Nobody set out to design the airplane with an upper deck. Today’s 747 has a large upstairs cabin because Trippe thought it would be a freighter, because a round hump produced too much drag, because Pan Am bosses had fond memories of the Stratocruiser’s bar (and all-night parties held by the light of the Pratt & Whitney R-4360s’ flaming exhausts), and because fuel prices went through the roof. There were no ill effects, as it turned out, so Boeing designed the new 747-300 with a longer upper deck to seat up to 70 passengers. This short-body, long-range version of the 747 was as economical as it was elegant (that is to say, not at all), but when Boeing sawed 47 feet out of the fuselage to create the SP, the engineers had to look at what would happen when the rear of the cockpit hump lined up with the front of the wing. The décor in the 747 lounge is a vaguely horrible memory, but burnt-orange sectional sofas weren’t the only aesthetic transgression to come out of Seattle during that era. In announcing the change, a British Airways press release noted that the upstairs area was “currently used for a first-class lunge”-the spelling was probably appropriate more often than not. The party days ended with the 1973 fuel crisis, when virtually every 747 operator got rid of the lounge and replaced it with more seats for paying passengers. Then, in a deliberate echo of the below-deck lounge on the model 377 Stratocruiser, Boeing’s 1940s flagship, Trippe and his colleagues persuaded Boeing to turn the extra space behind the cockpit into a bar and lounge. This produced too much drag, so Boeing extended the aft portion of the hump to form a teardrop. The first design for the cockpit enclosure was a hemispherical hump atop the fuselage. Trippe was one of Boeing’s best customers and usually the first to order new models, so Boeing put the flight deck of the 747 above the passenger cabin to give the aircraft a hinged nose for a front-loading cargo door. Retired 747 chief engineer Joe Sutter was there just to remind people that Boeing had studied a dual-deck airplane as long ago as 1965 and had rejected it as too heavy.īoeing was competing for a supersonic transport contract in 1965, at about the same time the 747 was conceived, and Pan Am founder and chairman Juan Trippe believed that the big subsonic jets would end up as freighters and that the SST would replace the 747 on passenger routes. They are quite wrong, but the example of the 747 is useful because it points to some important general rules about how airplanes come to be the way they are.īehind the scenes at the Farnborough airshow in England in the summer of 2000, Boeing was keen to share its opinion that Airbus’ weight numbers for the A380 dual-deck jumbo, which is to enter the fleet in 2006, were optimistic. So, I ask them, why does the 747 have an upstairs cabin? Because Boeing planned it that way, they answer. ARGUING THAT LIFE EVOLVED WITHOUT INTELLIGENT GUIDANCE, say the people who believe in “intelligent design theory,” is akin to arguing that a tornado hitting a junkyard could create a Boeing 747.
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