Qantas 747/400 over Hong Kong

Hong Kong shown in the background of this painting is a fitting one for this magnificent airliner. As every airline captain would know, beneath the scattered clouds that so often carpet lies Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport. At the time this painting was completed, Kai Tak had the reputation of being the most demanding for pilots of jet airliners. The approach over the checkerboard marker, in low cloud, was as spectacular to the many plane spotters who set themselves up on a nearby building as it was heart-stopping to the inexperienced passengers aboard–they would swear the starboard wing was about to scrape the high-rise buildings as the graceful jet banked low over them on the final approach to the runway.

On August 16th, 1989, a Qantas 747/400 similar to the one shown in this reproduction created a world long-distance record for a passenger aircraft, flying non-stop from London to Sydney, a distance of 11,185 miles, in the flying time of 20hrs and 9 minutes. The aircraft, named “The City of Canberra”, registration number VH-OJA and its skipper, Captain Massey-Greene, was creating another historic milestone on an air-route pioneered by Australian aviators such as Ross and Keith Smith in their “Vimy,” Ray Parer in his deH 9, Bert Hinkler in his “Avian” and Charles Kingsford Smith in his famous “Southern Cross”.

The Boeing Company, too, has a fine historical record, it has grown to be the largest manufacturer of passenger aircraft in the world. Bill Boeing started the business with the flight of his seaplane, the B&W, at Lake Union, Seattle in 1916. The company soon became the largest manufacturer in the USA, producing a variety of land-planes and seaplanes for civil and military use.

In 1933, the first of their famous Boeing 247D passenger monoplanes took off on its maiden flight. It was the first all-metal streamlined passenger aircraft in the world. Its twin radial engines were streamlined into nacelles that faired sweetly into the wings and also housed the retractable undercarriage. Variable pitch airscrews and trim tabs to assist control were among the sophisticated features that set this machine apart from its contemporaries. It set new standards in reliability and passenger comfort.

The commercial success of the Boeing 247D was short-lived because of the arrival of the Douglas DC2 and the larger DC3, but its ground-breaking standards were already in the aviation history books.

After WW2, Boeing’s superior experience in designing jet bombers, particularly the radical swept-wing B47, led to the introduction of the famous 707 series of jetliners.

As with the 247D, the huge 747 again broke new ground in the airline industry when it was introduced in 1968. The Boeing 247D had carried ten passengers. The 747 has many variations, some of which carry up to 500 passengers. It must be the only aeroplane in the world that has endeared itself to the public so much that it has been given a nickname, “ Jumbo”.

The Landmark Boeing 247D of 1933, seen in the foreground of this David Marshall painting, displays its radically clean design and the features that were later to be built into most all-metal airliners–including the Douglas DC 2 in the background.