MORE LIKELY TO SKIP TWO OR THREE:

 A couple weeks before the 747's big send-off, Boeing and NASA announced a major partnership, the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, to produce a wacky-looking single-aisle plane that promises to slash fuel consumption for commercial aircraft. The new aircraft looks like a giant glider with long, skinny wings propped up by diagonal struts to reduce drag. It's called the transonic truss-braced wing concept, and if widely adopted could transform sustainable air travel as we know it.

Unlike cars, you can't simply bolt a battery onto a plane and make it electric. (Making an electric vehicle is more complicated than that, but you get the point.) Improvements to airplanes happen in small increments over the course of decades. Typically, a single-digit reduction in an aircraft's fuel consumption would be meaningful. Boeing says the innovations in the new truss-braced wing concept will amount to a 30 percent reduction. That's exactly the kind of leap NASA wanted to get out of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, which Boeing won.

"If you think that, or have the perception that, aviation hasn't been working on sustainability or environmentally friendliness, that's a bad perception because every generation of aircraft that's come out has been 15, 20, 25 percent better than the one it replaces," Rich Wahls, NASA's sustainable flight national partnership mission integration manager, told Recode. "What we're trying to do now is skip a generation."

The big idea behind the transonic truss-braced wing concept is an update to the aircraft configuration, or the plane's architecture. Unlike the low-wing design that dominates the commercial aircraft configuration today, the new Boeing design has wings that stretch over the top of the plane's tubular body. This reduces drag, but it also allows for a wider variety of propulsion systems, from bigger jet engines to exposed propellers. It's also fast. The "transonic" part of the concept's name refers to its ability to fly just shy of the speed of sound, or around 600 miles per hour.

NASA likes this idea so much it's investing $425 million into the project under a Funded Space Act Agreement. Boeing and other partners will chip in an additional $300 million. Once Boeing builds a full-scale demonstrator aircraft, NASA says it will complete testing in the late 2020s, and if all goes well, the public could see the new technologies in commercial aircraft sometime in the 2030s.

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