Article Reflection No. 40 (2/4/2023)

Article: The World the 747 Didn’t Predict

Reflection:

In the article “The World the 747 Didn’t Predict” by New Yorker journalist James Ross Gardner, the writer follows the journey of Boeing’s plane, which left an unerasable trail in aviation history as a huge aircraft that “was one of the safest aircraft ever built”, according to a Boeing historian. As the article progresses, Gardner emphasizes on how, although the Boeing 747 was expected to be a “‘great new weapon of peace’” in 1966, the world does not uphold this peace today. To wrap up, the journalist refers to how we, as humans, are prone to danger in planes and yet decide to travel on them in a manner that is more nonchalant than not. According to Gardner, “we should go woozy at the vertiginous improbability…[we] should be unmoored by existential dread. Instead, we loosened the seat-belt buckle [and] convince ourselves of brighter futures” (Gardner 17).

Through this wrap-up, I think that Gardner is trying to communicate how, as things rise in prevalence, what has once been lionized becomes viewed as part of the norm. Personally, I like the statement of how people convince themselves of better futures.

From New York to London, passengers in the Boeing 747 travel across continents. (Getty Images)