Originally Posted by pinniped

I will miss it when it's gone, mainly because it's the plane I'll always associate with my younger days when I first began flying long-haul. I'll always associate the 747 (and, to a lesser extent, the L-10-11) with an era when international air travel was still kind of special. I liked the fact that to board one, you usually walked out onto the tarmac. You'd look up at it and marvel at how enormous it was...you don't get quite the same sense of awe boarding at a modern terminal with jetbridges.

That said, I don't think it's going anywhere. It'll be flying in pretty substantial numbers into the 2020's even if nobody is buying new ones today.