The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

I. The BoneyardThrough the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.Explore the July 2026 IssueCheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read.View MoreI was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student’s trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American’s pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. 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.Jim Petty, the airpark’s manager, led me out the back door of his small office to his truck, and we peeled out toward the long rows of forsaken aircraft. I had been calling Pinal a boneyard, but Petty told me that he doesn’t like the term. Some planes get brought here for a checkup, others for intensive care or storage. Some ailing vessels are delivered here with every intention of flying again, like an elderly relative sent to a short-term-care facility. But if rehabilitation proves impossible, Pinal becomes their final destination.

Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid again. You’ll receive the first edition of the limited-run newsletter course in early July.Petty parked us under a TWA 747 that had been sitting there for almost 30 years. Its enormity eclipsed the hot desert sun. The tires alone were more than four feet tall, a memorial to outsize ambitions. From 1970, when the first 747 entered service, to 2023, when Boeing stopped building the plane, the company manufactured 1,574 of them, including the two that still serve as Air Force One. Most 747 routes spanned oceans and continents, giving travelers a speedier option than the Queen Mary had across the Atlantic, or the California Zephyr across the West. For generations, these jumbo jets flew to London, to Osaka, to San Francisco. But more recently, 747s have been flying to Pinal—drawn here by their own obsolescence.“Some day,” Petty said, “there’s just going to be one left.”II. Birth of an IconStarting the engines brings a sudden hush followed by a smooth roar. At 300-some metric tons, fully loaded, and with a wingspan that would cover two-thirds of a football field, the plane could be tricky to drive but was supple to fly. On the ground and about three stories up, pilots were aware of all they couldn’t see. Once airborne, though, a sense of infinity dawned out the cockpit windows, and of sheer mass behind the pilots. In the cabin, the heft makes the plane feel almost still, even at 500 miles an hour and 35,000 feet; it is the only plane I have ever flown in whose takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses. Paul Gallaher, a longtime 747 captain, told me he couldn’t remember a hard landing. He said that it was the plane every pilot wanted to fly, the top rung of a commercial-aviation career.Like most technological innovations of the 20th century, the 747 project was catalyzed by the military. In the early 1960s, Boeing produced designs in response to a government request for a large military transport aircraft.

Lockheed won that job and produced the C‑5 Galaxy. Boeing’s loss steeled its resolve and freed up engineers to work on the biggest airplane ever built for commercial service. Boeing acquired 780 acres of land in Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle, and erected an assembly complex that included the largest building in the world by volume—at a cost of $200 million ($2 billion in today’s dollars)—to house up to eight 747s under construction. About 2,700 engineers labored on the project.Aviation executives called a risk like this the “sporty game”—a shameless mid-century, flannel-suit euphemism for staking an entire company on a single long-odds bet. Had the 747 project faltered, Boeing would likely have gone down with it.Thomas Gray, who joined Boeing in 1961 as an electrical engineer, calls himself the “first passenger on the first 747,” responsible for in-flight testing. “Whether it was strain, arrows, airspeed, whatever,” he told me, “we had to measure all that data onto a tape machine.” Gray, a lanky man with a gray mustache, volunteers as a docent at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, just across from Boeing Field. For 17 years, the 747 served as his office. This was the Wild West of commercial aviation, after planes had been proven but when the Jet Age was still new and exciting.Watching the plane’s first flight from the blast fence, in 1969, Gray remembers telling a fellow engineer beside him, “One of these days, there are going to be 747s lined up to take off.” He was right. Boeing’s earlier jets—the 707, 727, and 737—carried fewer than 200 souls. The 747 could carry north of 490 passengers, plus a massive amount of cargo, and still fly thousands of miles farther than most existing jets. Juan Trippe, who ordered 25 747s for Pan Am in 1966 at a cost of $5 billion in today’s dollars, saw the plane as an instrument of human flourishing. “

The new era of mass travel between nations may well prove more significant to human destiny than the atom bomb,” he said at the time, calling the aircraft “a great weapon for peace.”The jumbo jet would make the world smaller in the same way that railroads and ocean liners had in the century prior. This was the age of seemingly impossible endeavors undertaken and accomplished despite extreme risk; five months after the 747 first took flight, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. This spirit of rarefied American invention, fueled by both government investment and private capital, was meant to serve all humankind.Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Francois Pages / Paris Match / Getty; Jim Gray / Keystone / Getty; AFP / Getty; Classic-ads / Alamy.It worked. From 1969 to 1979, the number of people flying every year more than doubled, to 640 million. Flying was glamorous—in part because it was expensive, but also because the 747 was built for human comfort as well as fuel efficiency.Speed was expected to supplant comfort, eventually. In anticipation of supersonic flight, the 747 was designed to shift into cargo duty sometime by the end of the ’70s; its cygnine hump allowed containers to be loaded through its nose, which opens like the mouth of a cartoon shark. But the supersonic passenger jet was a bust, and the 747 persisted. Its accidental longevity defined an era.III. Legroom and CaviarThe British architect Norman Foster once called the 747 his favorite building of the 20th century. Like the ocean liners and railcars it replaced, the 747 is more than a vehicle. It is also a dwelling.The upper-deck lounge became the first and most important room in this building—though somewhat incidentally. The charge to make the plane capable of loading cargo through its nose required the flight deck to be situated above the main section. Once the flight deck was placed high, over the cargo slot, the plane needed to sweep back accordingly for aerodynamics, one retired Boeing engineer told me. What to put in that space?A cocktail bar, obviously. Air France and United installed lounges with rotating seats to allow passengers to mingle.

Air India put in bright-red carpeting and sofas, with images of apsaras on the bulkhead behind them. Qantas offered the nautical-themed Captain Cook Lounge, with lantern sconces, intricate woodwork, and rope-wrapped swivel seats and cocktail tables.Boeing named its first 747 the City of Everett, after its birthplace, and painted it in Boeing’s corporate color scheme: white with a red cheatline, a gray belly, and a black glare panel. Gray and his colleagues used the City of Everett for testing; it was never outfitted with an interior. The aircraft now lives at the Museum of Flight. Visitors can take a tour inside but are generally not allowed up the spiral staircase to the upper deck and cockpit.I negotiated an exception. When I ascended the tight stairwell, I was surprised to see it decorated as a lounge, complete with antiqued mirrors on the rear bulkhead, blue carpeting, and vivid, mod-printed seating. At some point in the City of Everett’s long life, an upholstery shop had redone the upper-deck seating with old Braniff Airways fabric.Peggy Verger and Cheryl Grimm, two former United flight attendants, met me in the lounge to share memories of service on early 747s. For Verger, luxury wasn’t really the point of the plane’s interior design. “We’ve lost the personality of flying,” she said. At first I thought she was talking about the style—the Pucci-designed Braniff uniforms, or Eero Saarinen’s modernist terminals. But she meant personalities. She meant people. “We loved talking to the people,” Verger said. “The lounges, the wide aisles. We were tight with the passengers. ‘So how’s your dog?’ We were much more social.”Travelers turned in their seats to their neighbors. They stood up and chatted with someone across the aisle. They moved through the cabin to a lounge, or to ask for a coffee. Sometimes, after giving children pin-on airline wings, the stewardesses—as they were called at the time—would recruit them to help pass out nuts or matches. “It just was all so different,” Verger added. “The passenger was a person.”The food in first class was rich: hand-carved meats, lobster, caviar.