Good Bye

After spending much of the Thanksgiving weekend in traffic or waiting in airports full of flight delays in order to keep your temper down you should reflect on how wonderful air travel used to be. Now it is the 747 plane that is a thing of the past for passenger travel just like the Concord is no longer that took people to Europe in just a few hours instead of half a day. Why did such conveniences for all disappear in air travel now?

The 747 didn’t even look like any other plane in the sky. It had that whale hump where the pilots sat on top of the plane. By the end of this year not a single airline will be flying the jumbo passenger jet. Boeing gave us the first jumbo jet in 1969. When it first came out it was twice the size of the next largest plane in the sky. At one time you weren’t an airline unless you had a few   747’s in the air. With all that extra space the seats were wider. You could always book a seat and there were places on top with a circular stairway to even a piano bar on top.

After airline deregulation in the late 1970’s cocktail bars gave away to more and smaller seats. The greedy airlines wanted to pack in as many paying passengers on a flight as they could. Maybe that is why there is so much frustration on flights now. Yet because of its size and its long range capability it made flying affordable at the time.  The 747 was iconic because its 4 engines were powerful enough to carry the Space Shuttle on its back like a baby whale going for a ride on its mother. The 747 was the Air Force One that carried 5 United States Presidents all over the world. It was a proud symbol to the world of American ingenuity.

Now there are newer more efficient twin engine planes carrying us everywhere in the sky. We need to be thankful for the 747 because it outlasted the expectation of its engineers by about 40 years. Back in the 1960’s Boeing thought that Super Sonic jets like the Concord would have been the normal way to travel now. But the price of a ticket on the Concord never became affordable. The design of the 747 was so that the nose of the plane could lift up to let in large loads of cargo. Thus the cabin was moved on top.  Because of its unique design the 747 will still remain as a cargo plane. In the 1990’s Boeing was making 7 of the giant planes each month. Now Boeing delivers just one 747 every two months.

So, before you want to punch someone on a plane for just being too close to you, sit back and dream of how it all used to be. Wonderful! Good Bye giant whale in the sky.