Qantas retires 747s, the original jumbo jets

It’s farewell to the original jumbo jet, with Qantas announcing it will retire its last six Boeing 747s by the end of 2020.

A Pan Am 747 on one of the first jumbo flights in 1970.

So it’s farewell to the jumbo jet with Qantas announcing it will retire its last six Boeing 747s by the end of 2020, earlier than planned, as the super-efficient Dreamliner Boeing 787-9 nuzzles in.

The jumbo, pioneered by Pan Am in 1970, has been in the Qantas fleet since 1971 and has carried many Aussies on their first (and subsequent) journeys to the other side of the world.

My first flight was on Qantas’s earlier mainstay, a ­Boeing 707, on a student charter to San Francisco. I could visualise myself sitting in a pencil-shaped pencil case (remember them — the only item of fun in the history of school stationery) speeding through the heavens. Ah, the absurdity, but magic of flight.

My last 707 encounter was a journey up the Nile. “Seat allocation” had been a race across the tarmac when the gates flew open, my travel neighbour was a crate of chooks, and the pilot cabin’s faulty door flapped open and shut. That was back when the pharaohs were bad.

But my nostalgia is stirred by the jumbo, named for a circus elephant, and which in shape, size and significance is an icon. With a passenger capacity up to 600, the plane permitted cheaper fares and fuelled the democratisation of overseas travel, although that upstairs lounge afforded sweet retreat for the elite from the restless masses. Sure, the jumbo’s ­design has neither the classic elegance of an early ocean liner, nor the aerodynamic dazzle of the Concorde (the last fling of airborne aristocrats), but it is something rare: a comical beauty.

The jumbo reminds me of that pushing-design-to-the-limits crazy bird, the pelican. Just the other day, I watch a flock of them. They’re so ponderous, how can they possibly take to the air from an ­almost sitting start on the water? So too with a 747 lumbering down the runway. Will it ever gain enough speed to take to the sky? Of course it does and it soars away gracefully. My cocker spaniel, also a comical beauty, lollops along a parallel runway with the pelicans, his large ears flapping like Dumbo the elephant’s. Thankfully he remains earthbound.

Next week I am off to Seattle, the home of Boeing and birthplace of more than 1500 jumbos. While I’m joining a cruise, I will have the chance to see the very first 747, which is in the city’s ­Museum of Flight. Others sit in white-­elephant desert boneyards. US airlines have phased out jumbos, a few European carriers still fly them, many are used to carry cargo and, ironically, a 48-year-old one is in Iran’s air force. And the US presidential Air Force One is a 747.

It’s sad to see what was known as the Queen of the Skies (or should that have been People’s Princess?) dethroned.

Susan Kurosawa is on assignment.