WhoDaMan

My Feedback: (164)

"The link at the bottom has a cool video of the retirement flight/last landing of a 747SP in South Africa, being delivered to a very small museum airstrip......the runway was only 48 feet wide!

If you have speakers, crank them up...great music to go with it!!"

http://www.rudigreyling.com/movie/bo...ding_small.wmv

afterburner

My Feedback: (18)

Amazing. simply incredible.

SJN

Impressive

Eddie P

My Feedback: (4)

These photos are of the same airport and the same aircraft when it was donated to the museum. I've used these pictures for training at professional flight departments when we get on the subject of stabilized approaches and proper energy management. Here is a slightly different perspective. Enjoy

BTW, the only reason the 747 didn't put 4 foot deep holes in the runway on touchdown and then plow it like a soy bean field on the roll out is becasue it was very, very light and essentiall gutted on the inside (weights never seen in real life with full interior, seats, pax and reserve fuel on board). And the 18 wheels of a 747 really distrubute weight quite well too, but even better when light

rorywquin

I grew up at that airport. My dad was chairman of the gliding section of the flying club located at Rand Airport. We spent every weekend at the flying club which was situated at the end of the runway in those days. Thanks for the video!

swissflyer

outstanding...

great flying!

trioval00

My Feedback: (17)

very cool , great footage


Mark

AirPac Models

Very impress.

erbroens

Very impressive flying skills.. of course, but nobody mentioned here the skills of Boeing´s engineers for designing a plane this size and weight capable of doing this almost 50 years ago. those guys where really good...

thx for posting the video.

Enrique

digitech

My Feedback: (10)

if i am not mistaking
after the debacle with their supersonic drama.
they made a cargolifter in betwen to cover for the losses, and soon company,s wanted to have passengers instead of cargo......
voila! 747...was born

i also watch Discovery channel : planes that never flew....

erbroens

Hahaha.. well, for the aerodynamic point of view it doesn´t matter if you are carring a ton of people or a ton of goods, the merit is the same.. carrying hundreds of tons at almost the speed of sound and landing on a dime!

I also in the last years didn´t had much patience to watch any aviation show in the DC... most times I have stomach pain on watching images already seen in the web many times aggravated with a pompous narrator... I prefer to watch mythbusters instead.


Enrique

Gordon Mc

My Feedback: (11)

LOL ! I gave up on the "wings" channel too - at first it was kinda neat seeing so much aviation coverage ... until I realised that within 2 weeks I had seen every show and the next year's programming was simply those same episodes shuffled in a slightly different order. Worse yet, they only had about 3 advertisers - so the exact same annoying flying-school ad aired 8 times per hour, 24 hrs per day, 7 days a week, with that stupid woman shrieking every time.... Yuch.

Next Mythbusters should be interesting - something about concrete gliders...

erbroens

A concrete glider? well... why not? guess that´s plausible.. however I guess that the landing will not be as good as the 747! LOL


Enrique

charlieoneseven

I feel your pain Gordon, We got the military channel in it's place with shows about navy seals taking a dip in the surf all night and the now they are programming American chopper[:@] Sorry boys but If I see Paul yelling at Jr. one more time I'm going to write Dr Phil.

baron-noir

My Feedback: (1)

What always surprises me about the B747 is it's HUGE and COMPLEX flaps mechanism. Look at how far they extend out and down and imagine how much drag and lift they would create... Later airliner doesn't seem to have so complex flaps setups (look at MD-11 for instance)

Sk

Eddie P

My Feedback: (4)

The 747 was an engineering masterpiece by any and all level of measure for when it was designed. Much of what modern airliner standards are made of, in terms of wing technoligy, stability and control from a design and test flight point of view, was completely re-established with the 747 program. The 747 program left many previously established standards and norms behind. One particularly well respected insdustry book on airliner aerodynamics and stability/control was written by Britan's Chief Certification Test Pilot - and he identified the 747 as a quantam leap ahead in thinking/achievement and confirms what an accomplishment it was at the time (much as the Concorde later became, financial and viability concerns aside).

Pan Am's Juan Trippe was an inspiration for Boeing in that he pushed for a super airliner and gave them some of the confidence it took to move forward as no military contracts were forthcoming for the massive troop and cargo transport design initially envisioned (Lockheed later got that one with the C-5a).

Just like any project in the 1960's, the 747 program morphed into something else as it moved along. Designing huge air transports driven by the fickle civilian economy in the 1960's when passenger travel and large jet engine technoligy had yet to be fully realised was a leap of faith, and quite something in terms of relative risk and manpower compared to the relativly straight forward computer designed projects of today (for example the B-777 and the A-380). Not to take anything away from very impressive modern programs, but they are walking a well established path the 747 cut for them 40 years ago.

baron-noir

My Feedback: (1)

And not only it is one of the biggest airliner (well it was THE biggest for many decades) but more surprinsingly it is one of the fastest subsonic airliner, I think it can power cruise routinely at M. 0.88 where other flies at 0.75-0.85 max. Just the opposite than it's huge size would make you think capable of.

Sk

swissflyer

whell sometime i don't care to much about speed, flaps, wings..

i like airbus, they are very quiet, from passenger point of view..


but when i get to sit in a 747...
first the look to the main cabin...this HUGE space..!!! and after when possible in the "first floor"..is just something different...
you can't compare to anything else...is a pleasure by itself! just to sit there!!

baron-noir

My Feedback: (1)

Sure that any lambda passenger can appreciate the cabin, altough on high density planes (+550pax on Charter 747) I doubt about it. Now it takes just a little bit of airmanship interest to appreciate the technicalities of the beast, but that might be out of reach for you.

Sk