For decades the Boeing 747 was the largest passenger airliner in the world, and it debuted (in 1968) just a few years before I had occasion to take a plane flight anywhere, or pay attention to different kinds of planes. (Actually, perhaps 10 years; I didn’t fly on a passenger jet until May 1979, when I flew from LA to visit my family in Tullahoma TN.) So when it debuted I took it for granted as being the current pinnacle of a certain kind of technology, just as the landing on the Moon in 1969 was the pinnacle of that era’s space technology, the latest in a long line of ever-impressive pinnacles of technology that kept appearing, two thirds of the way through the 20th century.
What I didn’t understand at the time Continue reading
