The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent - The Atlantic

I. The Boneyard<br>Through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.<br>Explore the July 2026 Issue<br>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student’s trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American’s pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.<br>Jim Petty, the airpark’s manager, led me out the back door of his small office to his truck, and we peeled out toward the long rows of forsaken aircraft. I had been calling Pinal a boneyard, but Petty told me that he doesn’t like the term. Some planes get brought here for a checkup, others for intensive care or storage. Some ailing vessels are delivered here with every intention of flying again, like an elderly relative sent to a short-term-care facility. But if rehabilitation proves impossible, Pinal becomes their final destination.<br>Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid again. You’ll receive the first edition of the limited-run newsletter course in early July.<br>Petty parked us under a TWA 747 that had been sitting there for almost 30 years. Its enormity eclipsed the hot desert sun. The tires alone were more than four feet tall, a memorial to outsize ambitions. From 1970, when the first 747 entered service, to 2023, when Boeing stopped building the plane, the company manufactured 1,574 of them, including the two that still serve as Air Force One. Most 747 routes spanned oceans and continents, giving travelers a speedier option than the Queen Mary had across the Atlantic, or the California Zephyr across the West. For generations, these jumbo jets flew to London, to Osaka, to San Francisco. But more recently, 747s have been flying to Pinal—drawn here by their own obsolescence.<br>“Some day,” Petty said, “there’s just going to be one left.”<br>II. Birth of an Icon<br>Starting the engines brings a sudden hush followed by a smooth roar. At 300-some metric tons, fully loaded, and with a wingspan that would cover two-thirds of a football field, the plane could be tricky to drive but was supple to fly. On the ground and about three stories up, pilots were aware of all they couldn’t see. Once airborne, though, a sense of infinity dawned out the cockpit windows, and of sheer mass behind the pilots. In the cabin, the heft makes the plane feel almost still, even at 500 miles an hour and 35,000 feet; it is the only plane I have ever flown in whose takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses. Paul Gallaher, a longtime 747 captain, told me he couldn’t remember a hard landing. He said that it was the plane every pilot wanted to fly, the top rung of a commercial-aviation career.<br>Like most technological innovations of the 20th century, the 747 project was catalyzed by the military. In the early 1960s, Boeing produced designs in response to a government request for a large military transport aircraft. Lockheed won that job and produced the C‑5 Galaxy. Boeing’s loss steeled its resolve and freed up engineers to work on the biggest airplane ever built for commercial service. Boeing acquired 780 acres of land in Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle, and erected an assembly complex that included the largest building in the world by volume—at a cost of $200 million ($2 billion in today’s dollars)—to house up to eight 747s under construction. About 2,700 engineers labored on the project.<br>Aviation executives called a risk like this the “sporty game”—a shameless mid-century, flannel-suit euphemism for staking an entire company on a single long-odds bet. Had the 747 project faltered, Boeing would likely have gone down with it.<br>Thomas Gray, who joined Boeing in 1961 as an electrical engineer, calls himself the “first passenger on the first 747,”...