B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Of all the objects that can be understood to be a piece of design, none is more complex than an aircraft. Not exactly mass-produced but made in their hundreds and occasionally thousands, the aircraft has to face the supreme challenge of leaving the ground safely, carrying passengers long distances at an acceptable degree of discomfort, and then landing again. It needs to be fabricated and funded in such a way as to meet the needs of the air-travel industry, which is notoriously caught between boom and bust. A modern aircraft might not be quite as big as an ocean liner, but it has a larger scale than a lot of architecture. And building it stretches the capacities of the industrial system to its limits.

The impact of aircraft on the way that the world works has been profound at every level. Mass air travel has transformed migration flows, the relationship of one city with another, and the nature of the modern economy. The form of the aircraft has worked its way into our visual consciousness at every level. Harley Earl, first head of styling at General Motors, ushered in the era of high-rise tail fins for the car industry - and came up with a Cadillac with an acknowledged debt to a Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter. The profiled aluminium hulls of pre-war Junkers transport planes inspired architects and engineers such as Jean Prouvé. The plywood construction of the Second World War aircraft helped to underpin the technical development of Charles Eames’s furniture. The first-generation Comet, the first jet airliner, made by De Havilland, had sculptural elegance. With great engineering finesse the engines were made an integral part of the wing. It had a beauty that Brâncuşi would have appreciated. It was part of a succession of aircraft which helped to create a visual language that reflected, and was reflected by, the contemporary world. The extraordinary beauty of the wings of the Second World War fighter, the Spitfire, the amazing watershed represented by the Stealth Bomber were both landmarks, not only in aeronautical history. They affected the design of cars and furniture, clothes and domestic appliances.

But it is the Boeing 747, known in its early days as the jumbo, that has the most powerful visual presence, and which can be said to be the aircraft that has had the single biggest impact on the world. When the Boeing 747 made its first public appearance on 30 September 1968, it was the largest passenger jet the world had ever seen. The first version could take 450 passengers, more than twice as many as its largest predecessor. The later, bigger versions ended up carrying more than 600 people. It did not actually fly for another four months, or reach airline service with Pan Am until January 1970. But from the moment that the swelling whale snout and the aluminium alloy body of the City of Everett, tail number N7470, first emerged from a hangar door in Seattle, it was clear that the modern world had a new icon on its hands. There was nothing else like it. A double-deck passenger airliner had been speculated about; here was one for real. It was not just another airliner. Its shape made it instantly recognizable; it was the jumbo, with a silhouette which identified it as a type that was all its own. What was not so immediately obvious was that the plane would also turn out to be one of the most successful airliners ever built. Still in production thirty-five years later, Boeing delivered the 1,000th 747 to Singapore Airlines in September 1993. There have been another 400 built since then: bigger, faster, smarter but still basically with the same ingredients as the original N7470, even after the introduction of the curious swept-up wing tips and the stretched upper deck of the later versions.

The Boeing 747 was not the only aircraft that attempted to define the new category of wide-body, or twin-aisle jet. It was developed just ahead of rival products from Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas in a titanic struggle for domination of the market for big passenger jets that would eventually force both Boeing’s rivals out of the business. The starting point was military research. The US funded tenders from three aircraft builders for heavy-lift aircraft and troop transports that offered the potential to be developed for civilian use. Lockheed built the Tristar and McDonnell Douglas was responsible for the DC-10. Both went for more modest three-engine alternatives to Boeing’s bolder, and costly, four-engine version. Lockheed produced an integrated design that built its third engine into the tail plane. The DC-10 was more blunt about the way its engines were distributed. Its third engine did not sit on the hull like the Lockheed, but was lashed, in an apparently ad hoc way, to the tail. It looked unstable, and the aesthetic prejudice was reinforced tragically when a DC-10 lost an engine on take-off and crashed, killing all on board. The Boeing 747 became more than a commercial necessity for airlines flying heavily trafficked routes. For the more insecure politicians and tycoons, owning a jumbo or two became an essential trophy for a while, one to go with the fleet of armoured Mercedes cars and the crop of mirror-glass skyscrapers in their home towns.

Its sheer size gave the first jumbo an extraordinary presence, towering over pygmy ground vehicles swarming across the tarmac to greet it, like Lilliputians trying to lasso Gulliver, on that long-ago day in Seattle. The front view is as impassive and intimidating as Mount Rushmore. The four engines hang from pylons that are like the flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. In fact they are the genetic inheritance from the B-52, Boeing’s nuclear bomber. Boeing had built the American strategic bomber fleet, and with it came the expertise to hang jet engines from pylons slung beneath the aircraft wing, which was essential for the jumbo. The tail towers over the hull, like a ski jump. All this and it moves too. Initially the shock of seeing one of these remarkable machines flying overhead would bring people running into the street for a glimpse. It was like watching an office block sailing through the clouds.

Wandering around on the ground beneath a Boeing 747 induces a curious sense of vertigo. You lose the sense of scale and proportion. This is a vehicle, a man-made object capable of hurtling down a runway at speeds of more than 200 miles an hour and lifting off into the air. Yet it has the character of a piece of the landscape. Even its wheels are bigger than a man, though from a distance, they seem tinier than the castors on a wheeled office chair.

The wide body and the upper deck was the chance for the realization of those schoolboy fantasies of the 1950s about what air travel could be like one day. In the early 1970s, there really were pianos and cocktail bars in the skies as the airlines struggled to find entertaining ways to deal with overcapacity. All that vanished in the age of mass intercontinental air travel, when the planes filled up and 600 people found themselves crammed into conditions not that dissimilar from the lower decks of a nineteenth-century migrant ship. The only saving grace was that the experience did not last as long as crossing the Atlantic by sea. Yet even now, there is still a moment of release from the pressures of the outside world when the cabin door swings shut on the first leg of the flight to Australia, with twelve guaranteed interruption-free hours all the way to Singapore.

The jumbo is an airliner with an architectural interior rather than a cabin. It is made up of infinite loop corridors and a sequence of rooms each with a different character. It is in an entirely different league from the pencil-slim, claustrophobic flying cigar tubes that previously represented the airliner. Not so surprisingly, when Norman Foster was asked by the BBC to make a film about his favourite piece of twentieth-century architecture, he was able to devote it entirely to the jumbo jet without even a hint of having his tongue in his cheek.

The 747 is one of those very rare industrially made objects that acquire an authentic personality of their own. They are made in factories and represent cold commercial logic and painstaking engineering calculations, but, nevertheless, like a VW or a Bakelite phone, they have an identity. The Boeing’s eulogy came from an architect, Norman Foster, in a film. The Citroën DS got Roland Barthes and an essay.

At the same time, the 747 is a technical phenomenon whose impact on the course of social history has been enormous. Its capacity ushered in the age of mass air travel, which the 707 had only hinted at. Its economies of scale slashed the cost per seat of flying the Atlantic. For most Europeans, air travel had previously been limited to the Mediterranean. The jumbo put Florida and Thailand within reach. It accelerated the convergence of the world’s cities and transformed the nature of migration. Perhaps even more far reaching in its long-term impact on the cultural perspective of the world was the way in which affordable air travel made migration reversible and permeable. If it took four weeks and a year’s salary to sail from Sicily to Australia, then family ties and cultural connections were broken by migration. But now Britons born of Pakistani or Jamaican descent can fly to Rawalpindi or Kingston for the weekend, the connections and presumption of identity are very different.

The jumbo is an object of real beauty, and that is almost enough to forgive it the noise and the pollution that it produces. Only the name itself is curiously inelegant. And it spawned British Aerospace’s 146, an even less elegant, diminutive, four-engine regional jet that was a compromised coda to the long history of British-built airliners, and which was dubbed the jumbolino by one Swiss airline.

The jumbo was the starting point for a series of further developments that gradually expanded the original format by extending what began as a bubble behind the flight deck further and further back along the hull. It was a strategy that was taken to its ultimate conclusion by Boeing’s nemesis, the A380. Airbus Industrie created what became the world’s largest passenger aircraft by taking the idea of the upper deck and extending it down the entire length of the hull, leaving Boeing in its dust. Creating it was an extraordinary achievement: with wings built in England - reflecting an expertise that goes all the way back to the Spitfire - a fuselage made in Germany, and final assembly in France, where it was necessary to widen roads and create new bridges to allow the components to reach their destination, it took a positively pharaonic approach. The big Airbus was an undertaking on the scale of the building of Stonehenge, or Notre-Dame. Half shark, half whale, the A380 looks too large and too ungainly to climb into the air. Inside it has a grand staircase that feels like something out of a Busby Berkeley production. It is big and it is an extraordinary engineering project. It lacks the presence and the charisma of the original 747 wide body, not because of any failing in the abilities of the design and engineering teams that made it possible, but perhaps because of the fundamentals of aerodynamics. An aircraft of one category has the potential to provide a gainly elegance, but step up a collar size or two, and a line has been crossed, and it is no longer possible to have charisma.