investigated or apprehended apart from its history. All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas. And the history of political economy, at any rate, is not lost. It would not be difficult to trace the connection between every extant treatise prior to the `Wealth of Nations,' and conditions of thought at the epoch at which it appeared. But there is the less occasion, for the purpose of these pages, or of ascertaining the origin and foundation of the economic doctrines of our own day, to go behind the epoch of Adam Smith, that he has himself traced the systems of political economy antecedent to his own to a particular course of history, to `the different progress of opulence in different ages and nations,' and `the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men.' What he did not see was, that his own system, in its turn, was the product of a particular history; that what he regarded as the System of Nature was a descendant of the System of Nature as conceived by the ancients, in a form fashioned by the ideas and circumstances of his own time, and. coloured by his own disposition and course of life. Still less could he see how, after his time, `the progress of opulence' would govern the interpretation of his doctrines, or how the system he promulgated as the system of liberty, justice, and divine benevolence, would be moulded into a system of selfishness by `the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men.'
Also claimed is that Smith is entirely deductive. I'm not so convinced of this (Smith actually does cite observations and behaviour frequently), though it is true in parts, and most true in those parts of Smith that are most widely and loudly championed today, particularly the wholly fabricated notion that an "Invisible Hand" is some mechanism by which markets operate. It's not mechanism but apparent outcome, an outcome, it turns out from much subsequent studies. fantastically sensitive to actual conditions, and not in the least guaranteed. (See epecially Joseph Stiglitz.)
Anyhow, small bits. But yes, I'm running an abattoir for sacred cows and received truths.
The linked subbreddit (above) is where I'm exploring much of that. Conversation spills out in other places, including HN.
Joe Sutter did a lecture on the Shuttle disaster investigation at the University of Washington shortly after leaving the committee. He gave a memorable explanation of the risks of flying the Space Shuttle, which he described as an experimental vehicle with 700 flight safety-critical parts [1]. "Safety-critical" means that if the part fails you lose the aircraft.
Sutter claimed that thanks to redundant design the 747 had zero flight safety-critical parts. I have never been able to confirm this independently but it has stuck with me ever since. Anyway, he instantly cut through the prevailing NASA propaganda that the shuttle was the beginning of regular travel to low-earth orbit. It was a great talk by a great engineer.
The 747 is one of mankind's crowning achievements. It's not only a technical marvel but an aesthetic one -- it looks truly beautiful while an A380 looks like it just got punched in the stomach. Along with the massive network of airports, air traffic controllers, mechanics, regulators, pilots, engineers, forensic analysts, financiers, etc... I think that commercial air travel is a more impressive achievement than the moon landing and the 747 its glorious peak moment.
What a great comment. I went through a period in my life where I hardly traveled at all, and more recently I've been traveling frequently for work. I still feel the same childish joy every time I feel the plane leave the ground -- we're actually flying!
And the fact that basically on a whim, I can buy a ticket, show up at an airport, wait a bit, sit on a plane for a while, and then basically show up on the other side of the world in a few hours, what it used to take humans months, or even years, to do, when it became possible at all.
So yeah; from someone who's a geek about it, but outside of the aviation industry: it's cool.
I have over 500,000 BIS lifetime miles and I'm still exited by the takeoff roll. Airlines are starting to retire 744s. If you have a chance, find a way to ride in the upper deck. It's quite something!
AirFrance does coach on the upper deck -- you might need to pay a tiny bit more to get them, but definitely not the same as a business class ticket.
I highly recommend trying to get a seat up there as well. It has less seats than a regional jet in a coach config, and you feel completely isolated from the chaos below.
When we emigrated from the UK to New Zealand in the early seventies we flew by 747, my Aunts who had gone out a year earlier had to make the journey by ship.
it looks truly beautiful while an A380 looks like it just got punched in the stomach.
I read the opinion of an aeronautical engineer that the 747 gets its grace from physics, while the A380 goes a little against physics. Apparently, its wings are a little too short for its heft, but the engineers made it work. This is why it costs 50% more to operate per nautical mile, while having 700 nm less range. (Than the 747-8I)
It just so happens I randomly caught a documentary about the development of the 747 recently. From an engineering perspective it's amazing. A few tidbits:
- it went from an idea on a gold course to engineering prototype in 2.5 years in an era almost without computers
- Boeing had to build what I believe is the world's largest building to make them
- Boeing saw the 747 as a stopgap while their main focus was on the (doomed SST so Sutter had to try to go any resources. With the SST's cancellation and huge development cost it almost bankrupted Boeing.
- all of this was before simulators so they basically had to build one and take off and see how it flew or even if it flew.
- for much of the development there were no engines powerful enough to fly it, eventually a Pratt and Whitney prototype was used that had a nasty habit of exploding for over a year of flight testing before they figured out why. Nowadays engines are so reliable that the four engine design is essentially dead and many planes will serve their entire life never having their engines replaced.
- the distinctive (now iconic) design with the cockpit and upper deck bulging at the front was to fulfill a dual purpose as a cargo plane. You open up the nose and still get the full body height to load and remove cargo.
- when Boeing agreed to make it (because of a Pan Am request) they had no idea what it would look like.
I think the show was an episode of Mighty Aircraft. Well worth watching.
> Adam Bruckner of the University of Washington’s department of aeronautics and astronautics later described the 747 as “one of the great engineering wonders of the world, like the pyramids of Egypt, the Eiffel Tower or the Panama Canal.”
Absolutely true. It's one of the most beautiful machines of the world, and unlike the Eiffel tower or the great pyramids, it serves a purpose; it's a tool, and the nicest one.
One morning in 1992 I drove a friend to JFK; when he departed, I spent the rest of the day watching 747s take off and land; I just couldn't leave the spot. It was a great day.
> In 1986 President Ronald Reagan appointed him to a panel investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
Richard Feynman was a member of this panel; I wonder if the two got along well?
It's well know that the 747 is extraordinary in terms of engineering. Why? From the naive perspective, it's the-same-thing-only-bigger. I'm not quite that naive, but I'd love to hear an authoritative analysis rather than the popular wisdom.
I would guess that engines powerful and efficient enough to fly a plane so much larger than any predecessors, and to fly it further, would also be a significant achievement.
So much happened in aviation between the Wright Flyer's first flight in 1903 and the 747's in 1969. Since then, at least from a passenger experience viewpoint, relatively little has changed.
Is that because most new technologies eventually reach plateaus? Or have unique factors -- like environmental concerns about supersonic travel -- held back progress in aviation?
Very little in the immediate, physical execution of airliners have changed (but very many small things certainly has - and a 747-8 being delivered today is a rather different machine than a -100 rolling of the assembly line in 1970, and the 787 is an amazing machine to fly, the air pressure and humidity controls, enabled by the composite body, make a huge difference).
But prices have dropped steeply, democratising air travel to an unprecedented degree with an unprecedented speed. Practically anyone who can afford to go on holiday at all can afford to fly somewhere, rather than being limited to the range/speed of ground transportation. The kind of trips to Greece/Spain etc that are completely routine these days in northern Europe were once-in-a-lifetime experiences for my (reasonably well to do) grandparents.
Everybody loves hating on Ryanair/Spirit Airlines/increasingly dense economy class layouts, but the fact is that you can in many cases (if you're out early) buy a discounted premium economy ticket (or even if you're lucky business class) for what regular economy tickets would cost just 20 years ago, much less 40, and get a much better product.
Maximum speed and capacity aren't increasing because those aren't problematic factors. Right now the most important place for improvement is in fuel economy, and at that modern planes are doing much better than their 1970s equivalents.
The 747-400 costs $47.34 per nautical mile, the 787-8 only $27.35. Sure it's not as visible to the passengers (except indirectly in the form of cheaper tickets), but that is a huge improvement in an important metric.
Thus, the values would be about $11 for the 747-400.
6.37 for the 787-8.
In addition, at the $6 gallon rate, the newer 3rd generation 747, the 747-8 which uses the same engines (and I believe redesigned wings consistent with the 787-8) as the 787-8 is $42.49 compared with $47.34 for the older 747-400.
At the current $1.39 YTD per gallon price, the 747-8 costs $9.85 per nautical mile.
It's the four-engine design. They just suck down fuel like crazy. As a passenger, I like the redundancy of having four engines for trans-ocean flight. But it looks like the modern two-engine planes with high-bypass engines have proven themselves to be "reliable enough", as well as more fuel-efficient.
I can think of only one ETOPS-rated aircraft in recent history that got into trouble due to multiple engine failure. That was flight 38 at Heathrow in 2008, which crashed short of the runway due to ice buildup in the fuel system.[1]
So it's definitely rare. Personally I love 777s--part of the attraction is the monster turbofans. Most long-range models have GE90 engines, which are total beasts. They incidentally have extremely low shutdown rates.
It's also worth noting that we've learned the hard way that many types of accidents take-out all four engines simultaneously-- like British Airways Flight 9 in 1982 which accidentally flew through a volcanic flume and lost all four engines.
The 777 is my favorite also, it's a beautiful well-designed and well-built plane with an almost unbelievable safety record. (Barring being sabotaged by the pilot, or being shot down by a surface-to-air missile, which are hardly things you can blame on the aircraft itself.)
Upvote from one triple 7 fan to another. I love those planes. The Heathrow flight 38 crash was the first hull loss in the history of the 777 program: not bad considering the first commercial flight was in 1995.
Still have not flown in a 787 as I mostly fly United and they don't have too many of them in the fleet yet. Ironically it's mostly 747s on the routes I regularly fly to Europe so I get to experience them regularly along with the odd A-380. (The latter a comfortable ride but just no poetry in the thing. It looks like a squashed frog.)
The 747 takes only about 50% more passengers in most seating configurations. However, that does not make it cheaper or more efficient to operate because it's harder to fill the plane especially when flying from smaller airports.
Meanwhile many 747s are only in service now because fuel prices are relatively low. Once the prices go up they will likely be replaced by 777s or other models that are easier to fill up and cost less to operated.
I confirmed this recently with a United Airlines 747 trainer who was booked on the same 747 flight as I was. He loved the plane and didn't want to fly anything else.
The driving force behind new airliner designs is usually fuel efficiency. The 757 used 35% less gas than previous designs, due to engine and wing improvements. The 787 is about 20% better than earlier designs.
When you think about it, those are enormous gains, but the passengers don't see it other than in the ticket price.
Yes; and Boeing does do that (the 747 that ships today is almost an entirely new plane from the one that shipped in 1969), but the limiting factor is the 4-engine design. We don't have engines available that would let you build a 2-engine 747, and as long as we don't, they're going to guzzle a lot more fuel than 2-engine designs.
That said, apparently Airbus doesn't agree that 4-engined planes are going extinct, because they just recently finished a brand-new jet, the A-380, which requires 4 engines to fly. Go figure. Time will tell if that was a wise move on their part. But I'm guessing: no.
That's perhaps true to a small extent perhaps but I think simple economics have more explanatory power. Subsonic air travel is an 80/20 solution that meets the needs of a very large market. Once you can fly from New Your to London in 7-8 hours dropping the flight time to 3.5 hours has limited utility especially when you consider it does not drop overall travel time by anywhere near as much. For most passengers it's not worth the far greater cost to make SSTs safe.
The same thing applies in a much bigger way to travel to low-earth orbit. Costs escalate dramatically.
- People got quite nervous about the risks. Sure, there were a lot of highly publicised accidents involving aircraft, but it's still a heck of a lot safer than driving a similar distance (and especially motorcycling). For some reason, the whole world has decided that flying needs to be a huge amount safer than the alternatives, and that has a huge cost.
- Terrorists. You could imagine a world where taking a flight was like taking a bus. It has certain similarities, right? But thanks to various events, everyone's got to go through the security theatre each time they're at an airport. That creates costs.
- Oil prices and environment. Just about when the Concord was getting in the air, oil prices went up. More recently, we've figured out it might not be so wise to put more CO2 in the air. Costs go up.
- Industry organisation. For some reason, a lot of countries decided they needed their own airlines. That's not necessarily economically viable, because a lot of countries are quite small. But there's a whole system of these airlines now, some subsidised, that fragment the industry. I don't know enough about whether there should be fewer airlines, but it certainly feels like it's something that is harder to evolve when various countries are propping up their local carrier.
As for the tech, why shouldn't it just progress? All those costs I've listed would suck money out of research. If things were a bit different, there'd be more people looking at making better planes.
a good quote from him (and the article) "“You know things are going to happen,” he explained, “and sometimes it’s going to be severe. You still should be able to come home.”
What boggles my mind is that the 747 and Concorde were designed with slide rules and built by hand without CNC. Not just the airframes but the motors and everything else. They must have had some simple computer simulation, but not much.
I don't want to return to those days but if we had to build software that way it would be much more reliable. It would take longer and have much less functionality too of course.
He did an amazing feat in such a short time in accomplishing the design. There is a fantastic documentary shown on the Smithsonian channel ever few weeks about the design of the 747. If you are interested in this kind of thing, it is well worth the 2 hours watch time. Joe is in it both in current day reflections and footage from the design period. RIP.
A lot of them are system issues: you need a LOT of passengers going point-point, and you need the airport infrastructure.
Consider the A380: it can only fly into airports that have been modified/built for them; takes forever to load/unload passengers, and only works for a few long haul routes. Most airlines are losing money on it (few are in the Qantas/Emirates mode) and thus the order book is not strong. I doubt anyone will build a larger plane.
Airlines loved the 747, because it was a money-making machine for them, too. Nobody could compete with the 747 for decades.
The 747 provided the technology and the money to develop the 757, 767, etc.