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The Boeing 747 Is Heading For Retirement
schwit1 writes: After 45 years of service, Boeing's 747, the world's first jumbo jet, is finally facing retirement as airlines consider more modern planes for their fleets. The article gives a brief but detailed outline of the 747's history, and why passengers and pilots still love it. From the article: "The 747 was America at its proud and uncontaminated best. 'There's no substitute for cubic inches,' American race drivers used to say and the 747 expresses that truth in the air. There is still residual rivalry with the upstart European Airbus. Some Americans, referring to untested new technologies, call it Scarebus. There's an old saying: 'If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.' A comparison to the European Concorde is illuminating. The supersonic Anglo-French plane was an elite project created for elite passengers to travel in near space with the curvature of the Earth on one hand and a glass of first growth claret on the other. The 747 was mass-market, proletarianising the jet set. It was Coke, not grand cru and it was designed by a man named Joe. Thus, the 747's active life was about twice that of Concorde."
Come on editors. I know this site is US centric, but do we really need the flag waving? Aside from anything else it will polarise and divert the debate from the real topic, the 747.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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As a frequent flyer, I'd much rather fly on an Airbus or a 777 than a 747. The 747 is noisy, it vibrates, and it's just generally unrefined. Sure it was an impressive plane several decades ago, when the competition was trijets like the DC10, but the world has moved on. In a way I'll still be kinda sad to see an icon of 20th century aviation go. It's also a far more elegant-looking on the outside than the A380. The A380 is pretty ugly front-on, but the 747 has nice lines.
That "summary" is just a rambling pile of words.
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The Boeing 747 has its instantly recognised "hump" precisely because Boeing thought at the time of its design that it wouldn't have a long sales life as a passenger aircraft, as the future was "obviously" supersonic for passenger transport. Therefore, the design was optimised for roll-on roll-off cargo transport through the nose section, which made it a very good cargo aircraft and thus increased its forecasted sales life.
Of course, Boeing also had a finger in the supersonic airliner pie - the Boeing 2707, launched internally in 1958, and publicly in 1964. Boeing had 122 orders for their SST by 1969, the year their 747 aircraft first flew.
And then the SST market collapsed due to the oil crisis of the 1970s, and everyones projects went under - Concorde only "survived" to fly on in airline service (British Airways and Air France) because it was further along than the Boeing 2707 and had actually produced production standard aircraft by the time airlines started dropping their orders from all manufacturers.
So Concorde was not an elite project for elite passengers, it was intended to be the norm for passenger transport - and Boeing agreed. Market conditions swung against them both however, and it was never to be.
Boeing went on to continue to market their 747, and Airbus (formed from the same agreements that created the Concorde) went on to produce the first twin engine wide body long haul aircraft in the A300 in the 1970s, which sold (together with its A310 variant) sold over 800 copies.
The early 707s were SCREAMERS. They had a high-pitched whine that made you hold your ears when they flew over. And that was just landings, I can't even imagine take-offs. As a kid, I lived in a place called Rosedale, just a few miles from JFK airport in Queens NYC.
The Concorde however, was a lower rumble. On landing, they weren't terribly noisy, although you heard them further out and the sound was so distinctive you knew it was coming at least 5 minutes ahead of it being visible. And what a sight! They came in at a high angle of attack, very nose-high, and with the beak of the plane drooped, and the landing gear extended, the plane looked like some kind of bird of prey about to swoop down and grab a mouse off a field.
It does need to be noted that Concorde flew mostly while turbofans were the norm, so most planes were quieter than it. The 707 flew when most other planes were still prop-driven, and it was only in the first few years of Concorde operation that 707s still flew (they were being phased out); but even by that time, they had made some changes to the engines to make the 707s less screechy.
That said, every plane had a distinctive engine sound, and if you lived in my area long enough, you could learn to identify which plane was flying over you simply from the sound. It got to the point where I never even had to look up, and I could name every aircraft coming over the house.
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Total sales over the last ten years don't seem that relevant to the "heading for retirement" claim. Just like total profits over the last ten years don't mean anything when considering if a company is growing or shrinking.
You need to see how the numbers are changing since "heading" is a claim about the direction of change not the quantities.
So taking orders (rather than deliveries since we care about the future) from 2005 through 2014 (2015 isn't done yet) we get - there are negatives because you can cancel:
747: 43, 72, 21, 3, 2, -1, -1, 1, 12, 0
380: 20, 7, 23, 9, 4, 32, 19, 9, 42, 13
To smooth things more for the 747 (380s are too new to bother) the 5 year order totals for 747s starting with 1966-70 and ending with 2010-15 are:
198, 103, 253, 126, 377, 104, 168, 90, 97, 16
Sure 2015 isn't over yet, maybe they'll get 80 orders in the next few months (making for their 2nd highest ever year) but that doesn't seem likely. However, orders have clearly plummeted in the last 5 years (lucky you picked 10 to use to hit the bumper year of 2006).
And yes given those order numbers "on the way out" seems reasonable enough.