Do you want to go for a ride?

It’s a crisp, cold morning. I’m sitting up front in the ID. Buzz, driving, with my son sitting behind me. We are listening to Joe Sutter’s 747. We pass through some fog that has settled at the base of the redwoods flanking the road. Then he asks, “Dad, what’s your favorite airplane?” I pause the audiobook and, without hesitating, respond, “747.” I press play again and we continue on. I wonder to myself if he’ll ever have the chance to fly in one, or if instead, he’ll see it a museum.

The Queen of the Skies

Decades ago it was I who was curious about the world of aviation. My parents would take me to the library in Richardson, Texas. We’d walk in through a massive door, under a brutalist structure of poured concrete and ribbed copper cladding that jutted out from all sides of the square building.

UNT Libraries Special Collections

Walking over the the waxed tile floor, we took the elevator up to the second level to see the children’s section. I was obsessed with a book about a baby’s first flight full of vibrant photographs.

I have forgotten most details of how it looked, except for one picture of the in-flight meal with all the little compartments. The texture of the food was so realistic that I felt like I could eat it right out of the page. After it was due, I’d asked my parents to check it out again.

As I got older my father would take us to DFW Airport to greet a family member flying in or say bye to another as they left. This airport was yet another massive brutalist concrete structure, a similar palette of light browns and pitch black roofs. The concrete half-loops of terminals were connected by a twisting maze of undulating roads.

Threading through those roads were the Vought Airtrans, automated people movers that transported travelers, staff, and, in our case, joyriders from one terminal to another.

Noah Jepsen on Flickr

My dad would ask us, “do you want to go for a ride?” You can guess our answer. We’d jump in at one station and, as it made its way through the forest of cast concrete, my dad would point out the various different airplanes on the tarmac.

He was showing us a futuristic autonomous transport just as my grandfather, decades ago, took him to see India’s first escalator. I don’t know if he realized how much of an impression it would have on me.

Airplanes of the time were a sight to behold, ranging in all shapes and sizes. There were engines in strange places, sometimes two bolted to the back of the fuselage, other times a third one going through the tail. Some had their engines hanging from the wings, and other comparatively diminutive ones had propellers that we loved to watch spin. They hinted at an optimistic future.

The AA lineup in the early 90s

But one, the 747, was the most recognizable, with an unmistakable hump at the top, four engines hanging from the wings, a cockpit far above the nose with passenger windows going all the way to the tip. It had a majestic presence. Multiple jetways connected to its doors, signaling that it was the queen of the skies.

The planes we got to fly on at that time seemed to pull from the same material and color palette as our library and airport. It was a sea of brown with large pleather seats and fold-out ashtrays in the armrests, though smoking was already banned. Music was delivered through pneumatic headphones.

One day, my parents had turned on our wood-panel television to see every major channel reporting breaking news. The words I could read mentioned that TWA 800, a 747-100, had exploded soon after takeoff, accompanying an image of burning embers floating in a dark night sea. I didn’t understand at the time, but as the investigation continued the adults would talk about the problem, something about the fuel tank and the wiring. What I did understand was that something was wrong. Hundreds of people had died in this majestic humped plane — the symbol of ingenuity and freedom. It was one of the first times I felt a sense of loss.

Megatop

At the time Dallas was far away from our ancestral home near Chennai, India. We’d go from Dallas Forth Worth to Los Angeles, where we changed to a 747 that would take us to Singapore via a refueling stop at either Tokyo or Taipei. We then changed airplanes again on our way to our destination, Chennai.

Before one of these trips my cousin had just returned from his own, and he was excitedly telling me about everything he saw. Apparently every single seat had not just a television screen in front of it but a full-fledged Nintendo. You could play through all of Super Mario World, among other games.

Aero Icarus on Flickr

I stepped onto the Singapore Airlines 747-400 and fell in love immediately as I walked past the spiral staircase to the second deck. The staff, with their tailored uniforms and cleanly kept hair, shuffled quickly up and down the aisles, marking our seats with stickers as a signal that we had pre-selected our meals. Each of our seats in economy had a little fold-down footrest, something I’d never seen before.

Then I spotted a little rectangular remote lodged in the armrest. I pressed the spring-loaded button nearby and out popped the remote. Flipping it around, I couldn’t contain my excitement at the sight of a D-pad and four colored buttons. After takeoff I played to my heart’s content. As the cabin lights dimmed and the rest of my family napped, I continued my gaming session, accepting a midnight sandwich offered to those who were still awake.

Arriving in Changi, though I was a bit groggy from the lack of sleep, I was beaming from having played video games far longer than my parents would have allowed on land. With just one hop left to Chennai, there was a mechanical problem with the 747 that would take us home.

We were herded along with the rest of the economy class passengers. We were in a massive room built not with concrete in hues of brown but instead steel and glass, with the glowing 747 towering above us. The words “Megatop” were written above the cockpit windows. The staff pushed around a cart, giving each of us a triangular package containing two halves of a sandwich of cheese and bread, and several red grapes. I may have forgotten the games and videos I enjoyed on the plane, but I still remember the taste of that sandwich. After an hours-long delay, we boarded and were on our way.

Finally, at Chennai, half a dozen folks from our extended family greeted us just past customs, sealing the 747 in my mind, not just as an entertaining place to be, but as the backbone of connection with my family in India. It helped reweave the fabric of familial connection that kept fraying as we lived our separate lives oceans apart.

All in all, including the long car ride to our village, it probably took more than a day of travel from door to door, and I had loved almost every moment of it.

Once there, all I could think of was freedom. There in the dusty village streets we could play however we liked, and we did, digging holes in the ground, making our own ceramics from the clay we found in the dirt and firing them. Then, when the electricity would go out, we’d walk out into the dark sky and see the Milky Way filling our vision, as if a blanket in a makeshift bedroom tent. My father would point in a direction and say, “Look, that twinkling dot is not a star but the planet Mars.”

One of those days in that same front yard, as we dug around in the dirt, my father called me over to show me the latest issue of the Hindustan Times. Accompanying an article was a color photograph depicting a 3D rendering of the Airbus A3XX concept (which would later become the A380), with two passenger decks running the full length of the aircraft. I was awestruck. Given how much I loved the experience of a 747, I couldn’t imagine what an airplane that large could be like.

A3XX

Back in Dallas, on one of the evenings when my father would put on documentaries from PBS, we watched 21st Century Jet — Building the Boeing 777. They showed the whole design process, how it was the first aircraft designed entirely using the computer. It aimed to be the safest and most efficient aircraft that ever existed. In keeping with that promise, as the years went by, more and more of our flights were on the fuel-sipping 777. My original experience in the 747 was starting to fade away.

Boeing 777 rollout

More than a decade later, as an adult, in the middle of my transformative trip to Japan, I took a short work trip to India. Looking through the flights, I went out of the way to take a detour through Thailand specifically to get on one of Thai Airways’ A380s that had an economy section on the upper deck. I was finally going to ride the plane my father showed me decades ago in India!

My expectations were still high, but everything was different than my first ride on the Singapore 747-400. I wasn’t traveling with my loved ones to see even more loved ones. It was simply a work trip. Stepping on the plane, the A380 felt just like almost every other plane. I’d gone out of my way to experience this aircraft but felt nothing special.

Kiefer on Flickr

The next year my wife and I took a trip back to Asia together to meet her family for the first time. It was yet another trip to an ancestral home, this time coincidentally on one of the last United 747-400s. I joyfully told my wife how this was my favorite aircraft to travel in as a child, but was soon disappointed when I got on.

The interior was worn and dirty, the fabric seats nearing their end of life. There were no footrests or in-seat entertainment to be seen. The meal was nothing to write about. It appeared that the staff, without enough time to put in the care that the folks of Singapore would have, had heated every meal tray at once, including the butter, which would arrive as a dripping liquid.

In this case it wasn’t that the 747 stayed the same while everything else improved. It managed to get worse because United knew that the 747 was on its last legs. The ashtrays and pneumatic headphones of my childhood were the remnants of an old future, but that 747 the result of neglect.

Twin jets

The investigation of that fateful night decades ago that left TWA 800 reduced to burning embers in the ocean had revealed a fatal flaw. A short circuit in the fuel tank could lead to explosions. The FAA required that all airlines retrofit their aircraft with a nitrogen-inerting system that, in the event of a short circuit, would not result in an explosion. The deadline for the retrofit was the very next year after our trip to China, which added pressure for United and Delta to retire those aircraft.

ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards) meant that twin-engine aircraft were being cleared for transoceanic routes. So, three- and four-engine aircraft, like the 747, were given an expiration date.

For our first trans-Pacific flight after the pandemic and having children, we went back to Shanghai. We were going to fly Korean Air and I was overjoyed with the possibility of flying the newest and final incarnation of the 747, the 747-8i. I told my son, who was three at the time, that we were gonna fly on a big long light blue airplane. He grinned and laughed at the idea. Then a few weeks before our flight I received the dreaded email. The subject said “Notice on Pre-selected Seat Change”. After reading the body of the email I saw what had happened. The plane was swapped from a 747 to a 787.

Kiefer on Flickr

As we found more comfort in flying internationally with kids, we started taking Zipair’s 787s to Japan. The tickets cost just about what it costs us to travel to New York. The hub-and-spoke model that necessitated 3 or more hops as a child was replaced by affordable direct flights. The joy of the long journey was replaced by efficiency. The particular aircraft we took was no longer an important link between an immigrant and his diaspora.

Looking out the window with my child, it was my turn to point out the aircraft, but gone are the days of quad- and tri-jets and the propeller planes. Nearly everything is a twin jet (two-engine) now.

We still look backwards and romanticize a time long gone by visiting the TWA Hotel at JFK or one of the many wonderful aviation museums in the country. But they’re nothing like my trips to the library to pick up my favorite book, riding the Airtrans with my father, or looking out the tall window in Changi Airport. Those were the clues pointing to the future.

The future

So, as I continue driving to my son’s school listening to Joe Sutter’s book, my son then asks when we’ll be able to ride the 747. I have to tell him the truth, which is that we probably wouldn’t take the detour required to fly on one. And he takes it the way that children seem to always take facts about the world, as simple information. And then he responds, “If not the 747, which one would it be?”

Right then, a lavender Waymo Ojai passes us to our left with no one behind the wheel. I call out: “Do you want to go for a ride in that?”, to which he responds, “Of course!”

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Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this.