Galleys and crew rest
Galleys, carts, lower-deck facilities and crew rest compartments — and why the 747-8 moved crew rest upstairs to free revenue space.
A 747-400 carries 416 passengers on flights of up to fourteen hours. Feeding them, and resting the people who do it, takes a surprising amount of the aeroplane.
Galleys
Meals are loaded in carts that lock into galley units, so catering is a matter of exchanging trolleys rather than loading loose items. On an aircraft this size that is the only workable approach — several hundred meals, twice, on a long sector.
Galleys are distributed rather than centralised: forward, mid and aft, so that no cabin crew member is pushing a cart the full length of a 231-foot fuselage. The upper deck has its own, which is part of why it functions as a separate cabin.
Some 747 operators used lower-deck galley facilities connected by lift, moving food preparation off the main deck entirely and freeing floor area for seats. It is an idea that only makes sense on an aircraft with a hold tall enough to stand up in.
Crew rest
On a sector long enough to need a relief crew, those people have to sleep somewhere, and it cannot be a passenger seat.
747s carried crew rest compartments — bunks for flight crew, separate provision for cabin crew — located variously in the upper deck aft of the flight deck, in the crown space above the cabin, or in the rear of the main deck depending on the operator and generation.
The 747-300 offered an optional flight-crew rest area immediately aft of the flight deck as part of its stretched upper deck.
The 747-8’s rearrangement
The 747-8 Intercontinental moved flight crew rest to the upper deck, and that decision had a larger effect than it sounds.
Taking crew rest out of the main deck and the lower hold freed space for passengers and cargo. It is a significant part of why the -8I carries 37,000 lb of cargo — a third more than a 747-400, and more than an A380 — despite being a passenger aircraft.
Boeing also proposed using the crown space above the cabin, normally occupied by air conditioning ducting and wiring, for galleys and crew rest by moving the services to the sides. The SkyLoft concept went further and tried to sell that space to passengers; it was dropped in 2007 when the pricing would not work, and airlines took the upper-deck galley storage instead.
Why none of this is visible
All of it is designed to be invisible. The measure of a galley is that meals arrive on time and nobody notices the machinery; the measure of a crew rest compartment is that the relief crew are alert when they take over.
It is a large fraction of the cabin, and the only part passengers are meant not to see.
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