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At least it’s not an up/down scaled 737… I’d say it looks nicer than the 777 replacing it, or the 380 that tried it.
Concorde, Tu-144, L-1011 TriStar , Il-62, Tu-154, SE 210 Caravelle , de Havilland DH.106 Comet and Vickers VC10 are all much sexier. Just for starters.
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Concorde, Tu-144, L-1011 TriStar , Il-62, Tu-154, SE 210 Caravelle , de Havilland DH.106 Comet and Vickers VC10 are all much sexier. Just for starters.
Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today. That is why I will always love the 747.
The Il-62 and the Tu-154 are still in limited service, for example. Not that it does your pseudoargument any favors anyway, as service history plays obviously absolutely no role in evaluating a design purely on its visual accumen.
Guess I probably wont get a chance to fly on one, flying on the 747 was on my bucket list.
I just asked my favorite stochastic parrot to find the cheapest flight from SFO on a 747 to anywhere. It found a one-way flight on Lufthansa for $500. If you can, I'd encourage you to spring for a business class flight on the top deck (probably $4000 one-way).
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Maybe the Concord and Comet. For the rest of the list I think you'd spend a very long time finding people to agree with you. The soviet ones are even more complicated, the Tu-144 is basically an Ugly Concord.
So or so, Bogost's statement is akin to describing the Amiga 500 as the only beautiful home computer. And that's obviously ridiculous. As for your statement, nah, I won't have to search very long for people agreeing with me on many of the aircraft listed; whole coffee table tomes have been published specifically dealing with the subject of Soviet, French and British classic, especially narrow-body, airliners.
> Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful.
Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view.
(I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)
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Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today. That is why I will always love the 747.
> "Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today." The Il-62 and the Tu-154 are still in limited service, for example. Not that it does your pseudoargument any favors anyway, as service history plays obviously absolutely no role in evaluating a design purely on its visual accumen.
I'm just sharing my love of the 747, since that's what the article is about.
Someday, when they write a glowing retrospective of the Il-62, I promise not to post about how it's one of the ugliest jets I've seen.
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Yeah economy class on a 747 sucks as much as it does on any other airliner.
One time I got an entire center row of 5 seats going from Seattle->Heathrow overnight.
Anyone interested should read Joe Sutter's book, 747. Sutter was the lead engineer for the development of the 747 and he has some awesome stories. One interesting story is that Juan Trippe (CEO of PanAm) wanted Boeing to create a double-decker airplane. He was enamored with the idea of "ocean liners" cruising the sky. But Sutter (and other engineers) knew that it would be impossible to create what he wanted, so inste…
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The efficiency and the safety. Modern planes are disgustingly safe to the point that hull loss is almost unheard of. For 50 years the industry has optimized for safety and fuel efficiency. And the modern machines are marvels in that.
True, but still incremental improvements over proven designs - maybe a sign of very strict safety standards making new designs and differentiation more expensive than just the development.
Not by introducing clean sheet unproven designs but by taking what works and improving any deficiencies over and over again.
we'll always have QatarForceOne (747-8) well as long as Congress doesn't let him keep it, hopefully BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance program to refurbish it * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25B_Bridge
It was a private bribe, he's not giving it back. He's probably not even leaving the White House in 2 years either.