End of an era: Farewell to the 747

It's been more than 40 years, but Tamula Sawyer still remembers the soft emerald green dress and stylish high heels she wore on her first trip aboard a Boeing 747 from Boston to Honolulu.

Back then, said Sawyer, who lives in Worcester, Mass., people dressed to fly. The seats were huge and comfortable, and the plane was nearly empty — so empty that passengers could choose their seats.

Dixie Deans was 18 when he immigrated with his family to the United States from Dublin. It was the first time he'd flown anywhere, and the 747 was just about the biggest thing he'd ever seen. His mother, father and seven siblings took up two full rows of seats in the middle on the world's first widebody jet.

'I remember thinking that the first plane I was on, going to America, was a 747 and how cool that was,' he recalled.

And so the announcement this year that two of the country's biggest airlines, United and Delta, were retiring the iconic plane hit hard. While international carriers and freight companies still will use the 747, it no longer will be a sight.

'I feel sad that this wonderful plane that brought [me] to America is coming to an end,' said Deans, 55. 'It will stay in my heart forever.'

'A huge gamble'

The retirement announcement spurred a wave of nostalgia for a plane that forever changed the way people traveled. Air travel still was considered a luxury when Boeing made its huge bet on a jet like no other. The company, still recouping the money it had invested in the 707, already was stretched thin and had to borrow money for the new airliner. It even shut down one of its divisions, which made turbines, to help finance the project.

'Oh, it was a huge gamble,' said Boeing's historian Michael Lombardi.

'It was a very, very special airplane when it entered service,' said Bob van der Linden, a curator at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. 'It was huge — it was so much larger than anything that had flown before.'

The 747 took international air travel to the next level, said Omar Idris, the station manager for United's hub at Dulles International Airport in Washington, who remembers donning a suit for his first 747 trip — from New York to Cairo — when he was just 5.

'It allowed more people to fly to far away places at a lower cost,' he said.

A rare feeling

The nostalgia for the 747 is a rare warm and fuzzy moment for an industry more often under fire for its treatment of passengers.

For some, it was the spiral staircase to the plane's upper deck. John van Dyke, who was 14 and terrified of flying, remembers being invited into the cockpit to sit with the pilots. Once the plane leveled off, he returned to his seat, his anxiety allayed.

For Deans, his trip to America was the first and only time he's ever flown in a 747.

'To this day I get goose bumps looking at the new planes being put together,' said Deans, who is a maintenance mechanic for Boeing in Everett, Wash., where the 747s are built.

As evidence of that goodwill, United sent one of the last 747s on a farewell tour of its major hubs this fall. Seats on the airline's final 747 flight from San Francisco to Honolulu, which took place earlier this month, sold out within two hours. Delta's last flight, scheduled for December, is likely to draw a similar outpouring.

Born on golf course

Boeing's 747 made its debut when people were just waking up to the possibilities that air travel offered. Its tail was taller than a six-story building. With its distinctive hump and double-deck, it quickly became the most recognizable plane in the world. A special version of the 747 has been used as the president's Air Force One since 1990.

An oft-told tale is that the 747 was born on a golf course during a match between Juan Trippe, the CEO of Pan American World Airways, and Bill Allen, the CEO of Boeing.

'That's pretty close to the truth,' said Lombardi, Boeing's historian.

Lombardi said gate space at airports was getting more crowded, and Trippe thought bigger planes that could carry more passengers was one solution.

Boeing's engineers went to work. One idea — to stack two airplanes on top of each other — proved unworkable in part because it would be too difficult to evacuate in case of an emergency, Lombardi said. But the second idea — a twin aisle airplane now known as the widebody — proved to be a winner.

The plane took its first test flight in 1969 and began carrying passengers in 1970. Since then, it has carried more than 3.5 billion passengers.