(CNN Business) — After 53 years and more than 1,570 aircraft, the last Boeing 747 rolled off the assembly line in Washington state Tuesday night, en route to becoming a cargo plane.
The once-innovative jumbo jet, with its signature bulge on the second deck, is perhaps the most remarkable and popular aircraft Boeing has ever built. It was even big enough to carry the Space Shuttle from the runways in California to its launch site in Florida. And a new type of Virgin Orbit spacecraft will launch next week, after taking it under its wing.
The 747 was once the choice of the rich and glamorous, and even royalty. In many films, including the 1973 James Bond classic “Live and Let Die,” the plane featured, or sets that resembled its upper-level first-class lounge. The 747 has been Air Force One since 1990. Two aircraft already assembled will become the next generation of the presidential plane. Those planes won’t be delivered for at least four years due to delays.
Other than that use, the days of the 747 as an airliner are almost completely behind us. Airlines have moved away from fuel-guzzling four-engine planes like the 747. Rival Airbus ditched its own split-level jumbo jet, the A380, in 2019.
The last Boeing 747 rolled out of the company’s widebody factory in Everett, Washington, on Tuesday night. It is scheduled to be delivered to Atlas Air for use as a freighter early next year. Credit: Paul Weatherman/Boeing
Boeing had signaled in 2020 that it would stop making the 747, even in its freighter form, as customers bought the more fuel-efficient 777 freighter or saved money by refitting older passenger 747s as freighters. The company has not yet announced its plans for the Everett, Wash., factory where it has built the 747, but it hopes to keep it open. To build the massive aircraft, the facility has almost 6 million cubic meters, which, according to Boeing, makes it the world’s largest building by volume.
Passenger versions of the plane could carry between 400 and 500 passengers, twice as many as one of Boeing’s current wide-body jets, the 787-8 Dreamliner. But Boeing hasn’t built a passenger version of the 747 since it delivered the last one to Korean Airlines in 2017. This last 747 will go to Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings, which will operate the plane for Swiss logistics company Kuehne+Nagel. The last plane will fly to another Boeing shop for paint and other final details, before being delivered to Atlas early next year.
There are only 44 passenger versions of the 747 left in service today, according to aeronautical analysis company Cirium. More than half of them, 25, belong to Lufthansa.
That total is down from the more than 130 airliners in service at the end of 2019, just before the pandemic crippled demand for air travel, especially on international routes where 747s and other jets were primarily used. wide body. Most of those passenger versions of the jets were grounded for the first few months of the pandemic and never returned to service.
But there are still 314 747 freighters in use, according to Cirium, many of which were initially used as passenger planes before being refurbished as freighters.
A Boeing 747 airplane.
“The 747-8 is an incredibly capable aircraft, with a capability that is unmatched by any other freighter in production,” UPS said in 2020, when Boeing signaled it would soon stop building the plane. “With a maximum payload of 139 tonnes, we use them on long, high-volume routes, connecting Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East.”
The current version of the 747 is 76.25 meters long, the longest commercial jet currently in service, or about twice the length of the Wright brothers’ first flight. It has a wingspan of 68.3 meters.
Boeing delivered the first passenger 747 in December 1969 to two airlines that no longer exist: TWA and Pan Am. Delta Air Lines was the last US airline to fly a passenger version of the plane, also in 2017. That was the last year that the latest passenger flights of the US 747 — both Delta and United — drew huge crowds of fans of the plane, a testament to its enduring popularity.
CNN’s Jackie Wattles contributed to this report.