This just makes me feel old. Last week the last 727 revenue passenger flight was made in Iran.
I never did fly on an L-1011, and it seems unlikely I’ll get the chance now.
God. I made many flight in a 747. But, when I was a boy, I lived next to the runway of a major airport, from our backyard. At that time, the Jumbo was a staple of long haul travel.
There is no more beautiful sight, then seeing such a massive machine defeat gravity.
I flew one to Germany in 1986. Huge compared to 727s and 737s
DC-10s used to be everywhere, but I could tell when I flew to Amsterdam in 2004 that it would probably be my last time on one. And I flew Boston-to-L.A. in December and was surprised that almost all the flights were on 737s or A320s. I found one flight on a 757, it was probably my last time on that plane.
I haven’t been on a 787 or an A380, yet. I think I’ve got time.
I remember when we used to go out and look at a Jumbo. And my first flight on an A380- they are great for passengers (and there is a great deal of difference between Premium Economy on a 380 compared to a 350).
How travel has changed- from the time smoking was allowed in aircraft. That was awful.
There is no more beautiful feeling, than being on such a massive aircraft, and not even feeling the touchdown.
I’ve flown many times, on many aircraft. Airbuses in North America bump and jar, Beechcrafts on commuter flights bump and jar worse. But every trip I’ve ever taken on a 747 has been as smooth as silk on landing. I still remember flying into Sydney, Australia on a Qantas 747, and not even knowing that we had landed, it was that smooth. Same for a British Airways flight into London Heathrow.
It’s funny how so many of us can be sad about not seeing or flying in a big chunk of metal. But count me among them. I feel particularly for the pilots who have been denied a proper farewell flight on these great machines, but needs must I suppose.
Never managed to fly on a 747, but rode a L-1011 back when Eastern was trying to figure out what to do with them. Been on a DC-10, the one time on a 757 was memorable–out of John Wayne. Never thought something so large could go ballistic…
I’ve flown in a 747 a few times, and also in a DC-10, but not an L-1011 or an A-380. The 747 is fading away, wow the end of an era. It was a huge deal in the early 1970s when it first came out. Reading Wiki’s page on the jumbo jet, I’m a bit surprised to learn that (not 60 but) 61 (edited later) of them have been lost to accidents, with 3,722 deaths. That’s more than one per year on average, and I find that surprising because I thought it was a safe plane.
ETA: it’s 61 of 747s that have been lost to crashes (or, “hull losses”), not 60. Wiki has a page for that, Boeing 747 hull losses - Wikipedia
I beg pardon, I did not intend to get macabre about the airplane. The 747 is a majestic bird and a landmark symbol for commercial aviation for so long. It will be odd to not see one, or more appropriately it’ll be odd to finally see one, maybe in a museum or a film, and then we’ll say, They used to be everywhere and now they’re all gone.
The final Qantas 747 flight (QF7474) will be flying from Sydney tomorrow, heading for LAX, and then her final resting place in the Mojave area. Qantas had been planning to retire them anyway, and the travel downturn hastened that decision. Pity; Qantas started using the 747 in 1971, and making the 50th anniversary would have been nice.
This’ll be the flight tracker.
I’ve travelled a number of times on a Qantas 747; though older, I preferred them to the A380. I’ll miss the grand old girl.
That’s the Mojave boneyard off of CA highway 58. I drive by there every year or two. I’ll look for the grand ol’ girls with their distinctive tails.
I think it is a safe aircraft (though I believe this should also be true of nearly all large aircraft built post-1970) - of those 61 hull losses, 32 resulted in loss of life, and a good number of those were related to terrorism. Of the remaining, most were human error, e.g. the Tenerife runway incident.
My guess is that has more to do with that it flew in the 1970s and 80s, rather than anything to do with the plane itself. Statistically, planes crashed more often back then. In the decades since, improvements in aircraft design, but also more importantly in pilot training (as Dead_Cat pointed out, many accidents were the result of human error) have greatly reduced the frequency of plane crashes.
Yah. I’d love to have a wander through there, or better yet, Davis-Monthan AFB. Probably not gonna happen.
I’d wondered briefly why they’re storing the planes all the way over there, when we’ve got perfectly nice dry areas in Australia. Then I remembered that all the infrastructure for dealing with old planes is already over there, and why reinvent the wheel?
Just informational but there is an aircraft boneyard in the Northern Territory in Australia. Why Qantas did not use this I don’t know.