End of the runway for the ‘Queen of the Skies’

Picture: British Airways

I’ve blogged before about the majestic Boeing 747 and how, after five decades in the air, its future was limited. Today, the era of commercial aviation that the original “jumbo jet” defined will come to something of an end when the final 747 rolls of the Boeing production line in the US.

The plane, a cargo version built for Atlas Air, will be the 1,574th production model built by Boeing since the programme began in 1968, the result of Pan American founder Juan Trippe challenging then-Boeing president William Allen to build a plane even bigger than the company’s 707 model, the original game changer to long-distance air travel. The 747, however, evolved things even further, providing a platform for up to 400 seats and the ability to cover vast distances relatively quickly. Significantly, it enabled affordable intercontinental travel: I’m sure most Brits’ experience of places like Florida and New York were the result of flying there in a 747. I know all my first visits to America were via the beautiful flying ocean liner.

Three years ago, as Covid started to wreak havoc, British Airways announced the immediate retirement of its 31 747s. The airline had, then, by far the largest fleet of the type still flying. However, even before the pandemic grounded airlines, the aircraft that democratised air travel had started to become an anachronism as more fuel efficient planes like the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 DreamLiner began replacing such an ageing gas-guzzler as the 747. BA’s decision to end use of the 747 was, romanticism aside, a rational one. It was planning to retire the 747 in 2024 in any case - 25 years after its first -400 models were introduced - and had remained remarkably loyal to the type. US carriers United Airlines and Delta ended their 747 operations in 2017, while Virgin Atlantic (with whom I took my first US trip, in 1992) retired their 747s in 2020. Lufthansa, one of the few airlines to buy the last 747 type, the -8, are planning the retirement of their fleet, as has KLM.

In those mad days of yore when I used to get on a plane as often as some board a bus, no journey would fill me with the same excitement as one in which I flew in a Boeing 747. When I left San Francisco to move back to Amsterdam in 2003, I got upgraded to a business class seat for the flight with the now defunct Northwest Airlines, who put a 747 on the route. That meant sitting in the upper deck cabin, with a window seat looking out on the Golden Gate Bridge as we soared out of SFO. I’m not too ashamed to admit that I shed a tear - but not because I was leaving California, just the shear romance of it all. I've been lucky enough to get seats on that upper deck on a number of occasions, and it never fails to enamour, not the least, the novelty of having side storage bins that follow the contours of the Jumbo’s haughty prow.

Picture: British Airways

Even ‘downstairs’, the 747 experience just seemed like no other. Despite its enormous size, the 747 was a very quick plane. While it could never compete with Concorde for speed across the Atlantic, seven hours in the air wasn't a particular hardship to get to New York (even less on the way back to London with a decent following wind). What let BA’s fleet down towards the end was the ageing interior of their 747s, which often lacked the basic connectivity that more modern planes offer as standard. But these were, ultimately, minor quibbles. On journeys to and from San Jose in a previous job, the sensible approach would have been to take BA’s direct flight from Heathrow in a comfy 787, but with the 747 still on the San Francisco route, I’d opt for the love of Boeing’s jumbo, even though there’d be an arduous hour’s drive down to Silicon Valley on landing.

The 747’s decline is sad but it had, to some extent, outlasted its relevance. It will, though, continue in a long-running build for the US Air Force of two specially adapted jets to be used for the President (as ‘Air Force One’), along with cargo versions like Atlas Air’s new addition, a popular option for freight carriers due to the plane’s vast interior. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also using one of his airline’s old 747s, Cosmic Girl,  for its nascent satellite launch venture. 

Indeed, the idea of large jets is not entirely over, either. Although the double-deck Airbus A380 has now stopped production, it is likely to remain in use for the foreseeable future, despite being, like the 747, four-engined. Emirates bought 118 of the type to ship large numbers of passengers to and from its Dubai hub. British Airways has even brought its own A380s out mothballs, having put them into storage during the pandemic. While not as romantically appreciated as the 747, passengers love the A380 for its comfort and, for such a lumbering giant, efficiency in flying point-to-point. 

It is, though, clear that despite the A380 enduring, twin-engined jets like the A350 and Boeing’s 777 and 787 models do the job, with less passengers, and more efficiently, from a carbon footprint point of view. The days of flying in a plane with an upper deck, and more than its sense of aviation decadence are, without doubt coming to an end.

Picture: British Airways

 

Stretching legs - why long-haul could be getting longer

As this blog commented on last month, air travel leaves much to be desired. For the most part, getting crammed into a toothpaste tube with wings is simply a necessary evil for those of us who have to travel for business or personal reasons.

Living and working in Paris and, increasingly, London, flying just about edges out taking the Eurostar between these two cities, a journey which, since last summer especially, has carried the considerable risk of the train getting stuck in or just outside the Channel Tunnel thanks to miscreants disrupting services in Calais (yeah, I know, desperate refugees escaping unspeakable horrors in their homeland getting in the way of my highfalutin' business meeting...). Call me precious but I really don't fancy the idea of being locked in a carriage without air conditioning or electricity for the nine or ten hours that some Eurostar passengers have been forced to endure while the authorities try and sort out track intrusions.

This does, however, bring me to a travel horror of a different sort: long-haul flying. Though my musings on aviation might suggest otherwise, I'm really not that well travelled. I've been to Asia just the once (via a fifteen-hour flight from San Francisco to Taiwan, on which, for the only time in my life, I managed to get some proper sleep courtesy of misreading the dosage instructions of sleeping pills I was offered). After that, the longest I've spent in the air has been between Europe and the US West Coast.

When I first flew from London to Los Angeles in 1992, I had barely been anywhere, let alone the other side of the continent on the other side of the Atlantic. I had no idea what 12 and a half hours sat in the smoking section of a Virgin 747 would be like, especially with a chain-smoking bit-part actor next to me, knocking back V&Ts like they were going out of fashion while boring me rigid about episodes of Murder She Wrote that he'd appeared in (since IMDB-verified, I have to admit). Until he passed out.

Nothing could prepare me for the world of disorientation that jet lag would induce for the first time. The next morning I drove out of my airport hotel and, instead of heading towards the 405 freeway and north to Hollywood, I drove east into South Central, barely months after the summer riots of 1992. A young English tourist conspiculously driving a shiny new Dodge Dynasty through Hawthorne was not the wisest decision jet lag could have mis-made for me. So, by the time I realised I was on Rosencrans Avenue, near its junction with Normandie Avenue and therefore epicentre of the trouble, I decided that a U-turn might be wise.

In the years since, including a spell living in California itself, I've grown used to the endlessness of flying out West from Europe, though these flights are becoming somewhat more tolerable as the aircraft servicing the routes have become newer and more efficient. However, I realise that these flights pale into insignificance when compared to other routes.

Last week an Airbus A380 of the Emirates airline made what is believed to be the longest non-stop scheduled commercial flight by distance (the record for duration is still held by a Quantas flight from Dallas to Sydney which took 16 hours and 55 minutes). However, this could be eclipsed by Emirates commencing a route from Dubai to Panama City (due to launch this month but postponed - again - until next year) that will clock in at 17 hours and 35 minutes, though this is still shorter by distance than the Auckland trip.

New planes with better engine technology are enabling these marathon flights, which no doubt benefit the bottom lines of the big carriers, such as the rapidly expanding Emirates and Qatar Airways, as well as Australia's Quantas which, through geographic necessity, has always had to be at the end of the longest routes on Earth.

But what do they do for the passengers? Given how the business of air travel is all about balancing profits with the passenger experience, the thought of spending three-quarters of a whole day crammed into an economy class seat fills me with mortal dread. Cabin innovations on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A380 and A350 are supposed to improve cabin pressure, air circulation and even ambient light, but from my own experience, nothing can relieve the strain of being squashed into economy class rows, where the legroom has grown ever-tighter, and even the number of seats per row has increased.

Unless you have a generous employer or are one of those air miles nerds who apparently can fly anwhere in a premium cabin by some form of black art, long-haul really is not fun. And as economy class sections become more cramped, the armrest duels, the seat-recline mind games and the awkward social etiquette of getting past (or clambering over) two or even four other sleeping passengers to get to the toilet during a very long-haul flight is the stuff of nightmares.

Twitter/Christopher Adams

The New Zealand Herald's Christopher Adams live blogged from the Emirates Dubai-Auckland flight to see how his fellow passengers were holding up, though he admits that he had booked into business class, making any immediate drawbacks around him of the sixteen-and-a-half-hour flight a clear case of 'First World problems'.

Exploring the economy cabin, Adams didn't see any greater suffering than any other long-haul flight. The 500-seat A380 wasn't completely full, either, possibly the result of fuel economy weight restrictions (Emirates will fly the smaller Boeing 777 on this route on a regular basis).

This begs the question of whether such a non-stop journey of endurance would be popular to begin with. Super-long distance flights, such as those from European cities to Australia or New Zealand, get broken up by layovers in Dubai or Doha. Some choose to stop off for a day in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Personally, I'd say that was sensible, even if it did cut down on time at the eventual destination. All I know is that if I ever brave the journey Down Under - a trip fraught with claustrophobia on the way and the world's deadliest things that could kill you when you get there - I could never do the journey in one go, even if the technology existed for an airliner to fly non-stop.

As it is, there is no shortage of routes, notably starting out in the Middle East, which clock in at over 8,000 miles, and which require supreme stamina to endure in all but the most luxurious of flying classes. Perhaps its no surprise, then, how airlines like Emirates and Qatar, with their reputation for opulance in the premium seats, can sustain flying the current crop of jumbo jets from Dubai to Auckland, Los Angeles or Houston. These airlines advertise themselves as being luxury experiences - one has a TV commercial suggesting that your travel itinerary could take you to New York before whisking yourself off to a tropical island in the South Pacific, before you then travel to Dubai. Clearly, this particular airline's advertising agency had no demographic in mind that would fly anything less than first class, because putting in the miles like that in the cattle section would surely not be any fun at all.