In 2026, the Boeing 747-8 is no longer the globe-spanning default that most once knew it as. However, on the routes where it still shows up, it is there for a unique reason. This is the last, and largest, variant of the Queen of the Skies, a jet that was built to haul numerous people, specifically many premium passengers, across very long distances with the kind of range and payload flexibility that airlines still value on a handful of high-demand city pairs. The catch here is that the passenger Boeing 747-8 has become a niche aircraft, with only a small group of carriers that still fly the model, and they tend to deploy it in an extremely surgical fashion. Operators prefer to use this jet on trunk routes that combine heavy business traffic, strong connecting flows, and airport constraints that make adding more frequencies increasingly difficult.