Paris Métro paper ticket reaches end of the line after more than 120 years
Tue 4 Oct 2022 10.41 BST
It has inspired French film-makers and songwriters, proven useful to cannabis smokers and aestheticians and served as an emergency bookmark or jotter – but now the Paris Métro ticket has reached the end of the line.
The city’s public transport authority is phasing out the rectangular pieces of cardboard that have kept the capital’s travellers on the move for the past 120 years.
Twenty years after the New York subway finished with metal tokens and 10 years after the London Underground went paperless, the Métro ticket, measuring 6.5cm x 3cm and white with a brown magnetic strip, is on a one-way journey to transport history.
Boeing bids farewell to an icon, delivers last 747 jumbo jet
By GENE JOHNSON
February 1, 2023
SEATTLE (AP) — Boeing bid farewell to an icon on Tuesday, delivering its final 747 jumbo jet as thousands of workers who helped build the planes over the past 55 years looked on.
Since its first flight in 1969, the giant yet graceful 747 has served as a cargo plane, a commercial aircraft capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers, a transport for NASA’s space shuttles, and the Air Force One presidential aircraft. It revolutionized travel, connecting international cities that had never before had direct routes and helping democratize passenger flight.
But over about the past 15 years, Boeing and its European rival Airbus have introduced more profitable and fuel efficient wide-body planes, with only two engines to maintain instead of the 747′s four. The final plane is the 1,574th built by Boeing in the Puget Sound region of Washington state.
