You’re on vacation, dude! Cut yourself some slack.
OK, so it’s not just me. The French and the British seem to make artwork out of most of their planes but the 380 has always looked more like a pregnant guppy than anything attractive. The 747 with its cockpit on the upper deck is more majestic. And then there’s the cool factor of standing on the main deck while closing the nose door in 2 minutes and seeing the 16 latch indicator lights turn green. Another big bowl of awesome.
If it was 50 feet longer it would look a lot better. They could have done something nicer with the nose too. Sticking the cockpit, the “eyes” of the jet’s “face”, mid-deck gives it an unnatural high-forehead Poindexter look kind of like these hokey Star Trek TOS aliens.
Had they put the cockpit on the upper deck it would have worked a lot better stylistically. They had their reasons, but Rule of Cool was not one of them.
Boeing doesn’t get off too easy. The 747 was actually a derivative of Boeing’s entry in the competition for a big USAF airlifter. The Lockheed C-5 won & Boeing’s design lost. Here are some pix of it. Not pretty.
See here and scroll down to 1965:
Or here
https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1449175
That long, smooth forehead always gave me a different alien vibe:
disclaimer pilot had minor injuries.
This photo looks like it came from a cartoon. I laughed for 5 minutes.
It’s surprising the wings didn’t shear off. Apparently they are attached more securely than the hanger roof. 
I think this guy should reconsider flying lessons. Stick with walking.
That sounds like night currency training attempted by someone who may not have had a lot of missed-approach day training.
OK, it has to be said. That’s the ultimate hanger flying story.
Well the B-52 originally had the cockpit on top. It was redesigned in a hotel room in my city.
Pregnant Guppy?
The 747SP always looked a little bit like a toy, to me. (In pictures, anyway; never seen one in person.)
Yes, it does look ridiculous and we can laugh because no one was seriously hurt.
The small Cessnas are surprisingly tough.
As to the Cessna, he evidently wasn’t going very fast. A hangar roof is typically pretty flimsy, especially in a part of the world with no concerns for snow loading. The lightweight roof is held up by a lattice of girders. Fortunately for him, he punched the nose between girders, not directly into one.
I can certainly see the relatively dense part of the airplane forward of the firewall punching through, but when the cross-section of collision suddenly doubles or triples as the entire leading edge of the wing makes contact, the force per unit area drops enough that the whole roof flexes, not gives. And yes, bending the wings off is pretty difficult; the spar is strong and so are the attachments to the fuselage carry-through.
This appears to be the building he landed on: Google maps ref. It appears he impacted the northeast corner of the building with the top of the airplane facing south. Probably he’d been doing touch-and-gos on 8R or 26L when he stalled and half-turn spun into the hangar.
I am rather amazed he escaped with minor injuries. Back in the day when Cessnas did not have shoulder harnesses I’d expect the rather sudden stop of the plane to be followed by a very sudden stop of his belly into the yoke and his face into the instrument panel. That’d be serious injuries or dead. Evidently he was wearing a shoulder harness and it stayed around him and held. Yaay for mandated safety retrofits.
Hitting the building rather than the ramp almost certainly saved his life. Had he punched into the ground covered in concrete or asphalt, or even just the hard dirt between pavements, I bet the airplane, and him, would look quite different and much more deformed.
Some years ago at the condo I ran we had a semi-similar incident but not involving an airplane. Our 8-story building had an exterior balcony / catwalk on each floor running the length of the face of the building. It was accessible to the residents and public by unsecured stairs & elevator. At the base of the building there was an asphalt parking lot filled with cars with an aluminum-roofed carport above them.
A distraught person, not a resident, decided to commit suicide by taking the elevator to the 8th floor catwalk/balcony then jumping off. In a cruel twist of fate, he failed to account for the carport roof. He fell the 6 floors (from 8 to 2) to the flimsy aluminum carport roof, missed the support girders and busted through the sheet aluminum, then landed on the roof of the convertible car parked below, whose top duly tore, and he ended up draped over the seats severely wounded.
He survived the ride to the hospital with significant internal injuries. I don’t know what happened afterwards, but the responding paramedics thought he’d live but be pretty well damaged for life.
The unrelated condo building next door to ours was 10 stories tall, had similar unsecured catwalks, and a tiled concrete floor at the base. Had he gone there instead, he’d almost certainly have succeeded.
You had one job …
Moral of both stories: To die, aim for something hard. To live aim for something soft.
That is a much better alien. Thank you. That alien’s forehead is an excellent match for the A380’s. But its very protruding lower jaw reminds me more of the
I’ve only seen them in the flesh a few times, and certainly not recently. But yes they have that same weird aspect as does the A380 of being too short, too fat, and with too tall of a tail. The original 737-100 is similar in that. In each case they look sort of like a kid’s rendition of an airplane or like a Fisher-Price toy: right general configuration, but improbably plump.
Oddly enough, the only 4-engine jet I ever “flew” was a 747-SP. It’s also by far the biggest I ever “flew”.
After leaving USAF I interviewed at Pan Am in Miami not long before they shut down for good. I’m not sure whether not being offered a job there was a blessing or a curse. On such small things do entire lives pivot.
In any case, as is commonplace in airline interviews, all the interviewees had to fly a simple canned simulator mission. Which was done in an SP sim at their training center. They no longer had any SP airplanes, so the sim was otherwise unused. Which made it ideal for the interview rides. Kinda fun. Except for knowing that much of the rest of your life depended on not screwing up flying an unfamiliar airplane really, really well. No pressure; none at all.
Seems like it shouldn’t be too difficult to convert a sim from a 747SP to a 747-100. I’m sure there are performance differences between the two, but I think those could be handled by changing the software or electronics. Were there any physical differences in the flight deck or controls that were specific to the SP?
Of course, maybe Pan Am didn’t have any 747-100s by that time, so they didn’t need to convert their sim.
I never did get to fly on Pan Am; as a history buff I feel like I missed something. I think the name was owned by a railroad recently. Looks like it was swallowed up by CSX. It might be fun to see if I could, someday, somehow, travel on something with the Pan Am name.
There have been several re-incarnations of the Pan Am name for airlines. Ditto Eastern. With the old logos and everything.
I’ve never understood the attraction of using the branding of a dead company, and especially not a long-dead one. Your younger potential customers won’t have heard of it and to the degree your older potential customers remember it at all, they remember it mostly as a decrepit hulk that finally sank beneath the economic waves. Neither of those seem to be positive marketing messages. OTOH, I suck at marketing.
As to sims …
There can be a lot of subtle differences they’d need to correct. Different gauges, different panel layouts, etc. A big one-off project that would need FAA blessing throughout. At which point they’d own a weird hermaphrodite of a sim. Probably not a good plan.
Given their free-fall trajectory as a business by then, they probably already had enough 747-100/200 sims for their ever-shrinking needs anyhow, so the conversion would be pointless from their own training needs POV. Probably simpler to keep it as an SP, lease out training time to those few airlines who still flew SPs, and hope to sell the thing to somebody someday somehow. Many mainline airlines kept their 707 & DC-8 sims busy for many years after they’d retired their fleet. Freight dogs gotta train someplace, and outfits like Flight Safety had not yet fully invaded the big-jet marketplace.
As to traveling on Pan Am …
As a kid I flew on Pan Am from LAX-Honolulu-Papeete Tahiti & back in 707s. On another occasion as a teen from LAX-Honolulu-Auckland NZ then returned Sydney Australia to Nouméa New Caledonia for a fuel tech stop, then Honolulu & LAX. All on DC-10s. This was back in Pan Am’s heyday, but other than the coolitude of the name, they’re no different inside than anyone else’s 707s or DC-10s. IOW, you didn’t miss much.
IIRC my ill-fated interview trip was from then-home in Las Vegas to LAX on ??? then on a Pan Am A300 / A310 to Miami. Same return. The gloom of that crew, and the thrashed condition of those planes and all of Pan Am’s other facilities were an obvious omen of worse things to come. Still, had they offered a job and I took it, that might, might have spring-boarded me on a different path that might, might have worked out better. Or else much worse. Who’s to say?
My first airline job was based at JFK / LGA / EWR and I overlapped with the last of Pan Am’s widebodies to Europe, then the next couple years of the Pan Am shuttle while Delta owned it but had not yet absorbed it. Saw lots of dirty once-white jets with big blue globes on the fin. Then they were gone.
I’ve always thought it looked ‘sporty’.
Were there different panels and gauges, though? They’re variants of the same airframe, built by the same company, at about the same time. Seems like Boeing wouldn’t have changed the flight deck any more than they really had to.
I know the flaps and the rudder were noticeably different between the SP and the -100, for example, but wouldn’t the controls for them still be the same?
I wasn’t aware that Pan Am ever flew DC-10s. Did a little googling and they didn’t have them for long.
This. He didn’t fly into the building so much as fell on it. The spinning prop likely can-opener’d a hole in the sheet metal roof and the wings kept the plane from falling through.
The FAA has a 747SP at their Tech Center at Atlantic City airport. No longer airworthy. I’ve done some training/testing work on it. Sit in the flight deck, yep, it’s a 747, no question. Walk down the stairs, sooo much a 747. Do the 180 from the bottom of the stairs and walk into the cabin? Wow, this is the widest 737 I’ve ever seen.
Open the oddly wide doors and look 24 or so feet to the ground? Oh, I’m back in a 747.
Is there anything on the flight deck that gives it away as an SP?