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As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

nytimes.com

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Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#111

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

WalterBright wrote: post #105
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There was no government financing nor subsidy." I assume that the military part of Boeing, which was heavily subsidized by the government, paid for the tech development in the CX–HLS program - which resulted in the C5 - and from which many technologies were taken into the 747 program. The 747 has the raised cockpit because of the CX-HLS being a front loading transport airplane, it wasn't designed because of a first…

The C5 was a Lockheed project. The CX-HLS was just a design study. (A design study is several years from a prototype airplane.) As 747 Chief Engineer Sutter put it: "I should add that fostering large high-bypass engines was all that the USAF C-5 competition contributed to the Boeing 747, as my new airplane would be called. Time and again there appears in print the logical but false assumption that Boeing took its los…

"The C5 was a Lockheed project."

Yes, I didn't say something different,

"[...] CX–HLS program - which resulted in the C5 - [...]"

"In fact, the 747 would be an entirely original design that owes nothing to the C-5."

I sadly have not time to dig deeper, but this looks suspicious, b/c the planes look highly similar and both were planned as freighters by the same company at the same time. And although he is a primary source, if you ask me about some of my projects from 20y ago, I'm hard pressed to recall all details. Also considering the legal lawsuits between Boeing and Airbus in any case this is a wise thing to say.

But perhaps if I have more time next holidays. Thanks for the link.

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#112

Post by mseebach »

tyingq wrote: post #84
dogma1138 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some reaction considering I can fly to Crete from the UK right now for £19 each way that’s what $25? A price of a Pizza? If I don’t use the cheapest public transport I will pay more to get to the airport than I will for my flight tickets like 9 out of 10 times while flying from the UK to Europe on the cheapest fare these days.

That's obviously below cost and unsustainable. So, I'm not quite sure what we're supposed to gather from it. It's probably more than £19 per passenger just for the fuel for a trip from the UK to Greece. The average drop off in load factor, and resulting drop in prices after 9/11 is pretty well documented.

£19 is probably pretty close to the marginal cost of carrying an extra passenger, and only available on flights they know won't sell out anyway.

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#113

Post by WalterBright »

lmm wrote: post #110
WalterBright wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Boeing 2707 SST had nothing in common with the 747. You'd be hard pressed to find any common parts or design elements. Supersonic airplanes are very, very different from subsonic ones. Look at the picture. There's no resemblance. https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15481905

That's not what I said. The company was being heavily subsidised, and money is fungible.

The government paid Boeing to do certain projects. That isn't a subsidy. Just like when you buy an F-150, you are not subsidizing Ford.

Even if Boeing plows profits from government work into another project, that is not a subsidy. Profits are the property of Boeing, to use as they saw fit. (Boeing was making huge profits off of the 707 at the time.)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subsidy

The government did not provide payments or financial assistance to Boeing to design or build the 747. They did for the SST, but that was for the SST.

Now, if Boeing diverted government money from the SST project to the 747, that would be fraud and a crime, and you'd need some evidence to assert that.

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#114

Post by gadders »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #22
avar wrote: post #12

For anyone wondering why airlines are retiring the 747 this Wikipedia section summarizes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400#Retirement_and_... Summary: Old, inefficient, less need for jumbo jets. Everyone's either buying smaller or migrating to the modern Airbus A380.

The A380 isn't that popular either. The A380 only makes sense for really popular routes with a guaranteed high passenger count, whereas the 787 is more flexible because it has a similar range and takes less passengers but is almost as efficient per passenger-mile. And in 2016 there were fears Airbus might even cancel the A380 entirely: https://qz.com/782361/airbus-a380-airlines-are-abandoning-th...

They might not be popular with the companies, but I flew regular cattle-class on a 380 to Dubai and it was better than premium economy on some 747s.

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#115

Post by WalterBright »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #111
WalterBright wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C5 was a Lockheed project. The CX-HLS was just a design study. (A design study is several years from a prototype airplane.) As 747 Chief Engineer Sutter put it: "I should add that fostering large high-bypass engines was all that the USAF C-5 competition contributed to the Boeing 747, as my new airplane would be called. Time and again there appears in print the logical but false assumption that Boeing took its los…

"The C5 was a Lockheed project." Yes, I didn't say something different, "[...] CX–HLS program - which resulted in the C5 - [...]" "In fact, the 747 would be an entirely original design that owes nothing to the C-5." I sadly have not time to dig deeper, but this looks suspicious, b/c the planes look highly similar and both were planned as freighters by the same company at the same time. And although he is a primary so…

If this helps any, the 757 was the result of the availability of new engine designs. Engines affect everything, and one thing led to another, and Boeing decided it was worthwhile to design a new wing, and a new wing led to a new fuselage, and pretty much a ground up design.

Airplanes just do not have interchangeable designs.

Boeing tried to save money by sharing parts between the 757 and 767, but this didn't work out very well. The designs were just different enough that the 767 engineering group had essentially nothing to do with the 757 engineering group, I don't remember even meeting my counterpart there.

The assembly lines were in different plants and completely independent, the tooling was all custom designed/built and so different, the testing/certification process was all different, and on and on.

And besides, a design study is mostly an outline that survived enough wind tunnel testing that one knows what the performance would be.

When I joined the 757 team, we started with a hole we were allocated that the machinery had to fit in. It's true that there's a family resemblance among Boeing designs, because they like to continue with what works. Design studies, though, are not proven designs.

> legal lawsuits

That is common among all highly competitive industries, whether they have merit or not. There's certainly enough of that going on in the tech sector.

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#116

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #111
WalterBright wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C5 was a Lockheed project. The CX-HLS was just a design study. (A design study is several years from a prototype airplane.) As 747 Chief Engineer Sutter put it: "I should add that fostering large high-bypass engines was all that the USAF C-5 competition contributed to the Boeing 747, as my new airplane would be called. Time and again there appears in print the logical but false assumption that Boeing took its los…

"The C5 was a Lockheed project." Yes, I didn't say something different, "[...] CX–HLS program - which resulted in the C5 - [...]" "In fact, the 747 would be an entirely original design that owes nothing to the C-5." I sadly have not time to dig deeper, but this looks suspicious, b/c the planes look highly similar and both were planned as freighters by the same company at the same time. And although he is a primary so…

Thanks again for your long reply.

I'm just a suspicious guy, and when I wrote an ecommerce cart system for one customer, and then move on to the next customer, I never take source with me. Did I benefit from designing and thinking through the first very similar system? Yes. Did I take things with me? No. Do I adhere to best practices that were developed in projects in the new company? Yes. Do I reuse code? No.

So - again - from my suspicious point of view, declaring we - hundereds of engineers and the company - took no knowledge and expertise except the engines from the CX–HLS program makes me suspicious.

AND as a CEO I would probably not be happy with engineers that do not use knowledge from other inhouse projects in a highly competitive market.

But I'm no primary source ;-)

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#117

Post by dredmorbius »

taejo wrote: post #99
OliverJones wrote: post #58

My dad worked for the US diplomatic service when I was a kid. Our family started out traveling on ocean liners (on the North Atlantic route from Le Havre to New York in the winter: no glamour there). There was our journey from Lagos to NY in 1958: A DeHavilland Comet over the Sahara with four stops for fuel, and a diversion from Paris to Brussels for weather. Then a train to Le Havre on the English Channel, then five…

> A have a friend who was a flight attendant working the Teheran evacuation in 1979. They packed the 747 full. People were sitting on the floor in all the aisles. During Operation Solomon , an El Al 747 carried 1,122 Ethiopian Jews from Ethiopia to Israel.

TIL. And yes, characteristics associated with Ethiopians apply:

Operation Solomon airlifted almost twice as many Ethiopian Jews to Israel as Operation Moses. The operation set a world record for single-flight passenger load on May 24, 1991, when an El Al 747 carried 1,122 passengers to Israel (1,087 passengers were registered, but dozens of children hid in their mothers' robes). "Planners expected to fill the aircraft with 760 passengers. Because the passengers were so light, many more were squeezed in." Five babies were born aboard the planes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Solomon

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#118

Post by dredmorbius »

analog31 wrote: post #17
jacquesm wrote: post #15

I used to fly these every two weeks, KL691 and KL692 the flights between Schiphol, Netherhands and Toronto, Canada. Then at some point they moved to 777's, and even though it was a nice plane and far more modern the 747 almost never had a turbulent ride whereas the 777 trips were far less comfortable, especially the red-eye return flight rarely was smooth enough that I could get some sleep. Retiring the 747 was one (…

I wonder if the increase in turbulence was due to climate change.

Some turbulence is associated with crossing, entering, or leaving the Jet Stream. That meanders more now than previously, due to global warming. So turbulence could be directly related.

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#119

Post by JohnBooty »

avar wrote: post #39
pirocks wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this necessary. I take it 747s have been safe up til now?

The reason the FAA considered fuel tank inerting in the first place is because of a 1996 crash of a 747 that killed 230 people[1], and which is thought to have been avoided had the tanks been inert[2]. Other 747s were lost to the same issue, such as the ULF48 that crashed in 1976 killing all aboard[3]. To answer your question, no, the 747 is not "safe". No aircraft ever made is "safe". They will all crash and kill pe…

I appreciate your answer and the informative links.

    No aircraft ever made is "safe". They will all crash and 
    kill people given sufficient flight hours. The question 
    is what we consider acceptable risk,
Let's give our fellow HNers a little credit, shall we?

When the other poster asked if 747s were "safe," do you really think they meant to ask if 747s were literally indestructible? Or do you think the other poster meant "safe" as in "safe, compared to other aircraft, which are things that any reasonable human being understands can have accidents from time to time?" I really believe it was the latter.

Re: As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane

#120

Post by jacquesm »

Bromskloss wrote: post #70
jacquesm wrote: post #15

I used to fly these every two weeks, KL691 and KL692 the flights between Schiphol, Netherhands and Toronto, Canada. Then at some point they moved to 777's, and even though it was a nice plane and far more modern the 747 almost never had a turbulent ride whereas the 777 trips were far less comfortable, especially the red-eye return flight rarely was smooth enough that I could get some sleep. Retiring the 747 was one (…

> Also, this is the only time I've ever gone faster than 1,250 Km/h groundspeed in a regular jet Wow! How fast was the air flying? I.e., how close were you to supersonic airspeed?

Just as far away as usual. Airspeed was quite normal, it was the tailwind that did it and that just gets added to your airspeed. Mach .92 is Vne, I don't think any responsible airline pilot would want to test the limit on that one.
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