That is way cool. Thanks for sharing.

I flew QANTAS from LAX to Sydney in 2000, the week after the Olympics ended. British Airways had given me two tickets to anywhere they or any of their partners fly. We just looked at the map and asked "how far from home can we get?" In the fine print, we had to pay our own fare to LAX, but we didn't grumble much about that.

There was one open seat on the entire plane. We got seated and I discovered that the recline on my seat was broken. I hailed the flight attendant and said I would prefer not to spend the next 14 hours in a seat that didn't recline. She moved the passenger next to me to the one open seat and I officially moved into his seat. In reality, my companion and I had the group of three seats so we had a bit more elbow room than anyone else in economy.

We came back from Brisbane. We were in the first row in economy. There was a large group of Australians in the middle seats in that row and the next one back. By the time we landed in LAX, those two rows were ankle-deep in empty beer cans. They were complaining that the flight ran out of Australian beer and they had had to switch to American beer. Oh, the humanity.


I will have to looks and see now what airlines are still flying passenger 747s. Seems the numbers are dwindling, especially among those that are the original owners of said planes. The 747 was, at one time, *the* airplane for long-distance high-capacity routes. The DC-10 was a good long-haul plane, but definitely smaller than the 747, and maintenance on the tail engine was a pain. The L-1011 was a superb machine, but a marketing failure -- the last previous commercial airplane Lockheed built was the Constellation and they had simply lost the knack for working with airlines.

What an awesome bird.

From a glance at the Wikipedia page for the 747-400 and 747-8, it looks like Air China, Air India, Asiana, China Air, Korean Air, and Lufthansa are the only original operators of passenger 747s that are still flying them. That is down from well over 50 airlines that bought new 747-400s.

I started at the NFFMCo working on a project for the 747-400 shortly before it entered service, and now there are only a handful still flying with their first owners.

I'm feeling like it's about time for me to retire from aviation, as well.