747-400F

The 747-400F is the aircraft that made the 747 indispensable to air freight. It pairs the 747-400’s wing, winglets, engines and two-crew flight deck with the fuselage design of the 747-200F — and 126 were built.

It first flew on 4 May 1993 and entered service with Cargolux on 17 November 1993.

How to spot one

The short upper deck. Passenger -400s carry the stretched upper deck as standard; the freighter reverts to the original short hump, because a freighter has no use for an upper-deck cabin and every kilogram of structure up there is payload given away.

Once you know to look for it, a 747 freighter is unmistakable at a distance.

The nose door

The -400F retains the hinging nose. This is the feature the 747’s whole layout was designed around — it is why the flight deck sits on an upper level — and it is what no other freighter of the era offered.

A side door lets you load anything that fits through the door. A nose door lets you load anything that fits in the aeroplane, because the load travels in along the centreline instead of being turned through 90 degrees inside the fuselage. Engines, machinery, rotor blades, satellite sections and helicopters went into 747s for that reason alone.

Operators

Major customers included Atlas Air, Cargolux, China Airlines, Korean Air, Nippon Cargo Airlines, Polar Air Cargo and Singapore Airlines.

The Airborne Laser

One 747-400F became the strangest aircraft in the family. The United States Air Force took a 747-400F airframe and rebuilt it as the YAL-1 Airborne Laser, carrying a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser behind a turret in the nose, intended to destroy ballistic missiles in their boost phase.

It is often written that the USAF bought seven of these. It did not. A fleet was originally envisaged, but only one aircraft was ever built and flown. The programme ran for 16 years and more than $5 billion; a second aircraft was cancelled, the programme was terminated in December 2011, and the aircraft made its last flight to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on 12 February 2012. It was scrapped in September 2014.

Where it led

The -400F’s extended-range sibling, the 747-400ERF, added payload and range from 2002. The 747-400BCF programme converted retired passenger aircraft into freighters to meet demand the production line could not.

The final development was the 747-8F, which stretched the fuselage again and closed the 747 production line in January 2023.