The Boeing 747 begins its final descent
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I re-wrote the Central Maintenance System (portion inside the FMS) in C from scratch because no one had the original detailed design documents. The original -400 code was written in Pascal if I'm remembering correctly. I gleamed what I could from the source and relied on unit tests to get the rest of the way there based on what I knew of the protocol itself.
The entire FMS software was completely re-written in C++ and using modern object oriented patterns (at the time). Probably the most fun I've had over my now 20'ish year career. Of course Boeing was pissed with the delays this caused because the airframe wasn't a major change. I'll quote a Boeing (from MD originally) executive as saying "Meeting this project deadline is more important than your child dying."
Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out. Personal opinion, this was a large part of what led to the MAX situation.
But saying it out loud is another thing, it is, to me, a terrible blunder in terms of communication, and executives who talk like that should 100% get fired. They are the face of the company, what they say and how they say it matters. Maybe it matters even more than the technical part of their job. If they get a pass for saying things like that, that's even worse, because it means that it is what the shareholders and customers want to hear.
> Sadly this was also the time I remember Boeing's engineering ranks began to thin out.
These two things seem very related.
On a more positive note, awesome to hear an account of the software's evolution from someone who was there.
That's what I would've been thinking in the shower 2 days after the conversation, anyway.
"That's what I would've been thinking in the shower 2 days after the conversation, anyway."
so like imagine your day jobs employers name in that part
(Market inefficiencies is where everything that is nice, beautiful, good, human, lives.)
The real world is slightly less black and white of course, but that’s the gist of it.
It's laughable, but Hackernews loves a good, "everyone in management is evil" story.
That’s 5 flamed out CEOs since 1996.
Does it shock you that a CEO who is on the record for preferring that his employees “Cower under their desks” in fear of him would also require that their employees prioritize the schedule of a flying barge over their child’s personal life?
https://mynorthwest.com/local/boeing-ceo-apologizes-for-sayi...
Or how about "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm" - can this statement by former CEO Harry Stonecipher be justified as anything other than evil, in the context of the damage and injury that has been caused by intentionally reducing Boeing’s engineering capability?
Given Boeings later history this is pretty chilling...
This class of manager is the cause of most of Boeing’s woes.
This sort of person, given any power, makes everyone's life worse
Is this normal for a comany like Boeing? It's not my area, but I would have guessed they would keep the documentation for everything on a product as important as a 747.
I'm actually dealing with exactly this problem on an old project right now :-(
What was the context? Did someone’s child die?
Probably didn't work. Remembered though.
Could it have been Ada 83?
One interesting story is that Juan Trippe (CEO of PanAm) wanted Boeing to create a double-decker airplane. He was enamored with the idea of "ocean liners" cruising the sky. But Sutter (and other engineers) knew that it would be impossible to create what he wanted, so instead they proposed a wide-body aircraft (10 seats across). Nevertheless, Trippe insisted on a double-decker design.
The engineers then created two cabin mockups. One for a double decker, which was basically two narrow-body cabins stacked on top of each other. The other was the wide-body of the 747. Once Trippe saw the trade off, he realized that the spacious cabin of the 747 was the way to go.
But even then, when he saw the second level where the pilots go, he insisted on putting passengers up there too.
I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
The B-747 went through a similar process. Boeing was proposing a big cargo aircraft to the USAF (the CX-HLS), but that was never built. Lockheed got the C-5 contract instead, which satisfied the USAF's need for a really big cargo plane. So the B-747 was built as a commercial plane, mostly to Pan Am's requirements.
Military-civilian commonality was mostly wishful thinking at the management levels, as it turned out.
"Time and time again there appears in print the logical but false assumption that Boeing took its losing military C-5 bid and revamped it as the commercial 747. In fact, the 747 would be an entirely original design that owes nothing to the C-5."
That said, in the same chapter he talks about how GE developed a high-bypass turbofan engine for the C-5 and it was only because they had such an engine that the 747 became possible.
But really my only point is that you should read the book if you're interested.
Many engine manufacturers were experimenting with high-bypass ratios; Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce. GE was just first to production. If they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
The 747 was a great aircraft to fly in though. The tower of power effect on take-off really reassured you that you were going to get where you were going.
Somewhere over the North Sea I decided to give the on board phone a go, and it worked. A early call to let my wife know I’d made it (there were only a few seats left on the morning flight and 180 passengers to fit on).
Next time I flew it the phones weren’t working, and it wasn’t long until they’d all been removed, so I’m glad I got to tick that off my list.
Likely my last 747 flight ever was far less salubrious. I was supposed to be flying Toronto to jfk to Heathrow, but the Toronto flight was cancelled and I got downgraded to economy and put on a 747 to Amsterdam.
To clarify slightly, I first heard "tower of power" used to describe the Saturn V. So two icons of the late 60s.
I have the memory of being struck by how much the overhead storage compartments were shaking at takeoff. Not reassuring at all, but they stopped shaking once we got off the ground.
(I'm still happy to have traded that for planes with a much higher cabin pressure-altitude - and would trade even further for business-class transatlantic non-cruise ships. But it was definitely fun to have had the experience.)
I've flown British Airways's business class on the upper deck, and I've flown Qantas' business class which is all on the lower deck starting at the nose. I wasn't quite at the front, but I was close enough to see the slightly more forward facing windows. I always thought it'd be great to sit in that first row and have that more forward facing view.
I had a blast on BA's though, as I was young and blowing through a bunch of airline miles on a transatlantic flight with my now wife. Getting to sit backwards on a plane was a little fun change too. Those BA seats (their last generation business class) are pretty bad by business class standards, even at the time, but they were alright on the narrower upper deck of a 747.
It's a shame, as I don't think I'll likely ever fly in a 747 again. I rarely fly Korean Air or Lufthansa, and I've got no plans to fly Air China.
I will say though, I really didn't like flying the 747 in economy. I did with Qantas a couple times, and it was noticeably louder and less pleasant than their A380s which had started flying at the time.
So my recommendation: fly a 747 at the front or upper deck if you can in business or first, at least once if you've never had the chance. Avoid it if you're flying economy. Most other wide body jets will be newer, quieter, and all around more pleasant.
Two small corrections:
1) If it would have had a change in internal pressurization, the -8 would have a higher pressurization to allow for a lower cabin altitude pressure.
2) The -8 does not have a higher pressurization, because they did not change the fuselage construction. Newer airplanes have lower cabin-altitudes thanks to the use of composite materials, allowing for better fatigue properties.
This is actually because the -8 wing is MORE efficient than yhe -400. There is a regulation that in case of a pressurization failure the airplane has to be able to descend below 15,000 feet in a certain time. The -8 wing has less drag, so it is easier to overspeed in descent, and they had to limit the maximum operation altitude to compensate.
Not always. 777X uses a conventional fuselage but has a 6,000 foot cabin compared to the 8,000 foot cabin on the legacy 777.
I used to fly frequently between SYD-LAX in business class on Qantas B744s. 11K (top deck, right hand side exit row window seat) was one of the best seats in the house.
The only passengers who had it better were those downstairs in First, where the curvature of the nose pretty much let them see out the front of the aircraft through the “side” windows.
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).
All truly marvels of engineering.
I recently visited Stuttgart to go to the Mercedes Benz Museum. They too have a lot of technical stuff of course, and history. Really recommend it!
The thing you neglect to mention is that the Speyer 747 is suspended 30 meters above the ground. It's breathtaking.
https://simpleflying.com/technik-museum-speyer-lufthansa-boe...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#History has a diagram of all the predecessor companies.
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.
Me321/323 was I think first heavy cargo with nose clamshell doors, but after that everyone settled on nose rising up, clamshell rear. It also had the top deck.
For context, when the 747 was being developed, simultaneously Boeing was developing the SST, Britain and France were developing Concorde, and the Soviets had their own supersonic Tupolevs in development. Boeing was anticipating that supersonic aircraft would render the subsonic 747 obsolete for passengers overnight, so it was designed to be easily convertible to freight.
Yes, but it turns out the hump is great for area ruling (aerodynamic drag reduction at transonic speeds), as observed by the 747-300's extended hump giving lower drag (but higher weight, of course) than the short-hump versions.
It had a lower Cd with the extended hump, but it still had a higher drag, due to the larger wetted area.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to those old notes, and couldn't quickly find what I was looking for online.
So for now, due to lack of proper supporting arguments, I would say: scratch that.
The Cd is normally normalized by the wing area, and the wing planform was the same between the 747-200 and 747-300. So if the Cd was lower for the -300, the total drag should be assumed to be smaller.
Assuming that the boundary layer is laminar for the entire length of the extended part of the fuselage during cruise - which is probably a good assumption, correct me if I'm wrong - then I wouldn't expect that the increased wetted area to add any significant drag. There is no additional frontal area, and no additional low pressure transition (just one moved back, obviously). But I'm not an aerospace engineer, just an interested laymen, so I'm just guessing. For all I know the straight staircase reduced drag compared to the classic spiral!
In high-subsonic cases, it normally points to slightly better aerodynamics in the areas flirting with transonic regimes. The name of the game at those speeds is to try to delay the onset of drag-inducing shocks. These shocks will typically first appear on the wing, or in an area heavily influenced by the wing.
In the case of the -300, with the extended bubble coming down at about half the wing root chord, it is possible that the bubble downflow / low-pressure area positively influenced the flow over the wing to slightly delay the transonic onset and further effects.
Pulling the bubble further aft made things worse again.
> Assuming that the boundary layer is laminar for the entire length of the extended part of the fuselage during cruise
Mm. No, I would expect the flow to be turbulent well before that.
> and no additional low pressure transition (just one moved back, obviously).
Careful where you put your low pressure zones, the wing aerodynamics are critical and sensitive! :-) (see explanation above)
But to make things even more interesting, the 747- 300/400/8 cargo all use the short bubble. :-)
> But to make things even more interesting, the 747- 300/400/8 cargo all use the short bubble. :-)
EDIT: Never mind, I see you wrote more down below about this. It's increased risk of a catastrophic engine failure bringing down the entire plane, not an engine simply dying and forcing a landing. Four engines = twice as many chances for that to happen.
It's amazing that jet engines work at all! Yet the safety record of the engines is incredibly good.
Though in general, a new engine design necessitates a new wing design, which means a new airplane.
Four engines are also less safe than twin engines. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but Boeing did the math and made the case.
I think CX would hate to retire them because from what I understand their load capacity is unparalleled. And you can load horses in them! There'll always be money from that for HAECO to keep them aloft.
It's even better when you're at the bus terminal at HKIA and watching them fly overhead...
I don't know if it lays out the safety math but it goes very deep on twin engine safety and some of the fights over the a340 vs. 777 regulations
The 747 is a safe aircraft, but there have been a lot of fatalities associated with it, due to pilot error, terrorism, improper repair/maintenance, etc.
I remember when the US Navy was rejecting single engine aircraft, and the F135 had be be proven literally bulletproof before they would even look at the F-35.
If this article is going to be so poetic, I'm not sure I can continue reading it. Let's just stop for a moment and remember that the 747's, er, distinctive shape wasn't some designer's fancy, it was dictated by necessity: while it was being designed, Boeing feared that in the near future all (long-distance) passenger travel would be supersonic, so it wanted the 747 to also be attractive as a freighter, so they added the possibility of loading cargo from the front, so the cockpit had to be moved up. Simple as that. Of course, the supersonic revolution didn't happen, instead the 747 ushered in the era of widebody jets, and all the fond memories it created now make it look beautiful to the nostalgic. But in the end, Boeing's engineers were proven right: currently there are around 300 747s still in operation, but only 29 of them are passenger variants.
Ok, moving on...
> 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.
You've got your Boeing planes mixed up there buddy! That was the 707, not the 747. The Queen Mary was retired in 1967, and the 747 first flew in 1969, so there obviously was no timespan where the one was an alternative to the other.
> 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.
"Only"? Not "First"? Ever flown an A380?
In the era when Joe Sutter designed it, almost the whole world believed that supersonic passenger aviation was right in front of us. Boeing put almost all of its core resources into the Mach 2 Boeing 2707. The Jumbo Jet was only a temporary plan based on a freighter foundation from the beginning. Its later conversion to cargo use was deeply considered from the start (which makes its situation today much better than the A380).
What happened later we all know. The Tu-144 fell from the sky over Paris. Concorde barely entered service because Britain and France did not want to pay cancellation penalties. Boeing was almost dragged down by the 2707. And the 747 became Boeing’s savior.
Ironically, as engine bypass ratios increased, newer airliners became more and more fuel-efficient, also slower and slower. This former "slow temporary backup freighter" is now the highest and fastest mainline airliner in the sky, able to fly above 40,000 feet and cruise close to Mach 1.
Another perhaps sad point is that before 9/11, the Jumbo Jet dominated the sky of large aircraft. So almost all the well-known bomb attacks people can easily remember were on 747.
... Wait, how was that? The Concorde was essentially the Franco-British entry in what was once a rather fierce international race to build a supersonic passenger jet (then seen as the future); the US entries were the (failed) Lockheed L-2000 and Boeing 2707.
If the US had been open to collaboration, it is likely that the UK would’ve gone in with them, and we might live in an alternate universe where there was a UK/US Concorde-ish thing, and maybe a French mini-Concorde (the French design which got subsumed into Concorde was particularly small, only 70 passengers). In our universe, though, US manufacturers were sceptical of working with BAC because they believed that govt funding for a foreign design would be hard to come by.
- NASA Skylancer built to validate wing design and improve landings.
- NASA simulations at Ames that predicted ground effect pitch issues that was incorporated into pilot training.
Oh come on, it's hardly "absurd."
> What US aerospace has created post 1969 is nothing short of remarkable in comparison. (And we can be proud of the Apollo era too.)
What are you referring to?
If you want to chart progress over time, consider this: In 1919, people were still flying biplanes and civilian aviation barely existed. Fifty years later, in 1969, you've got the 747 -- consider the progress made over those fifty years! Fifty years from then, in 2019, you've still got the 747 -- alongside, as the article notes, smaller and less remarkable aircraft "that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable."
So what, pray tell, is so remarkable?
Not by introducing clean sheet unproven designs but by taking what works and improving any deficiencies over and over again.
They also had QF7474 trace the Qantas logo in its track along the way, which is so cool and I am surprised I couldn't find it in the official site:
https://www.escape.com.au/destinations/australia/how-qantas-...
Great seat number though.
And both B747 and A380 fly much calmer than the smaller, lighter widebodies, which is equally nice for passengers on all classes.
So far my personal favorite is the 787. About the only thing 'bad' I can say about it is that all the mechanical bits are kinda loud, like the flaps and stuff, and are very noisy inside the cabin. But it cruises so nice, and the lower pressurization altitude and increase in humidity is noticeable on a long flight.
The 787 is nice but I find the seat width quite cramped in economy, and unfortunately premium economy isn't great value either to pay or for points upgrade on any of the airlines I fly...
What’s even the point of flying if you can’t look at the world from up high?
I only ever flew on the upper deck in coach configuration, and the last time I did that was about twenty five years ago on SAA. It wasn't anything special, but it was a little quieter.
It felt like a private jet up there, very cool. And that's even with the awful club world seats where you had to step over your neighbour to get to the aisle.
There's still a few of these in passenger service, so you can easily get it done if it's important to you.
Otherwise, you'll need to figure out how to get on a cargo flight.
Korean Airlines has a handful of 747-8 in active operation but they're making moves to retire them especially post Asiana merger.
Air China also operates a handful of 747-8 and 747-400 on both international and domestic routes.
FlightsFrom is a great resource to find routes for specific aircraft: https://www.flightsfrom.com/explorer/FRA?aircrafts=747 https://www.flightsfrom.com/explorer/ICN?aircrafts=747
Always fun to be on the second floor despite the seat configuration being a bit dated.
I would at least explore the city for a few days to have a break.
The only flying I enjoy is when I'm the one in the front left hand seat holding the yoke :)
I just asked my favorite stochastic parrot to find the cheapest flight from SFO on a 747 to anywhere. It found a one-way flight on Lufthansa for $500. If you can, I'd encourage you to spring for a business class flight on the top deck (probably $4000 one-way).
But I probably missed my chance for an A380. Maybe a Lufthansa flight will pop up that’s affordable. The other airlines mostly operate in the ME or Asia, and no plans for either right now.
> The jet was perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence. Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition.
End of American ambition? SpaceX landing is rockets… today! That’s apples to apples also, both aerospace. In other fields we have literally taught computers how to talk.
Normies lost faith in the media partly because they were seen as not really loving America. And if you don't trust the media, then it's a lot easier to believe Trump's lies.
I would argue they lost faith because the media constantly lies and distorts the truth to promote the ideology of capital. They are elite and disconnected, absolutely, just not in a left wing way, but a corpo-capitalist way (which only looks “left” if you’re to the right of capital).
sure
> to promote the ideology of capital
eh, no that's false. They promote the ideology of ad revenue at most, which causes audience capture, which on the left means anti-capital crazy talk like pro-theocracy, anti-growth and other weird shit.
Partly true, but also mostly wrong. It's all about the business model. Owners doing what you say can only do so much if the business model is based on selling ads and no one gets a salary if they don't attack jews enough for their audience.
The claim that Israels bad actions are down played is pretty doubtful. I always see 10x or more negative reporting of Israel compared to what I happen to know about the conflicts. Like in Swedish media it's always "Israel attacks Lebanon" but never ever "Hizbollah attacks Israel", even though that's what happens first.
And beyond that, he just said the right words to people who were not doing so well in the economy. Lies, of course, but very seductive lies, and for a while I even felt bad for some Trump voters for getting sucked into those lies. And then of course he leaned into the popular right-wing culture-war stuff.
(No longer, though: at some point you lose the ability to say "but I thought he would help me!" after the 500th time he hasn't helped you like he said he would.)
Both sides said that "America sucks right now". I think Trump said "Let's go back to when America was great" whereas liberals said, "America was never great, so we need to keep changing."
Worse, it was easy for some liberals to slide from "America was never great" to "and it's the fault of [white people|cis people|males]"
I'm not endorsing any of those views--I just think that's how some people perceived it.
Slate is even worse than The Atlantic in this regard.
This is a form of victim blaming. The right side of American politics gets away with it not because the left complains, but because the right doesn’t get punished at the polls for doing it.
As long as the Democratic base insists on caveating every American achievement with the Omnicause, it will keep playing into the Gingrichian rhetoric.
Toxic positivity is when you can’t criticize something even when it deserves criticism. Is America full of brilliant people? Yes. Is it in a steep decline at the moment? Also yes. Apple thrived because Steve Jobs did a coup and steered the ship. America needs the same, but not from an incompetent nincompoop like the current moron.
I don't know? Ask everyone who voted for a second Grump term. Every one of his rambles is some kind of sour puss complaint about our country, and yet people are still lapping it up!
I'd say the better framework is constructive versus destructive. The average American just doesn't want to think about constructive solutions or constructive criticism. The nuance required for incremental improvement is just too much work. But tell them you're going to smash things and hurt people, and they'll buy right in. It's essentially pan-religious fundamentalism.
Of course then the corpos are all too happy to step in with their own constructive but proprietary and anti-individual-liberty solutions. Which points back to the real motives for why the destructive memes end up being so popularized to begin with - destruction creates a power vacuum for the corpos to step into, while constructive governmental solutions get corrupted by lobbyists to overtly benefit corpos.
I really dislike the concept of "patriotism". What does it even mean? I think you'll get different answers if you get different people.
If people think that being critical of the US makes someone "unpatriotic", then that's their problem. If that makes a critical politician less electable, so be it. The alternative -- politicians censoring themselves and pretending everything is amazing -- is much worse.
And I'm not sure where the right is coming from anyway. The whole concept of MAGA is that the US kinda sucks right now and Trump is the savior who will fix it. If anyone has been critical of the US, it's been Trump and the MAGA crowd. But of course hypocrisy is never a problem for the right.
For those that were attracted to it, Trump presented the idea that America and it's people are good at good at their core, and this can be brought back.
Those same people view rhetoric from the other side as saying America is and was fundamentally evil and corrupt. They take this personally as a condemnation of them and their family.
Right can’t say a single word without bringing up Left first! What’s their obsession with them? Why they seek constant validation from Left? Pretty clear who’s hateful! Given the current mess, it’s also clear who hates America.
The right gets away with it because they are disingenuous children who argue in bad faith. Don't blame the people criticizing the US; those criticisms are usually valid and reasonable. The right needs to remember that being able to criticize the government/country was a founding principle of the US, and that just because someone says something critical, it doesn't mean hate. Seriously, it's like they have a child's level of discourse.
(In reality, they know exactly what they're doing, of course. The hypocrisy and simple ragebait is entirely the point. It's just bad faith bullshit.)
It is like basic child psychology. It is hard to get child to develop constructively by telling them they are awful and worthless.
The Internet
Hubble Space Telescope
Deep Blue beating Kasparov
iPhone
Human Genome Project
F-22/B-2/F-35 stealth tech
Falcon Heavy dual booster landings
Waymo
Starship live re-entry video via Starlink
ChatGPT
B-52 still flying
Talking about why, for example, Boeing never build a larger passenger airplane, or why the Concorde is no longer flying, would actually make for an interesting analysis of technology and business.
Why did the progression from the Wright brothers to the 747 not continue for the next fifty years? The answer has to do with physics and economics rather than lack of American ambition or excellence.
1. there wasn't demand for one - airliner designs are driven by the customers
2. the airport terminals would have to be rebuilt
3. the runways would have to be redone to support the weight
> why the Concorde is no longer flying
It lost prodigious amounts of money on every flight. The Concorde was a prestige project, not a practical one.
> Why did the progression from the Wright brothers to the 747 not continue for the next fifty years?
The 747 is far more technologically primitive than today's airliners. Take a good close look at the wing shape of the two, for starters.
America is many things, has done many things. Some great, some not so much. Americans themselves should at least be honest about seeing the good parts even if nobody else will admit it. And if we're going to keep progressing forward we need people to be on board in good faith.
/soapbox rant over
I don't believe in national pride or even of sports teams. My loyalty is always conditional, as long as my ethics align.
I can imagine some Americans feel that way too.
Historically in many places religion has been a primary source of shared mythology. In America, despite prominent Christian religions, a strong historical shared mythology has been of our own founding. It does not matter that it is myth, it matters that it is shared.
What I want is when an American citizen goes into that theater at the US House of Representatives before the tour and watches the short film about the founding of the country, they should come out of it damn near shedding tears of pride in how great we are. Bullshit or not, the American Creed is a source of unity. That is failing, and I am sad to see it.
When everyone becomes strictly transactional, society has failed.
Consider the military. Few wars are actually worth giving one's life for. Since 1945 basically none. If the Communists had won in Vietnam nothing would have happened to America. Iraq was based on false pretenses, Afghanistan accomplished absolutely nothing. My own country was part of some of these misguided adventures and has some of its own wars where it definitely was the evil aggressor.
Or think of the Nazis who exploited the very concept of this nationalism to destroy half the world.
So no. I do think it helps social cohesion but when a state is using that cohesion for evil it does not deserve to be followed.
I think we should outgrow this petty follow the leader attitude and think for ourselves.
They did.
Like, why did America even get involved in that shit anyway? It was a French problem (and really, it was fair they wanted to kick the French colonisers out).
Man I'm an idealist today. Okay that's just about every day, thankfully. But nihilism sometimes tries to consume me too.
I like to work with others to make things better but they have to be aligned in values. I don't do unconditional loyalty stuff.
Sometimes I hear that it is because the right wing is perceived as strong on the economy, despite the facts showing that the left wing consistently performs better. Or that the right wing has better foreign policy chops, despite consistently starting wars. Or that the right wing is about smaller, limited government, despite consistently using government power to push their social agenda.
Maybe it was the pronouns thing.
Well.. some people do in fact fight back. You'll hear it on the Waking Up podcast for example. The issue is that Trump is also, on the surface, fighting back. Except he's destroying America instead of making it great.
I feel like in Europe its much more normal to say, Switzerland is doing X very well, Sweden is going Y very well and so on. Or even the US is doing Z better.
They just didn't turn out to fit the emerging economics of flight. They "work" fine.
I think this is a bit gratuitous. It's not like Boeing doesn't receive massive subsidies. I'm not disputing that subsidies exist.
WTO said "both sides" and you are on a TKO because the fine to Europe was bigger than the fine to the US.
I love the plane itself. It is my top choice for transatlantic flight. Businesses class is fantastic. If you get a window, they have stow cabinets big enough for my backpack, laptop, and street shoes.
It's absolutely one of my favourites to fly on. I'll miss it when they replace it with the 2 engine widebodies. Economics just didn't work out for a good idea.
(A re-engined 747 with something quieter, and with better cabin pressure and humidity could also have worked but Boeing were never going there)
That just sounds like a state investment
No one can predict the future, and it's absolutely possible that orbital datacenters will fail (either for technology or business reasons).
But:
1. Without a time machine, we cannot be certain.
2. If forced to choose, I would rather root for their success and be wrong than root for their failure and be right.
When I started my own business, everyone thought it was doomed to failure. Friends, enemies, acquaintances, all of them.
Except my dad. He believed in me, though he had no idea what I was doing.
Musk is in good company with the crazy people who build the first tunnel under the Thames, the nuts who laid the first transatlantic people, the morons who dug the Panama Canal, and the fools who built the first transcontinental railroad.
Me, I bought me some SPCX.
I was confused at first too.
I assume you think that SpaceX will never be able to build/deploy a radiator big enough? But that's not a physics/thermodynamics question, that's an engineering question. And I think SpaceX has some pretty good engineers.
Help me out and tell me how you can be so sure it will never work.
I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space. The utility of satellite internet has been known for decades before Starlink came around.
You agree that space data centers are physically possible, but you just don't think they will be economical (i.e., cheaper than terrestrial data centers). Is that right?
I don't know if they will be economical. But that will depend on a whole bunch of questions that nobody knows the answer to: How will the demand for AI grow? How much will opposition to terrestrial data centers increase the price? How cheaply can SpaceX launch mass? How cheaply can SpaceX build data center satelliters?
Maybe you know all those answers. If so, I envy your stock portfolio.
Again, “What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail”.
I doubt you’ve done enough investigation to conclude that. Watching a couple a YouTube videos about how data centers in space are dumb doesn’t count.
For one, it’s not one big hundred megawatt-scale datacenter, but many smaller rack-sized satellites.
Two, there are many trade offs SpaceX can make to reduce the overall cost. The radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so anything they can do to increase the temperature drastically reduces the size of the radiators, including custom silicon, heat pumps, etc. There’s also novel radiator technology like liquid droplet radiators that could be worth developing.
Third, there are reasons to put it in space: solar panel efficiency, no cost for land, less regulation, no NIMBYs, etc.
Not only does cooling increase with 4th power of temperature as you said, but power is abundant, so it may actually be practical to use more power to run chips of a different material at a higher temperature. That's a great idea, if it can actually be pulled off.
There's nothing inherent about electronics that makes it stop working around 120 degrees - that's just the practical limit of silicon. Other materials can withstand higher temps but may not be as practical in other respects like bandgaps.
A hedge that as it gets harder to build datacenters in communities over water, power, noise, space, tax, etc reasons that space is a new frontier for them. Consider that solar power works better in space.
Also, satellites may be able to do processing of data in-orbit.
>I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space.
You just mentioned it - cooling. Consider Starlink a POC of radiating computer heat in space. A datacenter would need a scaled-up version, but it is not impossible, although it could be impractical if the cost of compute doesn't rise enough.
I'd bet in SpaceX. I'll not bet on musk grafting in a failing AI business for financial shenanigans.
But when it opened, it exceeded the wildest expectations of its most optimistic boosters. It transformed the country overnight.
A similar thing happened with the first transatlantic cable.
There's a reason people are pretty sure it won't work and it's not the difficulty of getting them into space or maintening them space or generally protecting them from space. Of course, those are all considerations as well. No, it's the cooling.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
I've seen many confident assertions about that issue. Do you think Musk doesn't know about it? People thought you couldn't reuse rockets, either. Or land them on their tails. Or pluck them out of the air with chopsticks.
So, yes, it transformed the country. That didn't necessarily benefit the stockholders and bondholders.
2. Check out "Nothing Like It in the World" by Ambrose.
If you look at the competitors like say Blue Origin, you see that they have an entire lunar architecture mapped out that wouldn't be feasible without the infrastructure they're planning to build.
You also constantly hear from Musk and SpaceX fans that the moon is a distraction and that the transfer of techniques, etc, from the Moon to Mars is minimal because the ISRU resources and processes are different. From an outsiders perspective, the reality distortion is unbelievable.
Needing to send a different box to the surface of a gravity well doesn't really change anything, fundamentally speaking. You still need power generators, a power grid, communication infrastructure, habitats, life support systems, rovers/excavators to dig out the materials, launch pads, etc. The astronauts get to train on the Moon and come back to their families and perhaps wait until the kids leave the nest, before they commence their deadly one way trip to Mars.
Now after the merger and IPO, SpaceX has become a deeply underwhelming company if you care about space. Starship has been a massive failure and I'm being tired of being told that SpaceX has a proven track record and therefore you should expect them to accomplish something by going complete against the development ethos that their proven track record is based upon. Maybe its not clear, but from my perspective, SpaceX has already become the incumbent it claims to fight against.
For the average SpaceX fan, the Falcon 9 isn't something to be proud of, but rather something to retreat to, once it is exposed that the thing that according to them makes the Falcon 9 obsolete does in fact not make it obsolete. The true SpaceX ethos would have delivered a working Starship by now and only afterwards tried to figure out how to make the Mars/Moon promises work.
If SpaceX spent a ton of resources developing Moon and Mars base plane they’d be criticized for not focusing on the launch vehicle. The railroad company also doesn’t necessarily need to be the ones building the towns.
Starship has experienced setbacks but isn’t a “massive failure” by any measure.
These pieces then bemoan today’s bus of the sky, with the unwashed masses donning sweatpants and dragging screaming toddlers who leave orange Goldfish crumbs in the seat cracks.
I am a beneficiary of the modern age of aviation. I don’t fly routes that would ever have been profitable for the 747, I don’t imbibe in the sky, I’ve never eaten the cheese varieties that the Pan Am stewardesses were trained to serve, and caviar just doesn’t interest me.
But I do ride narrow-body jets on nonstop routes that would never have seen 747 service, the experience is perfectly acceptable, and that’s my toddler chomping on the Goldfish. That narrow-body airplane is much cheaper to operate than a 747 ever was, which is fantastic because my toddler doesn’t have an expense account.
Some folks find a fuel-guzzling huge machine romantic. That would be fine if they wrote pieces about their love of big old planes. But instead they often start rambling about how this giant old plane was a pinnacle of engineering and of some grand social order. They forget what aviation truly was in those days and neglect the benefits of what it is now. One might think this is elitist or worse. But I shrug. I just find it tiresome.
It's kind of crazy that people compare the experience on a $1000 transalantic ticket and bemoan that the experience doesn't seem quite as good as something that was costing people the equivalent of 10-20x as much back then!
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...
Not necessarily disagreeing with you but I understand the merits in cherishing “form” in a world that is - for the most part - devoid of beauty and taste.
I'm not going to pay 2x ticket prices to keep it alive either, but it is terribly romantic. If human beings are allowed to fall in love with machines this one is as good as any.
Today's flying cattlecar hell is the result of the opposite, a dramatic market-driven race to the bottom of quality... followed by a price bounce to see how much money they can pull out of use before we give up and drive.
The day we have self-driving cars good enough that we can sleep, domestic air travel is dead. Ill take 10 hours curlled up in the back seat of my car rather than the 10+ hours it takes getting to/from airports for a domestic flight.
Though this is not really limited to the legacy automakers; the Hyperloop was a media stunt to try and divert investment away from transit, and in some places, it actually worked.
An airplane is a very efficient way to move people. There is no ground friction, the route is pretty direct, and once the airplane is loaded 100 passenger-miles a gallon is not unreasonable.
Even today the EU has to ban short-haul flights along rail corridors because jets are still competitive. I say this as someone who likes trains and chooses them whenever possible.
Yes, because airports and everything around is heavily subsidized and there is no tax on jet fuel.
"There is no ground friction"
And that argument is not so strong considering that air friction grows quadratic with speed.
And considering side effects like climate change - contrails combined with lots of other chemicals in the jet fuel are really not helping, their effect is worse than just the CO2 released which is also already huge.
So high speed trains are superior in almost every way - once a rail network is build. That is the advantage of planes - they just require start and landing strip.
Yeah drag grows quadratically with speed but reduces with altitude. At 40k ft a modern jet delivers up to 150 pmpg.
Yes the carbon emissions argument is a good one, and I personally prefer taking trains when they're available. I think that people are not appreciative enough of how efficient air travel is.
Autonomous cars would absolutely be the most convenient, comfortable experience. But it is incredibly inefficient/wasteful and it will never be economical. Trains are a great way to travel. Also, how far are you expecting autonomous cars to take you? I can’t imagine it’s economical after more than a couple of miles. It’s certainly wasteful out the gate because everyone expects to have their own cars in the US in particular. And not everything needs to be door to door, nor do we need trains for literally every town in the US. These are all absurd bars you’re setting that no one is calling for. You’re basically saying “trains aren’t luxurious enough for me and don’t go literally everywhere so therefore they should be killed.”
There’s also the wrinkle that we keep being promised they’re about to be here and yet we’ve seen very minimal deployment of any kind so far. I just don’t think personal, autonomous cars are going to be here in any reasonable timeframe, if for no other reason then how litigious the US is, and trains are just far more efficient at the end of the day for most cases.
Edit: forgot the food and waiting around… at least you have food available to you at a train station. If you’re in a car stuck in traffic, you just have to grin and bear it with no options. There’s also nothing stopping you from packing your own food, while eating in a vehicle isn’t yours is generally frowned upon in a car.
What train did you take to France? Everytime I go to Belgium I have to be careful to pick a train that doesn't require me to book a ticket on a specific train. I really like the "I'll get the next train whenever I reach the station" that domestic trains have. For long distance international trains that seems to only still be available to a limited set of trains to Belgium.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to require you to buy tickets ahead of time when you’re going to other countries. All travel requires this and taking autonomous cars across countries is generally not a realistic option nor will it be except in edge cases (and for deep pockets).
Anyway point is daily train travel is generally easy and affordable. It’s not this grueling, burdensome process in places that have actually invested in it. It can be a great way to move lots of people consistently, and a lot of the US would benefit from it. Sooo many cities with crazy traffic between them forcing what should be a 30-60min trip into hours. A train would rip between these places.
Daily commuter trains between Austin/dallas/Houston for instance would be great. Austin to Dallas is a 3-4hr drive. A TGV, decades old tech, would do it in 60min flat. Could you imagine?
It's also not necessary (in Europe) to buy tickets any differently when crossing borders. Advance-purchase tickets are used for long-distance high-speed trains where they don't want people sitting, or wish to spread the demand throughout the day to avoid crowding — that applies whether or not a border is crossed.
I can buy a ticket (paper or electronic) moments before the train from Copenhagen to Malmö leaves, since it's a medium-distance regional train without reserved seating.
I find the exact planning ahead of time more annoying than a security checkpoint, so was hoping you found a better solution.
But still, I have a soft spot for the Golden ages of engineering well before my time - like many, I'm an apollo program geek. No matter how many documentaries I watch, books I read, websites I peruse, schematics I try to figure out, it is still beyond astonishing to me that we flew to the moon with 60s technology. I'll continue reading about it for rest of my life and be incorrectly melancholic about the simpler days of engineering :).
While the 747 isn't my kink, it'd adjexent enough thay I think I can understand it - I imagine it's similarly fascinating to think of massive intercontinental airplane designed by slide rule , then flown across Atlantic without computers or gps or ils or any other amenities.
More expensive and breakable and inefficient and polluting and just insane as it also may have been :)
Poor safety was a big problem, too.
We're allowed to be nostalgic for it. I, like you, benefit from the modern age. I never even flew on a plane until I was 19 years old, in 2001, so I never experienced those so-called "glory days". But I think it's important to think about and memorialize those times.
Smoking is bad. Objectifying stewardesses is bad. The whole "fancy party" type atmosphere of those days feels quaint and elitist now. The 747 itself isn't a great plane by today's standards, on several metrics.
But that's fine. We can appreciate it for what it was in its time, and celebrate an aircraft that put in so many hours and miles of service.
Concorde?
Can some explain why replacing it with more efficient, and still American, jets is somehow a negative for American might, progress, and invention?
The 787 would beg to differ. It is an engineering achievement on par with the 747.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH454
I booked it once when I couldn’t find a direct flight from AMS to SFO.
Unless having more engines increases the chance of certain kinds of accidents? Like maybe the chance of an engine failure damaging the hull goes up with more engines?
Not questioning the justification--I do believe it--I'm just curious about the details.
Which is why I specified that it’s equally as safe for airlines operating under ETOPS.
Right, the more engines the better…
(despite having "fuses" so an engine can depart without taking much of the wing with it, there are many cases of single engine failure bringing down the airplane)
What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this?
The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American.
Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature.
[0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."
Pathetic drivel. There's legion of commercial airliners that are more beautiful than the 747.
> Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful.
Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view.
(I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)
IL-62 I particularly dislike. Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard.
Hey, what can I say? I'm more of an ass man.
> "Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard."
I fail to see what this has to do with visual aesthetics, but the safety record of the 747 was not so hot; already excluding the malaise brought on by the fetishes of terrorists and the Evil Empire, of course.
The Il-62 and the Tu-154 are still in limited service, for example. Not that it does your pseudoargument any favors anyway, as service history plays obviously absolutely no role in evaluating a design purely on its visual accumen.
I'm just sharing my love of the 747, since that's what the article is about.
Someday, when they write a glowing retrospective of the Il-62, I promise not to post about how it's one of the ugliest jets I've seen.
well as long as Congress doesn't let him keep it, hopefully
BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance program to refurbish it