But really, it was just about four-engine planes becoming too expensive to run. Two-engine planes won. 777 burns 30% less fuel per passenger and has almost the same cabin width. And top level became a flop because it's too narrow for a first class cabin by today's standards and all other uses for them make no sense. Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition in which C-5 Galaxy won: it was meant to be a cargo plane with a small - top floor - passenger cabin.
I'd guess they'll continue in cargo service for many more years, just as the DC10 and MD11 did (despite the grounding after the Louisville crash, I expect they will fly again before finally being retired).
> Top floor existed at all because it was Boeing's entry for a heavy cargo plane competition
Yes, but it turns out the hump is great for area ruling (aerodynamic drag reduction at transonic speeds), as observed by the 747-300's extended hump giving lower drag (but higher weight, of course) than the short-hump versions.
Ah. It was based on a series of performance graphs from Boeing, dating back to my aircraft-design days where that very question was discussed and I was baffled enough by the contradiction to ask for detailed clarifications to the presenting professor.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to those old notes, and couldn't quickly find what I was looking for online.
So for now, due to lack of proper supporting arguments, I would say: scratch that.
The Cd is normally normalized by the wing area, and the wing planform was the same between the 747-200 and 747-300. So if the Cd was lower for the -300, the total drag should be assumed to be smaller.
I remember hearing that the -300 cruised at a slightly higher Mach number, I assumed that was enabled by the center of pressure being moved back a few metres. But I have no idea what kind of drag the hump transition imparted on the upper fuselage. I kind of assumed that the low pressure zone above the rest of the aircraft would make up for most of the drag penalty of the transition (in general, not -300 specific). I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Assuming that the boundary layer is laminar for the entire length of the extended part of the fuselage during cruise - which is probably a good assumption, correct me if I'm wrong - then I wouldn't expect that the increased wetted area to add any significant drag. There is no additional frontal area, and no additional low pressure transition (just one moved back, obviously). But I'm not an aerospace engineer, just an interested laymen, so I'm just guessing. For all I know the straight staircase reduced drag compared to the classic spiral!
> [..] cruised at a slightly higher Mach number, I assumed that was enabled by the center of pressure being moved back a few metres.
In high-subsonic cases, it normally points to slightly better aerodynamics in the areas flirting with transonic regimes. The name of the game at those speeds is to try to delay the onset of drag-inducing shocks. These shocks will typically first appear on the wing, or in an area heavily influenced by the wing.
In the case of the -300, with the extended bubble coming down at about half the wing root chord, it is possible that the bubble downflow / low-pressure area positively influenced the flow over the wing to slightly delay the transonic onset and further effects.
Pulling the bubble further aft made things worse again.
> Assuming that the boundary layer is laminar for the entire length of the extended part of the fuselage during cruise
Mm. No, I would expect the flow to be turbulent well before that.
> and no additional low pressure transition (just one moved back, obviously).
Careful where you put your low pressure zones, the wing aerodynamics are critical and sensitive! :-) (see explanation above)
But to make things even more interesting, the 747- 300/400/8 cargo all use the short bubble. :-)
Engines became reliable enough for regulators to allow two engine planes to cross large bodies of water. (ETOPS) That's what really killed 4 engine planes.
Isn't that because the twins are designed to a higher standard, due to regulations such as ETOPS? It's not something inherent in two vs four engine designs?
I remember when the US Navy was rejecting single engine aircraft, and the F135 had be be proven literally bulletproof before they would even look at the F-35.
Back in the olden days (2015-ish?) KLM was having a really, really cheap business fare sale JFK-AMS; I snagged it with Delta miles (if I recall correctly) - and flew there and back in their 747 in the upper deck (just to take the flight; didn't have anything to do in AMS). It was really quite nice; it was the first and apparently last time I've taken the 744. I'm really glad I was able to do it.
If this is truly on your bucket list, you should be able to pull it off.
I just asked my favorite stochastic parrot to find the cheapest flight from SFO on a 747 to anywhere. It found a one-way flight on Lufthansa for $500. If you can, I'd encourage you to spring for a business class flight on the top deck (probably $4000 one-way).
I got what was probably my last 747 trip a few years ago on a BA flight from DC to Heathrow.
But I probably missed my chance for an A380. Maybe a Lufthansa flight will pop up that’s affordable. The other airlines mostly operate in the ME or Asia, and no plans for either right now.
It’s such a beautiful plane. Despite having worked for Airbus, the 747 triggers emotions for me that the A380 simply doesn’t. It represents an era of aerospace engineering that will not come back (in many cases probably for the better - but still!)
It’s beautiful because Boeing started, not with the smallest, but with the largest plane possible. Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde, a completely orthogonal project to round up everyone’s identical patriotism, and both projects were absolutely beautiful in their own way!
I'm just a layman, but somehow Airbus doesn't embody the airplane magic.. yet I'm very curious what this means to you. Any easy to grasp details you could describe ?
It was the last aircraft designed using a slide rule and conventional drafting --- the conventional wisdom is that if one printed up a compleat set of blueprints and loaded it on the plane it would be too heavy to take off, though of course, the anticipation was that it would soon be replaced by supersonic passenger aircraft, so it was designed to be easily converted to cargo.
Amazing aircraft, well-deserving of the "Queen of the Skies" moniker, I can still vividly remember going up to the upper deck and cockpit and the view out of the front/side windows.
> The jet was perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence. Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition.
End of American ambition? SpaceX landing is rockets… today! That’s apples to apples also, both aerospace. In other fields we have literally taught computers how to talk.
I agree with you, and I would have expected Ian Bogost to take a more holistic view.
Talking about why, for example, Boeing never build a larger passenger airplane, or why the Concorde is no longer flying, would actually make for an interesting analysis of technology and business.
Why did the progression from the Wright brothers to the 747 not continue for the next fifty years? The answer has to do with physics and economics rather than lack of American ambition or excellence.
I find the whole thing a little odd. The 747 seems to be a great aircraft. It's also a quad jet and the change in regulations for ETOPS makes twinjets a no brainer for reducing cost. There's no reason to hurry and up and get rid of them, many will continue in cargo service for many years. But there isn't any reason to build big quad jets any longer
The most interesting thing about SpaceX is how it convinced a lot of otherwise sober people that data centers in space was a $50 septillion addressable market. You might laugh and think I’m joking but a lot of people seriously fell for the nonsense in the public filing, which should’ve been a one way ticket to SEC jail.
I will miss the 747. Modern planes with less engines feel less safe. I hate all the justifications used to fly long distances across oceans with only 2 engines, or only 1 engine.
Anyone interested should read Joe Sutter's book, 747. Sutter was the lead engineer for the development of the 747 and he has some awesome stories.
One interesting story is that Juan Trippe (CEO of PanAm) wanted Boeing to create a double-decker airplane. He was enamored with the idea of "ocean liners" cruising the sky. But Sutter (and other engineers) knew that it would be impossible to create what he wanted, so instead they proposed a wide-body aircraft (10 seats across). Nevertheless, Trippe insisted on a double-decker design.
The engineers then created two cabin mockups. One for a double decker, which was basically two narrow-body cabins stacked on top of each other. The other was the wide-body of the 747. Once Trippe saw the trade off, he realized that the spacious cabin of the 747 was the way to go.
But even then, when he saw the second level where the pilots go, he insisted on putting passengers up there too.
I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
This article is but one example of a tiresome genre: the paean to the supposed glory days of aviation. Passengers dressed up, dined on caviar, and smoked cigarettes. Stewardesses were sexy, and liquor flowed in the expansive 747 lounge.
These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks.
I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me.
But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account.
Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.
I know less about the airframe differences across the -400 and -8, but I can say the 747-8 represented a major upgrade in Flight Management Software.
I re-wrote the Central Maintenance System (portion inside the FMS) in C from scratch because no one had the original detailed design documents. The original -400 code was written in Pascal if I'm remembering correctly. I gleamed what I could from the source and relied on unit tests to get the rest of the way there based on what I knew of the protocol itself.
The entire FMS software was completely re-written in C++ and using modern object oriented patterns (at the time). Probably the most fun I've had over my now 20'ish year career. Of course Boeing was pissed with the delays this caused because the airframe wasn't a major change. I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out. Personal opinion, this was a large part of what led to the MAX situation.
One interesting thing is that the 747 was born as a temporary transition product, from a failed proposal after Boeing lost the competition against the C-5 Galaxy.
In the era when Joe Sutter designed it, almost the whole world believed that supersonic passenger aviation was right in front of us. Boeing put almost all of its core resources into the Mach 2 Boeing 2707. The Jumbo Jet was only a temporary plan based on a freighter foundation from the beginning. Its later conversion to cargo use was deeply considered from the start (which makes its situation today much better than the A380).
What happened later we all know. The Tu-144 fell from the sky over Paris. Concorde barely entered service because Britain and France did not want to pay cancellation penalties. Boeing was almost dragged down by the 2707. And the 747 became Boeing’s savior.
Ironically, as engine bypass ratios increased, newer airliners became more and more fuel-efficient, also slower and slower. This former "slow temporary backup freighter" is now the highest and fastest mainline airliner in the sky, able to fly above 40,000 feet and cruise close to Mach 1.
Another perhaps sad point is that before 9/11, the Jumbo Jet dominated the sky of large aircraft. So almost all the well-known bomb attacks people can easily remember were on 747.
> Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.
Can some explain why replacing it with more efficient, and still American, jets is somehow a negative for American might, progress, and invention?
"Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition."
What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this?
The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American.
Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature.
[0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."
58 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 66.4 ms ] threadYes, but it turns out the hump is great for area ruling (aerodynamic drag reduction at transonic speeds), as observed by the 747-300's extended hump giving lower drag (but higher weight, of course) than the short-hump versions.
It had a lower Cd with the extended hump, but it still had a higher drag, due to the larger wetted area.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to those old notes, and couldn't quickly find what I was looking for online.
So for now, due to lack of proper supporting arguments, I would say: scratch that.
The Cd is normally normalized by the wing area, and the wing planform was the same between the 747-200 and 747-300. So if the Cd was lower for the -300, the total drag should be assumed to be smaller.
Assuming that the boundary layer is laminar for the entire length of the extended part of the fuselage during cruise - which is probably a good assumption, correct me if I'm wrong - then I wouldn't expect that the increased wetted area to add any significant drag. There is no additional frontal area, and no additional low pressure transition (just one moved back, obviously). But I'm not an aerospace engineer, just an interested laymen, so I'm just guessing. For all I know the straight staircase reduced drag compared to the classic spiral!
In high-subsonic cases, it normally points to slightly better aerodynamics in the areas flirting with transonic regimes. The name of the game at those speeds is to try to delay the onset of drag-inducing shocks. These shocks will typically first appear on the wing, or in an area heavily influenced by the wing.
In the case of the -300, with the extended bubble coming down at about half the wing root chord, it is possible that the bubble downflow / low-pressure area positively influenced the flow over the wing to slightly delay the transonic onset and further effects.
Pulling the bubble further aft made things worse again.
> Assuming that the boundary layer is laminar for the entire length of the extended part of the fuselage during cruise
Mm. No, I would expect the flow to be turbulent well before that.
> and no additional low pressure transition (just one moved back, obviously).
Careful where you put your low pressure zones, the wing aerodynamics are critical and sensitive! :-) (see explanation above)
But to make things even more interesting, the 747- 300/400/8 cargo all use the short bubble. :-)
Four engines are also less safe than twin engines. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but Boeing did the math and made the case.
I remember when the US Navy was rejecting single engine aircraft, and the F135 had be be proven literally bulletproof before they would even look at the F-35.
I just asked my favorite stochastic parrot to find the cheapest flight from SFO on a 747 to anywhere. It found a one-way flight on Lufthansa for $500. If you can, I'd encourage you to spring for a business class flight on the top deck (probably $4000 one-way).
But I probably missed my chance for an A380. Maybe a Lufthansa flight will pop up that’s affordable. The other airlines mostly operate in the ME or Asia, and no plans for either right now.
Amazing aircraft, well-deserving of the "Queen of the Skies" moniker, I can still vividly remember going up to the upper deck and cockpit and the view out of the front/side windows.
well as long as Congress doesn't let him keep it, hopefully
BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance program to refurbish it
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25B_Bridge
> The jet was perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence. Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition.
End of American ambition? SpaceX landing is rockets… today! That’s apples to apples also, both aerospace. In other fields we have literally taught computers how to talk.
Talking about why, for example, Boeing never build a larger passenger airplane, or why the Concorde is no longer flying, would actually make for an interesting analysis of technology and business.
Why did the progression from the Wright brothers to the 747 not continue for the next fifty years? The answer has to do with physics and economics rather than lack of American ambition or excellence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714519
Pathetic drivel. There's legion of commercial airliners that are more beautiful than the 747.
One interesting story is that Juan Trippe (CEO of PanAm) wanted Boeing to create a double-decker airplane. He was enamored with the idea of "ocean liners" cruising the sky. But Sutter (and other engineers) knew that it would be impossible to create what he wanted, so instead they proposed a wide-body aircraft (10 seats across). Nevertheless, Trippe insisted on a double-decker design.
The engineers then created two cabin mockups. One for a double decker, which was basically two narrow-body cabins stacked on top of each other. The other was the wide-body of the 747. Once Trippe saw the trade off, he realized that the spacious cabin of the 747 was the way to go.
But even then, when he saw the second level where the pilots go, he insisted on putting passengers up there too.
I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks.
I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me.
But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account.
Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.
I re-wrote the Central Maintenance System (portion inside the FMS) in C from scratch because no one had the original detailed design documents. The original -400 code was written in Pascal if I'm remembering correctly. I gleamed what I could from the source and relied on unit tests to get the rest of the way there based on what I knew of the protocol itself.
The entire FMS software was completely re-written in C++ and using modern object oriented patterns (at the time). Probably the most fun I've had over my now 20'ish year career. Of course Boeing was pissed with the delays this caused because the airframe wasn't a major change. I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out. Personal opinion, this was a large part of what led to the MAX situation.
Could it have been Ada 83?
Concorde?
The 787 would beg to differ. It is an engineering achievement on par with the 747.
In the era when Joe Sutter designed it, almost the whole world believed that supersonic passenger aviation was right in front of us. Boeing put almost all of its core resources into the Mach 2 Boeing 2707. The Jumbo Jet was only a temporary plan based on a freighter foundation from the beginning. Its later conversion to cargo use was deeply considered from the start (which makes its situation today much better than the A380).
What happened later we all know. The Tu-144 fell from the sky over Paris. Concorde barely entered service because Britain and France did not want to pay cancellation penalties. Boeing was almost dragged down by the 2707. And the 747 became Boeing’s savior.
Ironically, as engine bypass ratios increased, newer airliners became more and more fuel-efficient, also slower and slower. This former "slow temporary backup freighter" is now the highest and fastest mainline airliner in the sky, able to fly above 40,000 feet and cruise close to Mach 1.
Another perhaps sad point is that before 9/11, the Jumbo Jet dominated the sky of large aircraft. So almost all the well-known bomb attacks people can easily remember were on 747.
Can some explain why replacing it with more efficient, and still American, jets is somehow a negative for American might, progress, and invention?
What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this?
The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American.
Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature.
[0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."