Cockpit Confidential (6 page)

He was right, even if vindication didn't come easy. Boeing took a chance and built Trippe his superjet, nearly bankrupting itself in the process. Early-on engine problems were a costly embarrassment, and sales were alarmingly slow at the outset. But on January 21, 1970, Pan Am's
Clipper Victor
(
see Tenerife story
) made the maiden voyage on the New York–London milk run, and the dynamics of global air travel were changed forever. It's not a stretch to consider the advent of the 747 as the most crucial turning point in the history of civil aviation. For the first time, millions of flyers were able to cover tremendous distances at great speed—at affordable fares. Fast-forward forty years, and the 747 is one of the bestselling airliners of all time. Of all passenger jets still in production, only its little brother, the 737, has sold more copies.

In the second grade, my two favorite toys were both 747s. The first was an inflatable replica, similar to those novelty balloons you buy at parades, with rubbery wings that drooped in such violation of the real thing that I taped them into proper position. To a sevenyear-old, the toy seemed enormous, like my own personal Macy's float. The second was a plastic model about 12 inches long. Like the balloon, it was decked out in the livery of Pan Am. One side of the fuselage was made of clear polystyrene, through which the entire interior, row by row, could be viewed. I can still picture exactly the blue and red pastels of the tiny chairs.

Modeled in perfect miniature near the toy plane's nose was a blue spiral staircase. Early version 747s were outfitted with a set of spiral stairs connecting the main and upper decks. It gave the entranceway the look and feel of a lobby, like the grand vestibule of a cruise ship. In 1982, on my inaugural trip on a real 747, I beamed at my first glimpse of that winding column. Those stairs are in my blood—a genetic helix spinning upward to a kind of pilot Nirvana. (Alas, later-variant 747s adopted a traditional, ladder-style staircase.)

In the 1990s, Boeing ran a magazine advertisement for its 747. The ad was a two-pager, with a nose-on silhouette of the plane against a dusky sunset.
“Where/does this/take you?”
asked Boeing in staggered script across the centerfold. Below this dreamy triptych the text read: “A stone monastery in the shadow of a Himalayan peak. A cluster of tents on the sweep of the Serengeti plains. The Boeing 747 was made for places like these. Distant places filled with adventure, romance, and discovery.” I so related to this syrupy bit of PR that I clipped it from the magazine and kept it in a folder. Whenever it seemed my career was going nowhere (which was all the time), I'd pull out the ad and look at it.

The nature and travel writer Barry Lopez once authored an essay in which, from inside the hull of an empty 747 freighter, he compares the aircraft to the quintessential symbol of another era—the Gothic cathedral of twelfth-century Europe. “Standing on the main deck,” Lopez writes, “where ‘nave' meets ‘transept,' and looking up toward the pilots' ‘chancel.' … The machine was magnificent, beautiful, complex as an insoluble murmur of quadratic equations.”

No other airplane could arouse a comparison like that. The 747 is arguably the most impressive and inspirational work of art—call it industrial art, if you must—ever produced by commercial aviation.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, designers seem to be thinking in different directions. “Air does not yield to style” is a refrain attributed some years ago to an engineer at Airbus, the European collective that is Boeing's main competitor. Right or wrong, he was addressing the fact that modern aircraft designs have become so bland and uninspired as to be nearly indistinguishable from one another. In addition to the 747, Jet Age romantics recall the provocative curves of the Caravelle, the urbane superiority of Concorde, the gothic confidence of the 727. Planes don't look like this anymore. They're a lot less distinctive. And this, we're told, is because in the name of efficiency and economy, they
have
to be.

But is this really the case, or is Airbus being lazy? The 747 is one of several good-looking planes to emerge from Boeing since the 1970s, yet Airbus has given us only one true head-turner—its long-range A340. It has produced a line of aircraft at once technologically exquisite and visually banal. At best, Airbus's philosophy seems centered around a belief that not enough people think air travel is boring. (It's a peculiar cultural juxtaposition—the Americans elite and tasteful, trumping those boorish Europeans. Who knew?)

I was once standing in an airport boarding lounge when a group of young women, seated near a window, began giggling as a small jetliner passed by the window. “Check out that goofy plane,” said one of them. It was an Airbus A319, which you have to admit looks vaguely, well, dwarfish—as if it popped from an Airbus vending machine or hatched from an egg.

Bad enough, but the pinnacle of aesthetic disregard was achieved upon rollout of Airbus's biggest and most ballyhooed creation: the enormous, double-decked A380. With a maximum takeoff weight of more than a million pounds, the Airbus A380 is the largest, most powerful, and most expensive commercial plane in history.

And possibly the ugliest. There is something grotesquely anthropomorphic about the front of the A380, its abruptly pitched forehead calling to mind a steroidal beluga. The rest of the plane is bloated, swollen, and graceless. It's big for big's sake, yet at the same time conveys an undignified squatness, as if embarrassed by its own girth. It is the most self-conscious-looking airliner I've ever seen.

And is it really
that
big? When the 747 debuted in 1970, it was more than double the size and weight of its closest competitor. The Airbus A380 weighs in at only about 30 percent heavier than a 747. Meanwhile, its well-publicized capacity limits of eight-hundred-plus passengers is likely to be seen only in rare, high-density configurations. With airlines concentrating on first- and business-cabin amenities, most A380s are set up for about five hundred riders—slightly more than most 747s. The A380 is big; revolutionary it's not.

Though you wouldn't know it listening to the media. The puffery got going in spring 2005, when the A380 took to the air for its maiden test flight. “The most anticipated flight since Concorde leapt from the pavement in 1969,” cried one news report. “Straight into the history books,” said another of the “gargantuan double-decked superjumbo.” Oh, the humanity. Over on the Airbus website, they were channeling Neil Armstrong, inviting visitors to listen to the “first words of chief test pilot Jacques Rosay.”

And what of the future? While the A380 was being doused with champagne and hyperbole, the 747 was flying into its fourth decade of operation. The bulbous new 'Bus wasn't much to look at, but it was loaded with high-tech gadgetry and the lowest seat mile operating costs ever seen. The 747's last substantial redesign had been in 1989, and for all its history, it was rapidly approaching obsolescence. Would the A380 soon be the only true jumbo jet?

Finally, in November 2005, as if the ghost of Juan Trippe himself (he died in 1981) had drifted down for a pep talk, Boeing made the move it should have made sooner, announcing that it would, after several false starts, go ahead and produce an advanced 747, designated the 747-8. (The nomenclature is a departure from Boeing's usual ordered suffixing of -100, -200, -300, etc., but a wily overture to Asia, where the bulk of sales were expected and where the number eight is considered fortunate.) The plane entered service in early 2012. The freighter version, introduced by Luxembourg-based Cargolux, was first. Lufthansa debuted the passenger variant later in the year.

The passenger 747-8 has a fuselage stretch of 12 feet and room for about thirty-five additional seats. Those are minor enlargements, but extra seating is secondary. Boeing's real mission was to upgrade the plane's internal architecture to cutting-edge standards, drawing from advancements already in place on the 777 and 787. Airlines can bank on a 12 percent fuel efficiency advantage and an eye-popping 22 percent trip cost advantage over the Airbus.

The big question, though, is whether there is room out there for
two
jumbo jets. It remains to be seen whether the 747 and A380 can coexist in an industry in which long-haul markets have steadily fragmented, trending toward smaller planes, not bigger ones. The need for an ultra-high-capacity aircraft is still out there, but not in the numbers of times past.

One way that Boeing has hedged its bets is by showcasing a freighter option right from the start. Cargo variants typically arrive later, not first. The 747's well-established history as an outstanding cargo-hauler ensures a certain sales buffer, should the passenger model stumble. And if the whole thing flops? Boeing has put up about $4 billion for the 747-8, with most of the R&D borrowed from prior, already-funded projects. Airbus spent three times that amount concocting the A380 from scratch.

But in my opinion, the best thing about the new 747 is the obvious one: the way it looks. Prominent tweaks include a futuristically raked wing, an extended upper deck, and scalloped engine nacelles that cover the engine and reduce noise, but from every angle, it remains true to the original profile. If anything, it's prettier.

As a kid, watching a whole generation of planes go ugly in front of me, I often wondered: why can't somebody take a classic airliner, apply some aerodynamic nip and tuck, imbue it with the latest technology, and give it new life? Not as a retro novelty project, but as a viable, profitable airliner. The 747-8
is
that plane. Boeing's back-tothe-future gamble may or may not make a profit, but either way it's still pretty slick.

Over in Toulouse, Airbus swears that its A380 is no white elephant. And how can we not agree? Look at that forehead again; that's not doing justice to the grace of elephants. Does air yield to style? Maybe that's the wrong question, for obviously it yields to a little imagination and effort.

Epilogue: It was a friend of mine, not me, who became the first pilot I knew to fly a 747, setting off for Shanghai and Sydney while I flew to Hartford and Harrisburg. The closest I've gotten is the occasional upstairs seating assignment. The upper deck is a cozy room with an arched ceiling like the inside of a miniature hangar. I'll recline up there, basking in the self-satisfaction of having made it, at least one way, up the spiral stairs.

I had an upper-deck seat to Nairobi once on British Airways. Prior to pushback I wandered into the cockpit unannounced, to have a look, thinking the guys might be interested to learn they had another pilot on board. They weren't. I'd interrupted their checklist, and they asked me to go away and slammed the door. “Yes, we do mind,” said the second officer in a voice exactly like Graham Chapman's.