For The Atlantic, Ian Bogost writes an ode to the 747, the Boeing Company’s over 50-year-old queen of the skies. After kicking off the era of mass intercontinental travel upon launch in 1970, Boeing ceased production in 2023, as airlines turned to a hub and spoke model of travel that flourished with more frequent flights using smaller, more fuel-efficient aircraft.
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.
More stories about the Boeing Company
The Worst 7 Years in Boeing’s History—and the Man Who Won’t Stop Fighting for Answers
“Fatal crashes. A door blowout. Grounded planes. Inside the citizen-led, obsessive campaign to hold Boeing accountable and prevent the next disaster.”
The Life and Untimely Death of a Boeing Whistleblower
“After the (Boeing-McDonnell Douglas) merger, the corporate culture shifted from ‘Let’s make great airplanes’ to “Let’s raise the stock price.’”
‘I Will Never Let Boeing Forget Her’
In designing the 737 MAX, Boeing altered the plane’s automatic response in the event of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor, failed to include the change in the airplane’s operating manual, and then promptly blamed foreign pilots when two separate crashes involving the model took 347 lives.
