A long goodbye to the Queen of the Skies

There’s no airplane that I’ll miss more when it vanishes from passenger service than the Boeing 747. The original jumbo jet hasn’t just helped to knit the world together since its first revenue flight in 1970, that iconic four-engine widebody has also been a recurring character in my own traveling life for decades.

For the first few of those decades, the Queen of the Skies was more of a regular character for how it owned most overseas itineraries and often soaked up capacity on transcontinental domestic routes. My first flight across the Atlantic that I can remember involved a Pan Am 747; I first flew across the Pacific on a Northwest Airlines 747. And at any airport where the 747 flew, there was no mistaking that aircraft, with its upper-deck hump and quadruple main landing gear, for any other.

(Especially if the 747 in question was one of the two operated by NASA and customized to fly space shuttles across the U.S.)

But by the time I boarded that NW flight from Detroit to Tokyo in 1998, the 747 was already starting to see its commercial sunset as twin-engine widebodies like Boeing’s 777 began securing safety certification to operate increasingly lengthy routes at lower costs than the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 trijet widebodies that had once been the 747’s primary long-haul competition.

The first decade of this century featured far fewer 747 flights for me, although the one my wife and I took from Dulles to Beijing in 2007 stands out for a different reason: a seating overlap led United to move us up to business class. My final flight on a 747 operated by the airline I’ve flown more than any other came a decade later, when I was able to clear an upgrade and grab the last seat open on the upper deck of a 747-400 flying from San Francisco to Shanghai.

United retired the 747 in November of that year–and since I was at Web Summit in Lisbon that week, I couldn’t spend a ridiculous amount of money on UA’s farewell 747 flight from SFO to Honolulu.

But that was not my own farewell to the 747. Air China, Lufthansa and Korean Air still fly the 747-8, the final version produced, and a press trip to Helsinki in 2022 gave me a chance to apply an upgrade to a Lufthansa flight from Newark to Frankfurt and enjoy one more ride on the 747’s upper deck. The view up there has no equivalent to what you can see from a 777, 787, Airbus A330 or any other single-deck long-range airliner.

And then this Wednesday morning found me boarding yet another LH-operated 747-8, this time with a boarding pass for a seat in the nose. After years of reading trip reviews rhapsodizing about Lufthansa’s first class and reminding readers about how to redeem miles from partner airlines’ programs for that experience, news of an impending devaluation for Lufthansa redemptions made me realize that I had left one 747 flight undone on my checklist.

So I cashed in a large stash of Avianca LifeMiles, collected by leveraging a bank sign-up bonus earned in 2021, to book myself a one-way first-class 747-8 flight from Frankfurt to Dulles, burned some United miles to get myself from Dulles to Frankfurt, and used a Hyatt free-night certificate for the overnight stay in between.

(I wrote a longer breakdown for Patreon readers of the long game involved in this travel hack, including my surprisingly small out-of-pocket costs for this bucket-list trip.)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flown across the Atlantic, but I can report that Wednesday’s flight in seat 2K–below the cockpit and ahead of the front landing gear, so far forward that I could not see the wing–stands apart from those other crossings, and not only for the luxury involved.

If I never fly the Queen again–or the two other four-engine long-haul jets in commercial service in the West, the Airbus A340 and A380–that’s okay. But if another opportunity somehow presents itself to fly a 747, preferably upstairs or upfront… it might be hard to turn down.

#747 #7478 #A340 #A380 #avgeek #aviation #Boeing #Boeing747 #bucketList #fourEngineAirliner #jumboJet #Lufthansa #Northwest #PanAm #QueenOfTheSkies #UnitedAirlines #widebody