Tag: aviation history

Categories
Aviation San Francisco/California

The Queen’s Last Climb Out of SFO

I watched the video this morning and felt that familiar tightening in the chest that only a certain airplane still produces in me.

It’s labeled simply enough: The Last 747-400 Departure out of SFO 5/31/26 LH455. The aircraft is D-ABVY, a Lufthansa 747-430 that first flew in December 2000. The passenger filming from seat 12K didn’t know it yet, but this was the final scheduled passenger 747-400 departure from San Francisco. Four engines spooling, wings flexing under the load, slats retracting, then the long climb out over the Bay — South San Francisco’s industrial lettering, the dark mass of Mount Diablo, two right turns, the airplane’s shadow racing across the ground, and the Pacific opening up ahead.

The Queen of the Skies, still doing what she was built to do, one last time from this airport.

The 747-400 has always sat at the top of my personal list. Not the stretched -8, though I flew one and respected it. The classic -400. The proportions are right. The upper deck still reads as a second story rather than an afterthought. The cockpit sits high enough that landing always seemed to demand something extra from the pilots. And those four engines have an authority in the sound that twins, however efficient, never quite match.

I first saw a 747 coming into SFO around 1970, watching something that size on final approach and finding it almost absurd. My first flight on one was a TWA trip from San Francisco to New York. I managed a few upper-deck seats along the way, which always felt like a quiet privilege. The last time I flew a 747 was 2016, a Lufthansa 747-8 from Bangalore to Frankfurt. I remember thinking the type still had years left, and being glad of it.

A few years ago, when Boeing delivered the final 747, I wrote a short piece called “Ode to a Queen.” I still feel the same way. The airplane made long-distance travel ordinary for people who’d never have managed it otherwise — and it was beautiful in a way pure efficiency rarely is. The -400 refined the original idea without losing its character. For decades it was the default long-haul workhorse, the one you hoped to see on the departure board.

Lufthansa has been the last major carrier flying passenger -400s into U.S. cities. The grounding is happening in stages now, with the last ones expected out of service next year. The 747-8 will hang on a while longer, but even that presence at SFO gives way to the A350 this coming winter. The video from May 31 caught something real closing: the last scheduled passenger 747-400 leaving the airport where so many of us first fell for the airplane.

I’m not usually one for nostalgia. The newer twins move people and cargo more efficiently and more safely, by almost every measure that matters. And still — something goes out of the sky when a design that carried this much of our collective imagination finally leaves the stage. The 747 never looked like a compromise. It looked like an answer to a question no one else had dared ask at that scale.

Watch the video if you have a few minutes. Sit with the wing flex and the engine note, the long view of the Bay Area falling away beneath a machine that made long-haul flight feel both ordinary and slightly miraculous, for more than three decades. D-ABVY did its job that afternoon in late May. The passenger in 12K, camera running, got something that airport won’t produce again.

I will miss her.

Categories
Aircraft

Living History on the Wing

This week the warbirds are gathering at Oshkosh. I’m not there on the grass, but I can still hear them: the uneven throb of big radials, the higher urgent song of Merlins, the deep rumble of a bomber turning final. Hundreds have flown in. They are not museum pieces behind glass. They are still flying.

The lineup this year is rich — multiple P-51 Mustangs, a rare cluster of P-38 Lightnings, the B-29 Doc, the B-24 Diamond Lil, Corsairs, a P-40, an SBD Dauntless, a Privateer.

One airplane pulls at me more than the others. I first saw a P-38 in flight at Oshkosh in the early 1980s — the twin booms, the central nacelle, a purposeful elegance I hadn’t expected from a machine built for war. It was one of Kelly Johnson’s early masterpieces, born from the same inventive culture that later became the Skunk Works. This year one of those rare P-38s has come back across the Atlantic with Austria’s Flying Bulls, its only public American appearance of the season. Watching even a video of it feels like a small closing of a circle.

The airplanes do not maintain themselves. Jim Tobul still flies the F4U-4 Corsair he and his late father spent a decade restoring. At Warbirds in Review, owners and veterans stand in front of their airplanes and tell the stories — sometimes their own, sometimes a father’s or grandfather’s. Daughters and sons speak. The sessions are informal, human, often moving.

The pilots who fly these airplanes are not reenactors. They know the systems are old, the parts scarce, the consequences of a mistake permanent. They keep showing up anyway.

I’m following it all from California — streams, photographs, mass formations, the occasional longer Warbirds in Review session. It is not the same as standing under a wing. But a Merlin still sounds like a Merlin. A P-38 still looks like the answer Lockheed once gave to a desperate wartime need. The people who keep them flying are not claiming the original heroism. They are refusing to let it become abstract.

History is still flying. Even at a distance, that amazes me.

Categories
Computers IBM

The Day the Last Mainframe Went Dark

Note: I literally grew up during the heyday of the IBM mainframe era. My first real job was working for IBM in San Francisco beginning in 1968. I’m a “big iron” kind of guy. But this post was imagined after reading the following in a July 14, 2026 announcement from IBM: When we discussed our expectations with you in April, we noted that we would be wrapping on the launch of z17 in the second quarter. Given this was the strongest start to a mainframe program in our history, we expected Infrastructure revenue to decline low-single digits for the year, beginning this quarter. What played out was worse than our expectations, driven by a shortfall in our Z performance and the associated software stack, primarily in Transaction Processing. In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases. This dynamic impacted client buying patterns. While we anticipated some supply chain related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization.

It won’t arrive with fanfare. No countdown, no viral video of engineers raising a glass. One morning—sometime in the 2040s, perhaps later—a small team in a climate-controlled data center will complete the final cutover. They’ll flip the switches, watch the lights dim, and listen as the hum of the last production IBM mainframe fades to silence. An era that began with the System/360 in 1964 will end. Not with a crash. With the soft click of obsolescence.

We’ve been predicting the mainframe’s death for decades. In the early 1990s, pundits declared it doomed. They were wrong. Those systems—reliable, secure, capable of staggering transaction volumes with near-perfect uptime—became the invisible backbone of modern life. Your last bank transfer, airline reservation, insurance claim, or government benefit likely touched one. They endured because they solved hard problems well: high-volume, mission-critical processing where failure was never an option.

The path to that final power-down was never a rupture. It was a long, uneven evolution—driven by economics, technology, talent shifts, and the patient work of modernization. AI tools accelerated the transition. They didn’t cause it.

Lessons from Earlier Transitions

Steam engines dominated railroads for generations—powerful, reliable, deeply integrated into the industrial economy. Diesel won through incremental advantages: better efficiency, lower maintenance, longer trains with less labor. Railroads rebuilt infrastructure and retired the old iron as the economics aligned, route by route.

Prop planes opened the skies to mass travel. Jets brought speed and range that transformed global connectivity—but airlines didn’t scrap fleets overnight. They ran hybrids during the overlap, invested in new airports and training, and retired props as jet economics and passenger demand made the case irresistible.

The mainframe followed this pattern. AI coding agents—Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI models, AWS Transform, IBM watsonx—transformed the brutal manual work of understanding undocumented COBOL, extracting buried business logic, generating tests, refactoring safely. What once demanded scarce veteran experts for months or years could now be accelerated, with rigorous human oversight and equivalence testing.

Platforms like Visa’s Pismo showed a smarter path: incremental modernization. Cloud-native microservices layered alongside legacy cores, rather than rip-and-replace. Banks demonstrated real progress. Hybrid strategies won—AI inference running close to sensitive data on evolved mainframes (IBM’s z17 and successors, with on-chip accelerators), while new applications and analytics moved to elastic cloud environments.

IBM positioned the platform as an “AI factory” for low-latency, secure workloads. But pricing pressure was constant. High, capacity-based software licensing made the economics harder to defend as cloud offered predictable, usage-driven costs and younger talent gravitated toward modern stacks. For CFOs weighing rising maintenance against retiring COBOL expertise and AI-assisted migration, the scales tipped.

By the mid-2030s, competitive and regulatory forces intensified. Fujitsu’s exit from mainframes created a cliff in affected markets. Skills shortages accelerated. Even the most conservative holdouts—ultra-high-volume, regulated systems in finance, government, specialized industries—began serious moves, as simulation environments and exhaustive parallel testing brought the risk down to manageable size.

The Final Act

The last systems to go were the stubborn ones, where disruption carried outsized consequences. When the final cutover succeeded—after months of flawless parallel running—the team powered down the machine. A global bank, a payments processor, a government entity. Maybe a small ceremony: engineers who’d kept it alive for decades, trading stories of the iron that never failed when the world needed it most.

Picture the aircraft boneyards outside Tucson or Victorville, retired 747s sitting in rows under the sun, giving up parts to new generations before they’re recycled. Mainframes will meet a similar fate, more climate-controlled. Some linger in warehouses as insurance, still humming faintly in test or archival roles. Others get dismantled by IT asset disposition teams—data wiped to standard, processors and I/O cards harvested for niche markets. The bulk gets recycled, metal and circuitry returning to the supply chain. Like the jets, the iron won’t vanish in disgrace. Its lessons in reliability and disciplined engineering at scale live on, embedded in whatever comes next.

The world didn’t stop. Transactions kept flowing, now on distributed, elastic, AI-augmented platforms that had absorbed the best of what came before. The mainframe era didn’t end in failure. It ended because better options finally existed for every workload.

What Endures

We’ll look back with respect and nostalgia. The mainframe wasn’t flashy, but it taught something durable: some problems reward obsessive focus on reliability and scale; disciplined engineering outlasts hype cycles; the wisest transitions are rarely clean breaks. They’re patient evolutions that carry forward what matters.

IBM will have completed its own transformation by then—software, services, hybrid orchestration, AI tools that work across environments. The company that built the platform helps close the book on it.

The last mainframe going dark won’t feel like loss. It will feel like the natural close of a chapter that powered the digital economy through its most formative decades. The iron did its job. Now the next architecture takes the stage, standing on shoulders built to last.

Categories
Aircraft Aviation

Sutter’s Balloon

At Pinal Airpark, in the desert north of Tucson, the airplanes sit in rows the way old men sit in rows at a clinic, waiting for something that isn’t coming. A great many of them are 747s, parked here because the engines are worth more than the rest of the airframe and somebody, someday, may want the engines. Somewhere among the rows is one that’s shorter than its neighbors by nearly fifty feet, the line of its fuselage interrupted just behind the wing as though a piece had been folded in and stitched shut. This is a 747SP, and there were only forty-five of them ever built, because the airplane was, from the moment it was conceived, a compromise built to solve one problem and no other.

The problem belonged to Pan American World Airways. In the early seventies Pan Am wanted to fly nonstop from New York to Tehran, a route that did not then exist because no airliner Pan Am owned could cover the distance with a full load of passengers and still land with fuel in the tanks. Iran Air had the identical problem in reverse. Boeing had, at the time, the 747-100, an airplane that could carry nearly everybody in the world somewhere, but not necessarily that far. McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed had the DC-10 and the L-1011, three-engine widebodies built expressly for the medium-haul market the 747 was too big to serve efficiently, and Boeing, watching two competitors carve into territory it had assumed it owned outright, needed an answer that did not require designing a new airplane from the keel up. There was no time and, after the financial near-catastrophe of developing the original 747, no appetite for one.

The man who supplied the answer was Joe Sutter, the engineer who had led the 747 program from the start and who brought to it an instinct for solving problems by subtraction. Sutter’s idea was not to add a third engine, which several engineers in the room had assumed was the path, since removing one engine entirely was reckoned to save a third of the fuel burn and nearly seven tons of weight in one move. Sutter’s idea was to leave the engines alone and shorten the airplane instead. Take fuselage out fore and aft of the wing, forty-eight feet four inches of it, lighten the structure to match, simplify the flaps from the standard triple-slotted design to a single-slotted one, lengthen the tail surfaces to keep the shorter airplane stable, and let the weight savings buy range instead of payload. Boeing’s engineers called the result, informally and a little affectionately, Sutter’s Balloon. The company filed it as the 747SB, for Short Body, before settling on a name that did the marketing for itself: 747SP, for Special Performance.

The first one, manufacturer’s serial number 21022, rolled out of the Everett plant on May 19, 1975, and flew on July 4th, ten days ahead of a schedule that was already tight. Jack Waddell, who had flown the maiden flight of the original 747 six years earlier, was in the left seat again, and on that first flight he put the shortened airplane through a stall and a run up to Mach 0.92, a speed that had no business being associated with anything called a jumbo jet. In November, Boeing flew the fourth airframe nonstop from New York to Tokyo, 6,927 miles, with two hundred passengers aboard, and landed in Seattle’s backyard with more than thirty thousand pounds of fuel still in the wings, a fact Boeing’s marketing department repeated for years the way a man repeats the one good thing a difficult relative once said about him. The FAA signed off in February of 1976. Pan Am took delivery of the first production airplane, named Clipper Freedom, on March 5th, and put it into revenue service in April.

What the SP was for, it did well. A South African Airways SP flew nonstop from the Boeing plant in Seattle to Cape Town on its delivery flight in 1976, a record for an unrefueled commercial airplane that stood for more than a decade. Pan Am flew SPs around the world in well-publicized record attempts, and for thirteen years, until the 747-400 arrived in 1989, the SP held the title of longest-range airliner in the world. It is a title that means something only to the small number of people who keep track of such titles. Boeing had once projected sales in the neighborhood of two hundred. Fuel prices rose through the back half of the seventies and into the eighties, and the SP, despite its range, cost more to fly per seat than the standard 747 it had been built to outdo on a narrower set of routes. Twin-engine widebodies were coming that would solve the same range problem with half the engines to maintain. Production ran from 1976 to 1982, paused, and then opened once more in 1987 for a single VIP-configured order from the Abu Dhabi Amiri Flight, after which Boeing closed the line for good. Forty-five airplanes, full stop.

A handful of them found second careers that outlasted anything the airline business had planned for them. One, a former Pan Am airframe, was hollowed out by NASA and the German Aerospace Center and fitted with a hatch that opened in flight to expose a reflecting telescope two and a half meters across, an arrangement that let astronomers fly above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere and look at the sky the way the ground never quite allows. It flew as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy until 2022. As of this year, the airplanes still capable of flight number three: two belong to Pratt & Whitney Canada, which uses them as flying engine test beds, bolting experimental turbines onto a wing built half a century ago to prove an idea about subtraction; the third belongs to a casino company in Las Vegas, configured for fifty passengers, which is roughly the inverse of what Joe Sutter had in mind. The rest are scattered in places like Pinal Airpark, sitting in rows, shorter than their neighbors, waiting on engines somebody might still want.