ABSTRACT
Just after 7 pm on 6 April 2012, the final Singapore Airlines (SIA) 747 passenger flight touched down at Singapore’s Changi Airport (Kaur 2012). The preceding 39 years had witnessed hundreds of thousands of SIA 747s descending to land in the city-state. But two special flights that day, flight SQ 747 from Singapore to Hong Kong and then SQ 748 back to Changi, marked the retirement of the jumbo from the airline’s passenger fleet. A year earlier, the 747 had been retired from fleet of Japan Airlines, once the largest operator of the type (Perrett 2011). And other carriers in the region, including Cathay Pacific and Air New Zealand, also plan to withdraw their own fuel-thirsty Boeing 747s by 2020. Thus, an iconic aircraft that was once virtually synonymous with transpacific flight and even many intraregional and domestic flights in Asia is slowly being grounded.
