It’s such a beautiful plane. Despite having worked for Airbus, the 747 triggers emotions for me that the A380 simply doesn’t. It represents an era of aerospace engineering that will not come back (in many cases probably for the better - but still!)
As an aside, if anyone is going to Southern Germany, it's worth going to Technik Museum Speyer, where you can really go into the guts of the 747. They also have a Russian Buran space shuttle.
The next day you could go to Technik Museum Sinnsheim, which is about half an hour from Speyer, and has both a Concorde and a Tupolev Tu-144 (both of which you can go inside).
The thing you neglect to mention is that the Speyer 747 is suspended 30 meters above the ground. It's breathtaking.
Fair. We had been to Sinnsheim a couple of times before Speyer. In Sinnsheim, they have the Concorde/Tu-144 on poles on top of one of the buildings. So, the 30 meters high suspension of the 747 was not so impressive anymore I guess :).
The museums are also great for kids. We went several times with our daughter and she loved it every time.
It was the last aircraft designed using a slide rule and conventional drafting --- the conventional wisdom is that if one printed up a compleat set of blueprints and loaded it on the plane it would be too heavy to take off, though of course, the anticipation was that it would soon be replaced by supersonic passenger aircraft, so it was designed to be easily converted to cargo.
Amazing aircraft, well-deserving of the "Queen of the Skies" moniker, I can still vividly remember going up to the upper deck and cockpit and the view out of the front/side windows.
My lead engineer at Boeing, Burt Berlin, showed me his (paper) design notebook for the 747. All done with a slide rule. He was an engineer's engineer, and a super nice guy.
There's an old quip about aircraft design that "a plane isn’t ready to fly until the documentation is heavier than the airplane". Can't find a source for it though.
It’s beautiful because Boeing started, not with the smallest, but with the largest plane possible. Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde, a completely orthogonal project to round up everyone’s identical patriotism, and both projects were absolutely beautiful in their own way!
Oh gracious no, Airbus started with the utilitarian A300 widebody twin[1].
Concorde was Sud Aviation and BAC joint venture, nothing to do with Airbus which didn't even exist at that time.
[1]The original A300A might have been interesting, having a fuselage as wide as the much later 777, but Airbus got cold feet and scaled it down to the dull and worthy A300B. Every Airbus widebody until the A380 was constrained by that decision.
Well. If you squint a little, Sud Aviation and BAC + others became Airbus. Airbus was first a consortium and then a proper successor (through a merger) to several European aircraft manufacturers. Sud Aviation's acquirer Aérospatiale was an initial member of the Airbus consortium and BAC's acquirer British Aerospace joined slightly later in 1979.
I'm just a layman, but somehow Airbus doesn't embody the airplane magic.. yet I'm very curious what this means to you. Any easy to grasp details you could describe ?
