![]() Nevertheless, as more modern airliners supplement or replace the 747, many pilots who have perhaps dreamt of flying one since childhood must say goodbye to it (as a young girl, one of my colleagues didn’t want to be an airline pilot she wanted only to be a 747 pilot). Of the thousands of flights in my career, it’s that first journey at the controls of a 747 that I remember best ![]() Not long ago the cargo carrier UPS confirmed a sizeable order for new 747s, reassuring the jet’s many fans that the QOTS will remain in production into the 2020s. Airlines such as KLM, Lufthansa and British Airways (my employer) still fly 747s. While the 747 has been in the news recently - as when Delta and United, the last two US-based operators of passenger 747s, bid farewell to their last jumbo jets - reports of its demise are at least a little exaggerated. We raise the landing gear and bank left towards the lights of Southampton, the city from which generations of Cape-bound Union-Castle ocean liners once set sail. The 747’s tail drops, its utterly iconic nose lifts, and we rise surely and steadily into the night. The captain calls “rotate” and I pull the control column backward. Soon after, we’re rolling across the Earth’s surface at roughly the speed of a bullet train. The thrust levers advance to their take-off setting and 370 tonnes of aviation legend slowly start to move. As the tower controller gives us our official take-off clearance, I think back to what the training captain said to me at this same position, on this same runway, just seconds before my first take-off back in 2007: “Here we go. ![]() One thing that hasn’t changed over the past 10 years, though, is the unique exhilaration of take-off on a 747. On the personal side, I’ve got married, written a couple of books about flying, and had a chance to fly to pretty much every major city in the world - including one trip to Sydney, 17 to Vancouver, and 41 to Los Angeles. Inside the aircraft, the 747’s left and right brains, otherwise known as the two flight management computers, have been entirely upgraded. Heathrow’s lighting has been updated, and so this venerable old runway now looks more like something out of Tron than anything the writer and aviation pioneer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry might have recognised. Much has changed in the decade between my first and last 747 flights. Now it’s just over a decade later and I’m taxiing a 747 towards the same Heathrow runway with an entirely different set of emotions, because I’m about to perform my very last take-off on the jet that’s affectionately known to pilots as “QOTS” (that’s “Queen of the Skies”). Of the thousands of flights in my career as a pilot, it’s that first journey at the controls of a 747 that I remember best. I’d completed months of classroom and simulator training and now, under the watchful eye of the training captain sitting next to me, I was just moments away from my first take-off. It was late 2007 and I was in the cockpit of a Hong Kong-bound Boeing 747, carefully taxiing what may well be our species’ greatest winged creation on to the northern runway of Heathrow airport. “Nobody ever forgets their first time,” the captain said to me with a smile. Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest - delivered directly to your inbox.
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