Oops. All I can claim is a bad memory. I have read through the entire thread but over a 1.5 year period. My bad.
No problem, no worries. I wasn’t admonishing, I was steering…
There will be very few 747s (or A380s) left in passenger service anywhere real soon unless something miraculous happens with COVID.
I remember when Dad’s airline got their first 747. He grabbed Mom & us kids and off we went in the station wagon to the employee parking lot by the company hangar. In we all went with no escort or formalities and we crawled all over the interior, the cockpit, and around the exterior of the “Jumbo Jet” sitting their shiny & new inside the hangar. It was just bogglingly huge, even for a jet-brat raised on 707-scale airplanes.
Pretty quickly a standard joke developed among the 747 pilots speaking to the 707 & 727 pilots: “I’m flying the box your airplane came in!” The FA’s as always quickly developed their own acerbic version: “You know why 747s have the big hump? To hold the Captain’s wallet & swell head!”
They can’t get rid of the things!
But American airline companies used to sell tickets for 747 flights just for coast-to-coast trips, or even less. The only time I ever flew in a 747 was from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. TBT the plane was continuing on to Japan, but you could still buy a ticket just for the American leg of the journey. As you’ve probably guessed, the airline was Northwest Orient, the “Northwest” a reference not to the Northwest where I live now, but the old American Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
Same here. My only flight on a 747, in the mid '90s, was on a United flight from O’Hare to Seattle; the plane then continued to Hawaii, IIRC.
I’m surprised by all the love for the 747. That has always been my least-favorite plane to fly. I suppose it’s probably because when I was 12, the 747 I was in caught on fire (well, one of the 4 engines caught on fire) and we made an emergency landing, and it was… shall we say… a stressful day.
But it’s crowded plane, with a lot of interior seats. And the middle seat of that block of 4 in the middle is REALLY middle. I frequently feel claustrophobic in a 747. And they take FOREVER for passengers to deplane.
In contrast, I really liked the 787. I flew Japan Airlines, direct to Tokyo. It was configured to give us all enough room, and it wasn’t so huge as to feel claustrophobic to me (maybe claustrophobic isn’t the right word? I feel crowded and tense in packed spaces). And I especially liked that they dimmed the windows at night, but let each passenger undim their own window a little. So I could look out the window in the middle of the nominal night without shining bright lights on fellow passengers – or on myself, for that matter. That was a quiet, comfortable flight.
Yes, I flew on several flying from the east coast to the west coast (Boston or NYC to San Francisco or Las Angeles). For quite a while that was the regular aircraft for those flights.
Even in the 2000s and early 2010s, United had a couple of domestic flights on 747s, mainly flights from Washington-Dulles to their other hubs. They were essentially repositioning flights. Typically the plane would arrive in Dulles from Europe, then fly to say Chicago-O’Hare or San Francisco, then continue on to Asia.
I don’t know the specifics of the treaty agreement between the US and Australia, but in general it is not legal for an airline based in Country A to sell a ticket for an itinerary that is purely within country B.
So if QANTAS route is Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, London, they could not legally sell a ticket from LA to NY without either starting in Sydney or ending in London.
This is the so called “cabotage right” or “eighth freedom right” in international aviation diplomacy.
https://www.icao.int/pages/freedomsair.aspx
Not exactly “repositioning”.
An airplane only makes money in the air. By having multiple airplanes continuously making the lap between Europe, the US east coast, US west coast, Asia, then return, they keep the things moving 18-20 hours per day. Back in the day those domestic flights had plenty good load factors themselves and were profitable in their own right.
That reminds me…
I really hope Biden, once he is president, reverts the Air Force One livery back to what it is now. Trump decided he didn’t like what Jackie Kennedy did with the paint scheme so he changed it for the new ones. Which is a tragedy. That iconic paint scheme should remain (not least because it looks good and is elegant).
The proposed new livery:
Current livery:
Huh - I don’t normally like change for change’s sake, and I don’t think I’ve agreed with anything else Trump has done, but I actually prefer the new design. Then again, I’m a Brit and I didn’t recall what the old one looked like until I saw the picture above.
The livery redesign of course uses Trump’s personal colors and echoes the paintjob on his personal 757. So there’s no way that should stand after January.
But overall the current baby blue and swoops are getting rather dated. Something with a little more excitement would be nice.
Best compilation of Kai Tak landings on YouTube (with killer music):
Ah, I wasn’t aware of that. That does put a rather different spin on it! Maybe I just like the colours because they are similar to BA.
Actually, the new US Presidential Planes are being converted from two planes that were already built; they were ordered by a Russian airline which went bankrupt before taking delivery. Per Wikipedia:
On August 1, 2017, Defense One reported that to pay less for the replacement program, the U.S. Air Force purchased two undelivered 747-8I ordered by a bankrupt Russian firm (Transaero); the aircraft had been stored in the Mojave Desert to prevent corrosion. Boeing and the Air Force will retrofit these aircraft with telecommunications and advanced security equipment for the required security level needed by presidential aircraft.[161]
Maybe a variation on this?
This encapsulates the Trump malAdministration beautifully: the POTUS riding in a Russian castoff. The only thing missing is that Trump won’t be the one flying, but that’s an infinitesimally small price to pay.