747

Qantas is likely to be one of the last operators of the significantly more successful previous generation, at least among airlines in the more developed world. The Red Roo has some of the most recent passenger 747-400s ever delivered, in the form of the six uniquely Qantas 747-400ER aircraft with extra fuel tanks that enable a range boost to 7,670nm/14,205km from 7,260nm/13,450km on a standard -400.

But 747s operated into Australia by other airlines have become a rare sight.

British Airways, which held the record for the largest 747-400 fleet, now serves Sydney with the Boeing 777‑300ER. Air New Zealand has said haere rā to its last 747-400 in favour of a mixed 777-200ER, -300ER and 787-9 fleet. United has swapped out the 747-400 on its Australia run for the 777-200ER.

The European airlines that once served Australia now do so through codeshares and connections to alliance or bilateral partner airlines based in Asia, only one of which – Thai Airways International – operates the 747, and even Thai has on-again, off-again plans to remove its 747‑400s from service. The rest primarily operate Airbus A330s for frequency or A380s for capacity, with Boeing 777s making up most of the rest of the market, and Boeing 787 Dreamliners starting to join the mix.

Tellingly, of the three Gulf carriers that have revolutionised the way Australians fly westbound, none of them is a passenger 747 operator.

It’s hard to find someone in aviation (except perhaps the most steely-hearted fuel economist) who isn’t preparing to shed anostalgic tear when the old birds finally go. This writer remembers fondly a boyhood of spending long stretches of daytime flights as an unaccompanied minor in the threecrew flightdeck of classic 747- 100 and -200 aircraft, where Jet A-1-soaked aviators encouraged a lifelong fascination with airliners.

Travellers fortunate enough to fly in the tiny upper deck of a 747-100 or -200, the stretched hump of the -300 or -400 series, or the extralong 747-8I upstairs cabin love the quiet, exclusive cabin, often (but not always) dedicated to a business class cabin that feels much like a private jet.

And as a commercial airliner, the unique nose cabin usually occupied by first class (or business where first class is not offered) remains unparalleled in shape and – even by the whisper-quiet Airbus A380 – in silence.

But enough of the rose-tinted glasses. How are airlines replacing the big bird? Why haven’t they chosen the 747-8I in any greater numbers? And did the 747’s own success drive its eventual flight into the sunset?

An unexpected icon in aviation history

The 747 was never designed or expected to be a quadragenarian. Its original mission was to provide extra subsonic lift for Pan American World Airways in the interim period until the industry moved to supersonic aircraft – developed from concepts like the Bristol Type 223 and Sud Aviation Super Caravelle (which merged to create Concorde), Boeing 2707, Lockheed L-2000, Douglas Model 2229 or Convair 58-9. Indeed, Qantas would place early options for Concorde in 1966, but later cancel them in favour of the 747.

As the first widebody aircraft, the 747’s width was dictated by its expected endgame: providing noseto- tail double-deck cargo uplift of the

Qantas is likely to be one of the last major operators of the 747-400.

developing unit load device (ULD) containerised transport system.

Indeed the size of widebody aircraft from the Douglas DC-10, Lockheed L-1011, Airbus A300 (and thus A330 and A340), and all the way up to the 787 and A350 has also been dictated by the requirement to use the LD3/6/11 container standard two-abreast – a system developed for the 747.

The first of Pan Am’s initial 1966 25-aircraft order was to be delivered in 1969, an astoundingly short period of time to imagine nearly 50 years later. Little wonder the team working on the project were called ‘The Incredibles’.

But in an echo from the 747 to the present: nearly two dozen aircraft were left engineless on the ramp at Boeing’s Paine Field, Everett plant, in the same state as the numerous 787 aircraft chocked and counterweighted during the much-publicised Dreamliner delays. The jumbo backlogresulted from issues with the Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines.

And that original 747 passenger layout looks incredibly spacious to the modern eye, with its 3-4-2 layout offering just nine seats abreast in economy when first introduced. Those seats measured up at over 18in wide and with aisles roomy enough for passengers sitting next to them not to be bumped when a flight attendant or passenger walked past. For flyers, the extra room was very welcome: the 707 fuselage diameter which the 747 replaced was essentially identical to the later 727 and 737 in width, where six passengers sitting abreast are resigned to seats at 17in. Practically all 747 operators would subsequently move to a more dense 3-4-3 layout in the mid to late 1970s, giving the new Boeing standard seat a width of just over 17in, which would set the stage for a similar move from nine-abreast to 10-abreast on the later 777. Another case of history repeating: the roomy-looking eight-abreast advertisements for the 787 Dreamliner also turned into a very tight nine-abreast seating layout for all current operators except some Japan Airlines aircraft.

Qantas flew the 747-200 for over 30 years

The extensive involvement of Pan Am in the 747’s development meant that the original jumbo was optimised for transatlantic routes. Qantas, meanwhile, required longer stage lengths and opted for the uprated 747B, later the 747-200. Delivered from 1971, the -200s served for over 30 years, first in JT8D and then in Rolls-Royce RB211-powered forms, with VH-EBS, the last of her kind, being retired after the post-9/11 airline crisis in early January 2003. Qantas also operated three 747-200 Combi aircraft, two of which were later converted to a full passenger layout. (In a quirk of fate, two Qantas 747-200s would go on to serve Virgin Atlantic in 1991, nearly a decade before Virgin Blue was established. ) Between 1980 and 2004 Qantas was also a notable operator of the endearingly oddly-shaped 747SP – initially not for its extended range, the reason for which the -SP was originally designed for Pan Am and pre-revolution Iran Air, but for its short runway performance at Wellington. Harken back to that when boarding a Jetconnect 737-800 the next time you fly Qantas to the New Zealand capital.

Qantas, before privatisation, would also operate the SP to Taipei under the Australia Asia Airways banner between 1990 and 1996, the People’s Republic of China objecting even to partially stateowned carriers from countries with which it had diplomatic relations serving Taiwan.

The early 1980s brought the extended upper deck 747-300 into service with Qantas. The upstairs stretch that would appear on the 747‑400 just a few years later provided additional seating,accessed by a new straight stairway that replaced the previous spiral steps. The 747-300 served Qantas from 1984-2008, longer than expected – or indeed desired – owing to delays with the delivery of both the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 programs.

But it was the best-selling 747- 400 that would define nearly two decades of Qantas’s international flying. Its then-revolutionary 1. 8m winglets and other improvements boosted range by 3. 5 per cent – over 560nm/1,000km – over the 747-300, enabling more reliable nonstop longhaul services.

Pacific flights particularly benefited from the extra range, with the headwind-vulnerable 12,051km great circle distance return flight from Los Angeles to Sydney a more dependable bet with the -400’s range at MTOW (maximum takeoff weight) of 7,260nm/13,450km compared with 6,700nm/12,400km on the 747-300 and 6,850nm/12,690km on the -200.

(Westbound Pacific headwinds would continue to buffet route planners and dispatchers when Qantas launched its 747-400ERnonstop Sydney-Dallas service in 2011, recently upgraded to an A380.

Even the fuel-sipping superjumbo may well require weight restrictions or refuelling diversions during certain times of the year. ) If the 747-300 was the jumbo of the 1980s, the -400 was the jumbo of the 1990s – and the extendedrange 747‑400ER, unique to Qantas in passenger serivce, was the 747 of the 2000s.

Qantas’s six -400ER examples, delivered in 2002-2003, are currently expected to continue serving late into this decade. Much as the extra range of the 747‑400 gave extra reliability to nonstop services, the additional cargo hold fuel capacity of over 12,000 litres gave the -400ER an extra 410nm/755km, or an extra 6,800kg of cargo.

The base 747-400 design is the very best that 1985 could offer.

Thirty years on, however, and despite in-service upgrades and later design improvements, the aircraftwhile as aesthetically pleasing as ever from the outside – is unable to match more modern airliners in meeting airlines’ needs.

The ETOPS revolution sent the 747 into exile

Extended range twin operations commenced in May 1985 when TWA’s Boeing 767 service between St Louis and Frankfurt gained an ETOPS-90 rating, later extended to ETOPS-120. That covered much of the North Atlantic routes, where airports in Maritime Canada, Greenland, Iceland and the UK provided a series of ETOPS stepping-stones reminiscent of the refuelling stops of yesteryear.

Yet it was the 1988 adoption of ETOPS-180 that opened the Pacific to twinjets, joining the dots in the ETOPS-120 dead zone between Hawaii and California to enable twin operations between Australia, New Zealand and North Americafor the first time. The JT9D high-bypass turbofan engines originally developed for and iterated by the 747 were now judged reliable enough to power the 767 during extended overwater flights – another case of the capabilities of the 747 contributing to technological advancements that would ultimately end up sidelining the jumbo.

Perhaps surprisingly, airframe development took quite some time to catch up to the new extended-range regulations: whereas ETOPS had originally been designed for the 1980s’ Boeing 767, the size and range of the 1990s’ Boeing 777 truly took advantage of it.

Developed initially as the 767-X, the 777 used technologies from its smaller sibling – and structures, including the 767’s nose section – to fill a gap between the 767-300ER and 747-400 in Boeing’s market, within the ETOPS landscape that was coming into view twenty-five years ago. The first-generation Boeing 777‑200 aircraft were designed for the US domestic market, and replaced trijets and the early 747-100 and -200. Similarly, the later 777-200ER, and particularly the 2000s’ 777-300ER and 777-200LR, have replaced the 747-400 in its size category for almost all non Qantas services from Australia or New Zealand to North America.

Qantas of course, never ordered the Boeing 777, the only airline in Boeing’s Working Together program during the requirements capture phase of the 767-X (which became the 777) not to do so. The decision has been the stimulus of arguments among airline CEOs – armchair and otherwise – for over 20 years.

And in a parallel to the heavy influence of US carriers on the 747‑100, Boeing had expected to offer a shrunken 777 as the 777-100 to serve long-haul routes (a bit likethe 747SP shrink of the 747), which Qantas had required during the Working Together program.

The first nail in the 747’s coffin was the range increase of the 777‑200ER, which United used to replace 747‑400s on its transpacific Australian flights, to 7,835nm/14,310km – more than the 747‑400ER. Air New Zealand quotes the 777‑200ER as 44 per cent more efficient than its 747-400s on the Auckland-Los Angeles route.

And the coffin was nailed shut in 2000 when the GE90-115 engine – the most powerful turbofan built to date – allowed Boeing to offer the ultra-long-range 777-200LR, and most significantly, the 777-300ER, which was first delivered to Air France in 2004.

More matricide than fratricide: the 777‑300ER does in the 747…

It would be an understatement to call the 777-300ER “wildly successful” in the decade since its launch. Its 7,930nm/14,690km of range – againgreater than the 747-400ER – is far more than most operators’ mission requirements, though those that can sustain long and thick routes, or that operate between cities with high nonstop premium demand, are flying it successfully on flights over 15 hours long.

Two GE90s drive a fuel efficiency gain over the 747-400 of 22 per cent according to Air New Zealand. With the ten-abreast economy 777 cabin efficiencies first tested (although ultimately nixed) by British Airways on its London Gatwick-based leisure fleet, the 777-300ER matches or exceeds the jumbo’s capacity for many airlines.

The success of the 777-300ER in the big twin category also caused the termination of the Airbus A340 program, another aircraft designed for the pre-ETOPS world, after 20 years of production from 1991-2011.

Air Canada’s latest 777-300ER configuration operates with 458 seats in a three-class (business, premium economy, economy)layout, nearly 100 more seats than Qantas’s 747-400ER.

British Airways’ more dense 747‑400 configuration (with fewer business class seats, so called “low-J”) holds 337 passengers while its 777-300ER seats 297. Since First, Club World and World Traveller Plus have roughly the same numbers, the difference is just 40 economy seats, which works out at only four rows down the back of the plane.

If BA was to move to the dreaded ten-abreast 777 economy seating, its 777-300ER would seat more people than even the “low-J” 747. With British Airways (and most other airlines) selecting the denser 3-3-3 configuration on its 787 fleet, the ten-abreast day passengers fear surely can’t be that far around the corner. And even if ten-abreast doesn’t appear on its current 777 fleet, the 11cm wider cabin on the 777X – for which BA is a launch partner – will surely make it a given.

The first nail in the 747’s coffin was the range increase of the 777‑200ER.

…with the executioner part played by the 777X…

So no wonder that, if the 777-300ER is over 20 per cent more efficient than a 747-400, and holds an order backlog of nearly 250 aircraft, airlines are making sure that they’re well ahead of the curve on the next generation of 777, currently slated for delivery from 2020.

The 777X, quietly mooted throughout the late 2000s and formalised starting in September 2011, currently comes in two rewinged, re-engined, re-cabined variants: the 777‑8X of a size similar to the 777-300ER, and the 2. 6-metre longer 777‑9X, which should allow three to four extra rows of economy seating at standard 31in pitch. A much-discussed doublestretch, the 777-10X, is not yet publicly on the table in Seattle.

And at ten-abreast – the 777X standard, fortunately with an 11cm cabin width gain from new sidewalls and insulation – that’s an unbeatable 30-40 extra seats over the -300ER.

…and the 747-8 finding itself uncast in the jumbo’s original role

It’s a testimonial to the 747 that it is being replaced by jets from the size of a Boeing 737 (in the case of Qantas’s Wellington flights) all the way up to the Airbus A380.

Expect the 747-400 fleet to continue to shrink through to the end of the 2010s. Larger airlines with higher demand, more feed and slot-constrained situations will go big with the Airbus A380 this decade and likely the much-mooted A380neo next decade. Airlines requiring the capacity of a 747- 400 will opt for the 777‑300ER this decade and the 777-9X in the next. Regional routes on the medium to long-haul of seven to nine hours will likely see the A330 and 777-200ER. A fewairlines will continue converting later, low-cycle 747‑400s to freighter models, either by Boeing (the 747‑400BCF) or by Israel Aerospace Industries (747‑400BDSF), yet the low uptake and thus keen pricing for the more efficient 747‑8F will stunt the market for these conversions in the medium to long term.

With the disappearing requirement for four-engined overwater operation, 777, 787 and A350 aircraft will continue to take over the 747’s role in these long-haul and ultra long-haul missions, where capacity was not as much a requirement as range and freedom from earlier ETOPS requirements.

Yet the 747-400 is unlikely to be replaced by the 747-8I in any but the most unusual circumstances.

Lufthansa, the launch customer, has two in-house efficiencies: first in its Lufthansa Technik MRO division, which needs type familiarity, and second in its Lufthansa Cargo subsidiary, which could convert the mainline 747-8I fleet into freighters should they prove uneconomical for passenger operation in the medium term. Air China’s fleet plans are notably influenced by whether the EU or US government is more in favour in Beijing. Korean Air takes a scattergun approach to its fleet decisions, preferring to operate twice as many passenger aircraft types as mainline Qantas within a similarly sized fleet.

The 747-8’s destiny is to become a moderately successful freighter, with the 747-8F model making up 67 of the 118 aircraft ordered. It’s a poetically symmetrical end for an aircraft that was never intended to endure in passenger service, supplanted not by the supersonic jet revolution but by the evolution of ETOPS twinjets that could never have happened without the 747’s reliable, capable 40 years of service.

Air New Zealand farewells the 747

Touchdown of NZ7 at 6:26am local time on Friday September 12 in Auckland brought the curtain down on the Boeing 747-400’s active service with Air New Zealand.

Having flown both the 747‑200 and then the 747‑400 models of the four-engine jet with its distinctive hump for more than three decades, Air NZ, like many airlines around the world, is sending the 747 out to pasture in favour of big twins such as the Boeing 777-300ER.

The airline’s last flight with the jumbo left San Francisco at 23:37 local time with Air NZ fleet captain Ron Woodward, Captain Les Matthews and Second Officer Andrew Hanley in the flightdeck of ZK-NBV.

Woodward describes the last flight with the 747 as a momentous day for the airline.

“The 747 is an iconic aircraft,” Woodward told Australian Aviation from San Francisco ahead of the final flight.

“It doesn’t matter if it is flying around or sitting at the terminal on the ground, the distinct shape of it is very endearing. It draws people to look at it.

“The size – the sheer expansiveness of the machine itself, I think there is just something about it. ” Woodward, who has been with Air NZ for 36 years, said there was almost something regal about the 747 and not just because it was an Air NZ jumbo jet that took the Queen on her first commercial flight when she travelled to New Zealand in 1995.

In addition to ferrying Queen Elizabeth to Auckland for a royal visit, the 747 has also played a major role in helping out the country in times of need, such as the Christchurch earthquake. In fact, ZK-NBV was named Christchurch in recognition of the work done in getting people out of the city and providing supplies to the devastated community.

Woodward summed up the 747 in just one word: reliable.

“We are very proud of our engineering facility but I think the work and the dedication of our engineering staff, they have played such a huge part in all of this and sometimes can be a forgotten part of the puzzle being behind the scenes,” Woodward said.

“We haven’t been confronted by any particular surprises by the aircraft. It has certainly delivered throughout its service life with Air New Zealand with a very high standard. ” However reliable or iconic, the economic realities of the day mean the Boeing 747-400 has to give way, in Air NZ’s case to the more fuel-efficient and less costly to maintain 777-300ER. Then there is the added savings of having to maintain just two engines and not four, as well as the lower maintenance costs generally. In the days of high fuel prices and anaemic margins, those savings are impossible to ignore.

“There is just no way of denying the fact that with these technological jumps there are advantages to the company,” Woodward said.

“The 777s carry people over the same distance with significantly less fuel cost. They are more efficient and as we are a growing, expanding company we have to look forward to taking advantage of those gains wherever possible. ” While those given the responsibility of bringing ZK‑NBV home were chosen for more practical reasons – the aircraft has now been ferried to as-yet-unidentified new owners – Woodward said there would have been no shortage of volunteers.

“Myself and second officer Hanley will be doing the delivery flight to the new owners so therefore we had to take the last possible opportunity to do the flying so that we could remain current,” Woodward said.

“If it was romantic I would have the entire fleet lining up wanting to do it and it would have been a very tough call. At the end of the day the realities of the situation dictate we had to do what was sensible. ” After delivering ZK-NBV to its new owners, Woodward will spend about three months getting his type rating to fly Air NZ’s 777-300ER fleet.

And the 36-year veteran of Air NZ is looking forward to it, based on feedback from his peers at the controls of the big twin.

“They sing the praises of the 777,” he said.