Why did Boeing stop making the 747?

The Boeing 747 stopped being built because the market it served disappeared. When it entered service in 1970, crossing an ocean required four engines for safety and power. ETOPS rules, which since the 1980s have allowed twin-engine aircraft to fly ever farther from an alternate airport, along with the arrival of huge, highly reliable turbofans, changed the equation. A 777-300ER or an A350-1000 carries nearly as many passengers as a 747 with half the engines, which translates into less fuel per seat and less maintenance.

The 747 was designed to concentrate large volumes of passengers between hub airports. From the 2000s onward, airlines found that travelers prefer direct, frequent flights, and that a smaller twin-engine aircraft makes routes profitable where a jumbo would fly half-empty. The 787 and the A350 opened hundreds of long-haul routes between secondary cities that would never have justified a 747, and demand for very high-capacity aircraft shrank to a handful of operators.

Boeing responded with the 747-8, launched in 2005 with engines from the 787 and a new wing, but the passenger version found almost no buyers: about 48 units against the nearly 700 of the 747-400. It was the 747-8F freighter, prized for its nose that opens upward, that kept the Everett line running for the last decade at a pace of just a few aircraft a year. In July 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Boeing confirmed the end of production. The last unit, a 747-8F for Atlas Air, was delivered on January 31, 2023. Over 54 years, 1,574 units were built, and hundreds of them, mostly freighters, will keep flying for many years to come.