September 30, 2018

The Boeing 747 turns fifty years old today.

Smithsonian magazine has published an essay of mine about the plane for its “American Icon” feature. You can read it here. It appears in the magazine’s print version as well.

The longer, unabridged version is below.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, on the last day of September in Everett, Washington, the first Boeing 747 was rolled from the hangar. Onlookers were stunned. The aircraft before them, gleaming in the morning sunshine, was more than two-hundred feet long and taller than a six-story building.

An airplane of firsts, biggests, and superlatives all around, the 747 has always owed its fame mostly to feats of size. It was the first jetliner with two aisles — two floors, even! And enormous as it was, this was an airplane that went from a literal back-of-a-napkin drawing to a fully functional aircraft in just over two years — an astonishing achievement. //

Say what you want of the DC-3 or the 707 — icons in their own right — it’s the 747 that changed global air travel forever.

And it did so with a style and panache that we seldom see any more in aircraft design. Trippe isn’t the only visionary in this story; it was Boeing’s Joe Sutter and his team of engineers who figured out how to build an airplane that wasn’t just colossal, but also downright beautiful.

How so? “Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems,” wrote the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in an issue of The New Yorker some years back. “How to meet the ground and how to meet the sky—the top and the bottom, in other words.” Or, in Boeing’s case, the front and the back. Because what is a jetliner, in so many ways, but a horizontal skyscraper, whose beauty is beheld (or squandered) primarily through the sculpting of the nose and tail. Whether he realized it or not, Sutter understood this perfectly. //

The picture at the top of this article shows the prototype Boeing 747 on the day of its rollout from the factory in Everett. It was September 30th, 1968. I love this photo because it so perfectly demonstrates both the size and the grace of the 747. It’s hard for a photograph to properly capture both of those aspects of the famous jet, and this image does it better than any I’ve ever seen.

Across the forward fuselage you can see the logos of the 747’s original customers. The one furthest forward, of course, is the blue and white globe of Pan Am. Pan Am and the 747 are all but synonymous, their respective histories (and tragedies) forever intertwined. But plenty of other carriers were part of the plane’s early story, as those decals attest. Twenty-seven airlines initially signed up for the jumbo jet when Boeing announced production.

My question is, can you name them? How many of those logos can you identify?