Boeing's Queen of the Skies Nears End of the Road

It was the glamorous jumbo jet of my childhood, now fading away.

At the Wall Street Journal, "How the Boeing 747 Got Left Behind: Boeing to Launch New Model as Drop in Air-Cargo Business Squeezes Its 747 Jet":

A drop in the global air-cargo business is hastening the decline of the 747 jumbo jet just as Boeing Co. is preparing to launch a new plane that could ultimately replace it.

With its distinctive hump and four big engines, the 747, nicknamed "the queen of the skies," has been a symbol of jet travel for much of the past four decades. But in recent years, as airlines have chosen to fly passengers in more fuel-efficient, two-engine planes, the 747 has increasingly become an aviation packhorse. Most new 747 orders have involved freight carriers, which have been weighed down by two consecutive years of recession in global air cargo.

Earlier this month, Boeing said it would cut production of the 747-8, its newest model, to 1.75 airplanes a month in 2014 from two a month now because of weaker demand for large passenger and freighter airplanes.

Since it launched the 747-8 passenger model in 2006 with a longer body and new engines in hopes of rekindling sales, Boeing has sold just 31 of them to airlines, plus another nine to VIP users. "It's a market that hasn't delivered like we'd anticipated," Randy Tinseth, Boeing's vice president of marketing, says. Meanwhile, the company has sold 70 freighter versions.

Boeing would like to keep producing 747s even as it lays plans for a new model of its twin-engine 777, which could eventually supplant the older plane. As early as this month, the Chicago company is expected to seek permission from its board to formally start selling new stretched models of the 777, dubbed the 777X, with additional lucrative under-cabin cargo space and the 747's 16-hour range.

The new 777X, often dubbed a "mini-jumbo," arriving in 2019 or 2020, will seat around 35 more passengers and fly thousands of miles farther than the first "jumbo" 747 flown by Pan American Airways in 1970.

Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney says he doesn't "see the 777X introduction cannibalizing" the 747-8 significantly because the jets are different sizes. But analysts believe the 777X will be attractive to buyers who want many of the same capabilities with more fuel efficiency.

Launched on commercial service in 1970, the 747 was widely credited with making global travel more accessible. At the time Boeing estimated that the 747 halved the cost to airlines of flying a single passenger, compared with its smaller 707. Sales boomed, with Boeing receiving more than 1,400 orders between the 747's launch in 1966 and 2005.

But economic volatility and swinging oil prices made big bets on big aircraft with four engines seem increasingly risky. Sales surged for big twin-engine jets that could fly just as far. Boeing introduced the twin-engine 777 in 1995 and added subsequent models that stretched the jet's capacity and range, cutting into 747 demand.

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.