I'll Never Fly a Boeing 747 Again
How come the company that created the world’s most amazing traveling machine became the company that can’t get anything right?
I will never fly on a Boeing 747 again.
That’s pretty hard for me to take because I’ve had a very long relationship with this airplane – more than 50 years, in fact, since I first boarded one in its first year of operating, 1970.
And it’s been a deeper relationship than it is for most people. For me it became far more than a machine. Its very form and presence and, yes, personality, embody the character of the people who created it, a bunch of remarkable engineers I got to know in the course of writing a book about it—a book in which I set out to catch the spirit of a magic moment when America could startle the world with audacious achievements.