Stick A Fork In It, It's Done, Boeing Ends 747 Production (Air Force, training)
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I also remember some years ago, an upper deck flight on an Air New Zealand 747 from Auckland to Rarotongo airport in the Cook Islands. That airport does not seem big enough for a 747! After we parked, a couple of guys ran out pushing air stairs right up the to upper deck door, where we disembarked. I remember it sure seemed a long way to the ground walking down that rickety, open staircase!
Edit: I misremembered (it was 25+ years ago). Not the upper deck door, it might have been the forward door in the main cabin. Still seemed like a long way down!
I'm glad I got in as many 747 flights as I did (7 between 1973 and 1981, 1-AA, 2-TW and 4-UA). At least there will be 744F and 748F flying into MIA operator by various freight airlines (Atlas, Cargolux, etc.) My job is a few miles away from MIA, but you can see planes lined up on final to Runway 9 (the southernmost runway at MIA, and the longest, so generally all heavies land on it). Alas, I have been working from home for the past 3 1/2 months, and it is not currently known when I will return to working in the office.
As did their ill-advised merger with National, in a bid to create a domestic network when international travel was their forte.
Pan Am desperately needed to build a domestic network in order to feed their international routes. Even with hub and spoke system Pan Am still didn't have enough domestic exposure and once deregulation hit it was every airline for themselves.
If Frank Lorenzo wasn't making goo-goo eyes at National Pan Am might have waited a bit longer and seen sense. But they didn't and like many shotgun marriages things began to fall apart not long after the honeymoon.
The 1st class cabin was up a round staircase, in the front of the aircraft, above tourist class.
Ah yes, the spiral staircase was a feature on the earlier 747's i.e. the 747-100s and 747-200s. The later 747-400s no longer had the spiral staircase but had a bigger upper deck. I last rode on a 747-200 in 2002, the same year I last rode a McDonnell Douglas DC10 both on Northwest Airlines. I last rode a 747-400 in 2011 by which time Northwest was bought out by Delta. I have not ridden on a 747 since.
The last 747, number 1574, rolled out of the Everett, WA factory on 06 DEC 2022, per this CNBC report.
Excerpt: "Boeing’s final 747 rolled out of the company’s cavernous factory north of Seattle Tuesday night as airlines’ push for more fuel-efficient planes ends the more than half-century production run of the jumbo jet. The 1,574th — and last — 747 will later be flown by a Boeing test pilot, painted and handed over to cargo and charter carrier Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings early next year."
My sister and I sat by the side of the road and watched the first 747 land at Baltimore's Friendship Intl Airport sometime in 1970. Some history of the plane.
It's an excellent cargo plane and if the price of sidelined 747s is low enough we might see the USAF buy up some of the planes to augment the C-5 and C-17 fleets, but that's just a guess on my part. There is some precedent for this. In the shipping business, the USN bought the retired Sea-Land fleet of eight SL-7 container ships and converted them to roll-on roll-ff (RORO) ships for military use. Those ships were only ten years old at the time, but the same culprit for their retirement then, and for the retirement of the 747 now, is the high cost of fuel to run them. My Army agency loaded those eight ships several times as we sent the Army to Saudi Arabia for the Persian Gulf war in 1990-91 and then used them to bring the military equipment back home.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 12-28-2022 at 02:15 PM..
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