Boeing pulls the sheet off its biggest airliner ever this weekend, the 747-8 Intercontinental. It is an extreme makeover of the plane that ushered in the jumbo jet era, but despite its impressive tech and imposing size it won’t be a big seller. Still, it offers further evidence that Boeing has found a winning strategy in its race against Airbus to make commercial aviation cleaner and greener.

The latest iteration of the venerable 747, which made its first flight 42 years ago this week, comes as the industry has spent the past few years debating the merits of two all-new aircraft, the gargantuan Airbus A380 and the technologically advanced Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Each was billed by its manufacturer as the airplane of the future, and they represent fundamentally different approaches to making air travel more efficient.

Airbus bet on moving a lot of passengers from hub to hub cheaply in giant airplanes. Boeing thought the future lies in moving fewer people point-to-point in super-efficient aircraft. And while the A380, which seats as many as 525 people, allowed Airbus to boast it makes the world’s biggest airliner, bragging rights only go so far. It’s the bottom line that matters.

“The secret sauce in the aerospace business is not building a pressurized tube with swept wings and podded engines,” says industry analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group. “It’s carefully surveying market needs and building a product the market wants. That’s the secret sauce.”

So far Boeing has better sauce.

Airbus is planning a fuel-efficient twin-engine, twin-aisle airplane to compete against the 787 Dreamliner. So with all of the attention on the 787 and the mammoth A380 not selling very well, it might seem a jumbo like the 747-8 is an anachronism. But Boeing isn’t about to cede the market for very large aircraft to Airbus, even if that market is a fraction of what it was in the 1970s when the 747 transformed the airline industry.

“In the past 10 years you’ve had 3,000 mid-market, twin-aisle long-rangers sold,” Aboulafia says of industry workhorses like the Airbus A330 and A350, along with the Boeing 777 and 787. Compare that to less than 450 very large aircraft like the A380 or 747.

“That’s the future,” Aboulafia says of very large aircraft sales. “Two per month.”

So if the market is so small, why did Boeing even bother with a new jumbo jet when it has more than 800 orders for the 787 Dreamliner, and the 737 and 777, two industry staples, continue selling well?

“It was supposed to be cheap,” Aboulafia says. “You re-engine it and spruce up the wing and for $2 billion [in development costs] you get something that’s far more cost-effective than the A380, which is going to come in at $25 billion.”

It  didn’t quite work out that way. Both the 787 and 747-8 development programs have been plagued by delays and the 747-8 program is approaching $5 billion, according to analysts. With Airbus offering deep discounts on the A380, Boeing is having a hard time selling the Intercontinental passenger version of the 747-8, with only 33 ordered so far.

With so few airplanes sold (there are an additional 74 cargo versions ordered), the economics of the 747-8 aren’t looking too rosy anymore, says aviation analyst Scott Hamilton of Leeham Co.

“Technically it’s going to be a very good airplane,” he says. “Financially it’s not going to be successful because they missed their window of opportunity.”

Economics aside, the 747-8 is an impressive aircraft. It is just over 250 feet long, making it 18.3 feet longer than the current model and the world’s longest aircraft. It will carry as many as 467 people in a three-class configuration.

The technology being put into the 747-8 is no less impressive. In addition to efficient new engines and all-new electronics and flight control systems, the airplane has an all-new wing that will dramatically improve the efficiency of the airplane over the older 747s. Boeing claims the 747-8 will be 30 percent quieter and 16 percent more fuel efficient than its current version, and it will offer 13 percent lower seat-mile costs.

Yes, the A380 can carry more people and fly a bit further. But the 747-8 Intercontinental is lighter per passenger, an indicator of cheaper operating costs.

Still, both the A380 and the 747-8 will serve a niche market — namely flights between major hubs like New York and Paris or Singapore and Hong Kong. So far only Lufthansa and Korean Airlines have ordered the Intercontinental. Hamilton points to another reason the very large aircraft market isn’t what it once was: the routes available to airlines.

“When the 747 entered service the global air transportation system was a lot different than today,” he says. Back then, individual nations held strict control over who could fly where, so you had to fly large numbers of people into relatively few cities. Today’s open-sky policies make it easier for airlines to connect cities, making point-to-point flights more attractive.

“You can go from A to C without going through B,” Hamilton says.  “You can go from Cincinnati to Manchester without a hub, [and] that’s one of the reasons you see downsized planes.”

Downsized planes like the 787-Dreamliner are increasingly pushing jumbos to the margins. But for aviation buffs, planes like the A380 and 747-8 will continue to capture our imagination.

Images: 1. A 747-8 is wheeled into the paint shop ahead of this weekend’s unveiling. 2. An artist’s rendering of a 747-8 Intercontinental in flight.
(Boeing)

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