Free Republic

After more than five decades, aircraft manufacturer Boeing hit a bitter-sweet milestone on the evening of December 6th as the last Boeing 747 rolled out of its production line at Paine Field in Everett, Washington. The 1574th Boeing 747 will go through test flights before being delivered to Atlas Air early next January. Having been in production since September 1968, the Boeing 747, often dubbed the 'Jumbo Jet' or the 'Queen of the Skies,' was designed by engineer Joe Sutter. With the ability to carry up to 524 passengers, the semi-double-deck quad-engined aircraft was twice the size of the Boeing...

Out of Time Airbus CEO Tom Enders expressed regrets over the timing of the A380 program, saying, “There has been speculation that we were 10 years too early; I think it is clear that we were 10 years too late.” But it was closer to four decades too late, or perhaps three decades too soon. There was not enough demand for an aircraft that size by the time the A380 rolled out in 2005, as proven by the aircraft's inability to attract sizeable orders in its brief lifetime. The 747 has lasted five decades and still maintains a sizable share...

U.S. Airlines are vying for attention as the Boeing 747 leaves their fleets, just as they did when it entered their fleets in 1970. And the world’s aviation geeks are watching closely. United announced Monday that its final Boeing 747 flight will take place Nov. 7 with a celebratory recreation of its first United flight from San Francisco to Honolulu. Twenty-eight minutes later, at 3:47 p.m. Monday, Delta announced that it recently operated its final Boeing 747 Tokyo Narita-Honolulu flight (on Sept. 5), and that it had operated what were thought to be the final domestic 747 flights from Honolulu...

But now the 747 is a flying antique: people are astonished when they see the analogue instruments. And the flight controls are all defiantly dependent on old-fashioned mechanical linkages. A 747 captain once explained to me that, if hydraulic assistance on the control yoke is lost, you can still put your feet on the instrument panel, give a big tug and wrench the plane about the sky. You cannot do that on a solid-state Airbus.

Late 1960s: Economy Class Seating on a Pan-Am 747 The 1960's were barely done when Pan Am again set a standard the rest of the world was forced to follow. Pan American's Boeing B-747 Jumbo Jets brought down the cost of long distance air travel once again. Source: Pan Am Historical Foundation

Fox news Alert: Emergency vehicles on tarmac waiting for 747 with an engine out at Dulles Int'l airport. Developing...

PARIS (Reuters) - European plane maker Airbus said on Sunday it had interrupted an evacuation test for its new A380 double-decker plane after an incident in which several people were injured as an evacuation slide dis-inflated. The test took place in a hangar at its Hamburg site in Germany under supervision of the European certification authority and in the presence of a representative from the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority, as it is part of the certification procedure. "Such an incident during such a trail is not unprecedented," said Airbus chief operating officer and head of the A380 programme, Charles Champion,...

Concord – An African-American woman claims Southwest Airlines unfairly subjected her to its policy requiring large passengers to buy two seats because of her race, a lawyer said yesterday at the start of her federal trial against the airline. Nadine Thompson of Exeter, president of a cosmetics company, sued Southwest in federal court for discrimination in 2004, saying the company doesn’t uniformly enforce its policy requiring obese passengers to buy two seats. Thompson, who had flown on Southwest frequently, was on her way to a business conference in Chicago in June 2003 when she boarded her flight at Manchester Airport....