The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

I. The Boneyard Through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student’s trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American’s pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.Jim Petty, the airpark’s manager, led me out the back door of his small office to his truck, and we peeled out toward the long rows of forsaken aircraft. I had been calling Pinal a boneyard, but Petty told me that he doesn’t like the term. Some planes get brought here for a checkup, others for intensive care or storage. Some ailing vessels are delivered here with every intention of flying again, like an elderly relative sent to a short-term-care facility. But if rehabilitation proves impossible, Pinal becomes their final destination.Petty parked us under a TWA 747 that had been sitting the