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Between the two towers of Westbank‘s WB1200 development in Seattle, a repurposed Boeing 747 is soon to be suspended. The body of the massive airplane will float above the residential project’s galleria as a centerpiece and a symbol of industrial innovation, on view as a sensational artifact for both pedestrians at street level and for residents in their dwellings overhead. Ian Gillespie, founder of Vancouver-based Westbank, leads the project with the aim of celebrating innovation. That’s why the fuselage will not only hang between the apartment towers an art object, but as occupiable space. The reused Boeing 747 will function...

1982: The flight of BA9 It was back in 1982 when a British Airways Boeing 747 flew into a cloud of volcanic ash over Indonesia. Due to the airborne particles ingested, all four engines shut off. Technology.org quotes the captain as saying: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress”. With all four engines not functioning, the aircraft began to glide down towards the earth. Thankfully, one engine eventually regained function...

BOEING is to strike back at Airbus with the launch in a few months of a new version of the venerable Boeing 747 called the 747 Advanced. British Airways may become one of the first customers. Revelations of Boeing’s plans will intensify its commercial rivalry with Airbus, which is due to stage the first flight of its new $13.5 billion (£7.2 billion) A380 within weeks. It will supersede the 747 as the largest passenger airliner. The Boeing move will also add fuel to the trade battle between Europe and America over subsidies to aircraft makers. A breakdown in talks last...

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...

About a year ago, a Boeing 747 operated by Delta Air Lines DAL, took off from Atlanta for a three-hour flight to Pinal Airpark, a boneyard for unwanted aircraft in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. The once celebrated giant of the sky, which had transformed international travel with its size and range, had flown its last flight for a U.S. airline. Delta has replaced its fleet of jumbo jets with Airbus A350s, one of a new breed of smaller, ultraefficient long-range airliners. Nearly every other airline in the world is doing a version of the same thing, replacing huge jets with smaller...

UPS is putting its savings from the upcoming tax cuts to use in a slightly different way than other Georgia-based companies.The United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE: UPS) said Thursday that the money is going toward boosting more than $12 billion in investments to "expand the company’s Smart Logistics Network, significantly increase pension funding, and position the company to further enhance shareowner value."“This $12 billion investment program is an outgrowth of the opportunity for tax savings created by the Tax and Jobs Act,” said David Abney, UPS Chairman and CEO, in a news release. “We will increase network investments and accelerate pension...

I tried to post an article from a source not allowed at FR, but search for other sources to this story. UPS is purchasing 14 Boeing 747's to add to its fleet. A big deal.

PARIS (Reuters) - Airbus is drawing up contingency plans to phase out production of the world’s largest jetliner, the A380 superjumbo, if it fails to win a key order from Dubai’s Emirates, three people familiar with the matter said. The moment of truth for the slow-selling airliner looms after just 10 years in service and leaves one of Europe’s most visible international symbols hanging by a thread, despite a major airline investment in new cabins unveiled this month. “If there is no Emirates deal, Airbus will start the process of ending A380 production,” a person briefed on the plans said....

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...

Joe Sutter, who was dubbed “Father of the 747” by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, has died at age 95. As the former chief engineer of Boeing’s 747, Sutter is credited with leading the birth of the first widebody airliner, which ushered in the globe-shrinking age of mass air travel.

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.

The body of a suspected stowaway was found atop an office building in West London on Thursday, and is believed to have plunged around 1,400ft from a Boeing 747 as it approached Heathrow Airport. Meanwhile, another man is in critical condition in hospital after being discovered an hour earlier in the undercarriage of the aircraft — British police are investigating both incidents. The survivor is believed to have climbed aboard the British Airways plane at OR Tambo International airport in Johannesburg before traveling over 8,000 miles from South Africa, largely in temperatures as low as -81 Fahrenheit on the 10-hour...

For most people, private jets such as the $65 million Gulfstream G650 or the Bombardier Global Series are the epitome of luxury air travel, but there are a select few who can afford more than that. They’re converting airliners into private flying palaces. To meet this demand, Airbus and Boeing have begun selling "VIP" versions of their airliners under the Airbus Corporate Jet and Boeing Business Jet brands. While most of these planes are based on smaller Airbus A320 series or Boeing 737 models, one recent VIP conversion took luxury to a new level. One very lucky, very wealthy, and...

Sifting through the center of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have made the first direct observations -- using an infrared telescope aboard a modified Boeing 747 -- of cosmic building-block dust resulting from an ancient supernova.

Explanation: Bright stars of Sagittarius and the center of our Milky Way Galaxy lie just off the wing of a Boeing 747 in this astronomical travel photo. The stratospheric scene was captured earlier this month during a flight from New York to London, 11,0000 meters above the Atlantic Ocean. Of course the sky was clear and dark at that altitude, ideal conditions for astronomical imaging. But there were challenges to overcome while looking out a passenger window of the aircraft moving at nearly 1,000 kilometers per hour (600 mph). Over 90 exposures of 30 seconds or less were attempted with...

Note: The following text is a quote: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, February 5, 2010 U.K. Firm Pleads Guilty to Illegally Exporting Boeing 747 Aircraft to Iran Firm Agrees to Pay $15 Million in Fines Balli Aviation Ltd., a subsidiary of the United Kingdom-based Balli Group PLC, pleaded guilty today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to a two-count criminal information in connection with its illegal export of commercial Boeing 747 aircraft from the United States to Iran, announced David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Channing D. Phillips, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia;...

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...

Fifteen minutes after KLM Flight 685 took off from Amsterdam for Mexico City on April 8, Mexican authorities forwarded the names of all the passengers to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The reason: the flight was scheduled to pass through U.S. airspace. by the time the Boeing 747 had finished its three-hour crossing of the Atlantic, Homeland Security screeners were on high alert. The names of two Saudi passengers aboard the KLM flight had begun producing "hits" on the screening center's lists of 70,000 suspect foreigners. The two Saudis, the database reported, were brothers and pilots who had attended...