For many, cheap air travel gave the human heart a much wider range of choices, as people living on opposite coasts or even in different countries discovered they could start and sustain long-distance relationships in a way that was simply not conceivable in the past. More prosaically, it gave the human appetite wider choices, be it just-picked kiwis from New Zealand or fresh Copper River salmon from Alaska. Unhelpfully, it also helped viruses to travel with ease across the globe.
All of this didn’t start with the 747, of course. The Boeing 707, the iconic leading airliner of the early Jet Age, had its own important role. (One example: Hawaii had just 171,367 visitors in 1958, the year before Pan Am started flying the 707 to Honolulu. By 1970, the 747’s inaugural year, that figure was up to 1.75 million.)
But it was the 747 that brought worldwide travel within reach for hundreds of millions of people. Today, air travel is a victim of its own success, and most of us hardly give more thought to flying on an airplane than we do to taking a bus; we may even consider the former a more miserable experience.
Anyone who got caught in the Southwest Airlines holiday meltdown may not appreciate this sentiment, but overall air travel today remains something of a miracle. Whether you need to get to Paris or Pasco, you can usually do so in a matter of hours, at a price that allows you to think about taking such a trip in the first place and with an astonishing degree of confidence that you’ll get there safely.
The “Queen of the Skies” is passing out of fashion because nimbler, more energy efficient jetliners with two engines — rather than the 747’s four — have come along to do a better job of getting people from point to point internationally.
In fact, the biggest challenge facing the aviation industry today isn’t how to move passengers around better. The existential question for airliner manufacturers and airlines alike is whether they can do it in a way that’s better for the planet. Aviation takes a frightful environmental toll, and for most of us, the single most significant thing we could do to fight climate change is simply to stop flying. The industry is working hard on solutions, but aviation remains one of the most difficult activities to decarbonize, for pretty obvious reasons.
Gravity is a difficult thing to overcome, and no battery yet known to man could possibly get a modern jet airliner across the Atlantic Ocean from Kennedy to Heathrow. Aviation engineers truly accomplished the phenomenal more than half a century ago when they met the challenge concocted by those two guys fishing in Alaska. Today’s airplane designers should use the story of the Boeing 747’s success as inspiration for the great task they now face of building an airliner that’s not only fast and affordable and safe, but green as well.
Bon Voyage, Boeing 747. – The New York Times
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