Boeing 747

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

by Peter Robison  · 29 Nov 2021  · 382pp  · 105,657 words

as the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter, the Apache attack helicopter, and the KC-46 aerial refueling tanker. The president himself flies on a Boeing 747 and is frequently called upon to close international sales worth billions of dollars. Barack Obama, who stood beside Lion Air’s CEO in Bali when

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wooded trails popular with Sunday hikers. The plane was a DC-10, a slightly smaller wide-body McDonnell Douglas had developed to keep up with Boeing’s 747. The engineers on the Douglas side in Southern California had struggled mightily for the needed investments, Mr. Mac holding the purse strings as tightly

Air Crashes and Miracle Landings: 60 Narratives

by Christopher Bartlett  · 11 Apr 2010  · 543pp  · 143,135 words

chapter, ranging from incidents involving the DC-10 to the worst-ever single aircraft disaster where the failure of the rear bulkhead of a Japanese Boeing 747 blew off part of the tail, with the aircraft flying around drunkenly for thirty minutes before crashing into mountains. The fear that an aircraft will

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smoothly on that almost final leg from Kuala Lumpur to Perth, Australia. Then some two-and-a-half hours into the leg, passengers on the Boeing 747 started complaining that there were too many smokers. On seeing the haze at the back of the Economy Class cabin, the cabin crew wondered why

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fly over congested areas. To be fair to the controllers, their initial appraisal of the situation was that the aircraft had ‘lost’ one engine. The Boeing 747 can fly safely on three engines, and British Airways, the biggest user of Heathrow, sometimes has its 747s come in for maintenance with only three

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ATSB report, this is what apparently happened. (Anyone fascinated by the affair should read the engrossing full report.) How the Events Unfolded Qantas 1, a Boeing 747 flight from Sydney to London with an intermediate stop at Bangkok, first nosed into the exceptionally heavy rain at a height of 200 ft, and

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much on Professor Reason’s ‘Swiss Cheese’ accident model and his other work in drawing its conclusions: Found that Qantas had not properly prepared their Boeing 747-400 pilots for landing on ‘contaminated’ [i.e. water-covered or icy runways]; and, partly to reduce costs, had introduced a new, ‘less conservative’ (= more

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of some patches of rain in Thailand. 6. Qantas had abandoned use of windscreen water-repellent Qantas had abandoned the use of water-repellent on Boeing 747s, deactivating the systems several years before for financial reasons and ostensibly to protect the environment—water repellents consist of fluorocarbons that cause depletion of the

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previously, had suffered ‘arguably the biggest dent to its once enviable safety reputation in decades’ after one of its Boeing 747s lost electrical power on approach to Bangkok. It was referring to a Boeing 747-400 London–Bangkok flight that lost electrical power from all four engine-driven electrical generators 15 minutes out of

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was subject to warnings from the Japanese aviation authorities regarding safety. The near miss in question involved the following aircraft: Flight number JL907, Japan Airlines Boeing 747, with 427 people on board had just climbed out of Tokyo’s domestic Haneda Airport bound for Okinawa to the south, and was seeking permission

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of the potential conflict, the controller, who had intended to tell JL958 (the DC-10) to descend, mistakenly told JL907 (the Boeing 747) to do so. The TCAS in the descending Boeing 747 gave an aural conflict resolution advisory to climb. Notwithstanding the fact that TCAS resolution advisories are mandatory, the 747 captain continued

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runway for takeoff. Though it had a good long runway, the airport’s ground handling facilities were not designed for aircraft as large as the Boeing 747. As a result, a Dutch KLM 747 and a Pan American 747 parked on the apron were taking up so much of the available space

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. The 747, ‘Clipper Victor,’ was said to have a dent in its nose—made from a champagne bottle when it had made the inaugural commercial Boeing 747 flight from New York to London on January 21, 1970! It was one of the first ‘jumbos.’ The KLM 747 also supposedly had some fame

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unused runway despite it having those Xs. Another reason may have been the death trap at Taiwan’s Taipei Airport into which a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 was lured on the stormy night of October 31, 2000. That night, one of the worst typhoons that Taiwan was to experience in recent years

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history. SIA were also famous for having one of the youngest fleets at a time when British Airways was still flying some 27-year-old Boeing 747s.[53] Many motorists have taken a wrong turning on badly signposted roads in heavy rain, but how could highly trained pilots do such a thing

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families of those killed, and to compensate generously the survivors for their expenses and so on. Points Related to this Disaster A feature of the Boeing 747 that many must have noticed is that the pilots are very high up off the ground, rather like the drivers of some SUVs looking down

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be due to the frenetic pace at which the aircraft was brought into production, with Lockheed’s very similar TriStar in direct competition, and the Boeing 747 lurking in the background. Although, the competing Lockheed TriStar L1011 was an excellent aircraft, McDonnell Douglas had the advantage that US airlines were so used

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two companies against each other, with the result that prices became so low that neither aircraft would ever be a big money-spinner, unlike the Boeing 747, which was in a category above. In addition, delays in developing the power plant for the TriStar had almost led to the demise of the

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appreciate its qualities. JL123, WORST SINGLE AIRCRAFT DISASTER (Japan 1985) Rear Bulkhead Fails, Tailfin Blown Off, then Hydraulics Fail This disaster in Japan where a Boeing 747 staggered drunkenly around the sky for half an hour with passengers writing ‘last wishes’ on their boarding passes must have been a terrifying experience, as

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the night took their toll. One young boy who was not to survive indicated his determination to be strong, exclaiming, ‘I am a man!’ The Boeing 747 SR (Short Range)—a jumbo specially adapted and reinforced to carry as many as 550 passengers on domestic short-haul routes in Japan—was the

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some 30 minutes before the crash. Subsequently, searchers recovered other pieces in that area. Never had there been a structural failure like this on a Boeing 747. The aircraft was relatively old, but there were 747s twice as old still flying safely. However, as Japan Airlines employed the aircraft on short domestic

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A300 flight outbound from New York’s JFK in 2001 (see page 174) in which the PF reacted to wake turbulence generated by a preceding Boeing 747 by swishing the rudder back and forth from extremity to extremity with the result that it was torn off. Investigators thought one reason why he

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hasty repairs to those worrisome fuselage structures have led to metal shavings falling into wire bundles. The incident described below, involving the 89th production line Boeing 747 manufactured in late 1970, shows that short-circuits not only present a fire risk, but also the risk of triggering something more unexpected—in this

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aircraft used for United Airlines Flight UA811 from Honolulu to Auckland, New Zealand, on February 24, 1989, with 337 passengers on board, was an old Boeing 747 that had seen considerable service. Honolulu was essentially a refueling stop—the airline also had a non-stop Los Angeles to Auckland flight for which

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in 1972 and 1974 where a known cargo door problem was left unresolved. Following the DC-10 disaster outside Paris, airliners, including the Japan Airlines Boeing 747 featured in the chapter on uncontrollability, were fitted with vents in the floor to release pressure differentials. The 747 in question had been manufactured earlier

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, too late for those nine Business Class passengers, were subsequently made, and there has not been an accident since due to the opening of a Boeing 747 cargo door. CHINA AIRLINES/EL AL 747F ENGINE MOUNTS (1991/1992) Boeing Redesigns Engine Mounts at Great Expense It is not so widely known that

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does not spin round disastrously and cartwheel. On December 29, 1991, the in-board No. 3 engine came off an 11-year old China Airlines Boeing 747-2R7F (Freighter) as it was climbing out under high power from Taiwan's Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport. It glanced off the outboard No. 4

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concern obliquely and politely has been borne out in a number of tragedies in this book, including the worst ever multi-aircraft crash when two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Tenerife. PRE-PROGRAMMED TO HIT MT EREBUS (Antarctica 1979) A Question of ‘Command Responsibility’ The accident at the South Pole

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and follow. Apparently, from the initial size of the ‘blip’ on their radar, the Russians had first thought it would prove to be a harmless Boeing 747, but when the fighter pilot announced it was a civilian 707 they had their doubts as the same design under the designation RC-135 was

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Flight KAL007 en route from Alaska to Seoul had a similar course deviation as that incurred by KAL902 five years earlier. However, this time, the Boeing 747 had already passed over militarily sensitive areas of eastern Russia and was heading possibly for the even more sensitive area around Vladivostok. The aircraft was

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eventually shot down by a Russian fighter just off the northern coast of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew on board the Boeing 747 were to lose their lives. The US and President Reagan in particular, made much of the fact that the ‘Evil Empire’ had shot down an

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all odds in that such an ideal—water temperature apart—ditching site was at hand. 6. Captain Moody’s (page 9) successful landing of his Boeing 747 after all four engines had flamed out (stopped) on entering a cloud of volcanic ash most certainly seemed a miracle to the passengers. It must

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, 38, 41, 52, 59, 64, 77, 89, 122, 231, 242 Boeing 707 41, 42, 225, 271 Boeing 737 xvii, 92, 151, 173, 231, 289, 294 Boeing 747 50, 56, 59, 64, 69, 70, 77, 78, 86, 90, 104, 115, 120, 238, 241, 242, 295, 297 Boeing 767 35, 38, 172, 314 Boeing

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of Configuration 112 Charles de Gaulle Airport 92, 162 Checklists and Flight Manual 332 Chernobyl xiv, 157, 325 Chicken and the Egg 326 China Airlines Boeing 747-2R7F (Freighter) 242 CHIRP 323 chronic smokers 121 civilian use of GPS 297 Classic Case Cited in Pilot Training 141 classic CFIT disaster 253 C

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business

by John Newhouse  · 16 Jan 2007  · 278pp  · 83,504 words

present). With its behemoth, the A380, Airbus has challenged Boeing’s long-run dominance in the so-called very-large-aircraft market that the 747 had provided. And Boeing, after an absence of fifteen or so years from its core business, is developing another market-driven better mousetrap. The company’s radically

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operate than other aircraft, partly because it will burn less fuel per passenger. Its operating costs are expected to be 15 percent below those of Boeing’s 747. Boeing had the better strategy. Until recently, an airplane’s range was equated with its size; the bigger it was, the farther it was

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one and thereby prove that the company’s improbable blend of corporate cultures and divergent methods could match Boeing’s most conspicuous accomplishment, the 747. As for Boeing, it did play for time, mainly because it lacked a strategy. Its management was divided. Curiously, none of the senior figures seems to have

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allow. The assumption was that no airline would want another 747 if there was a bigger and newer jumbo on offer—that is, unless Boeing decided to sell 747’s at giveaway prices. Still, recalled Hanko von Lachner, a longtime Airbus board member, “we didn’t really know at that stage who

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minibar and private closet.26 Airbus argues that the A380 is a “ministep” up in size, as Pierson describes it, compared to the advent of Boeing’s 747, an event that occurred thirty years ago. That airplane, Pierson noted, was 150 percent bigger than Boeing’s own 707, the second largest airliner

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modes apparently generate so much intercity traffic that both prosper. Yet despite the high-volume rail travel, Japan has carriers that fly jumbo airliners, notably Boeing 747’s, on flights between neighboring cities that last no more than an hour and are normally filled. The world’s three most heavily traveled routes

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do the simple math: the cost of flying five hundred or so people on the long routes would be less with A380’s than with Boeing 747’s. So the question (Airbus thought) would not be whether JAL would buy the A380 but when. Then, toward the end of 2005

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, Boeing began offering the 747-8, a bigger and highly improved version of its own jumbo. This aircraft seemed capable of prospering in various Asian markets, including, most important, Japan

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Schrontz, March 18, 2005. 11. Ibid. 12. Conversation with Larry Clarkson, May 3, 2005. 13. Conversation with Harry Stonecipher, March 4, 2004. 14. Richard Aboulafia, “Boeing 747,” Teal Group report, July 2005, p. 10. 15. Jeff Cole, “Boeing Lands over 30 Orders from Asian Carriers for New 747’s,” Wall Street Journal

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

by Robert Gandt  · 1 Mar 1995  · 371pp  · 101,792 words

which they didn’t even have engines. Financially, Boeing would be in as much peril as Pan Am. For a project the size of the 747, Boeing would have to build a whole new plant somewhere beyond its present facility. A production line of unprecedented dimensions and logistical complexity would have to

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slice twenty-five minutes off each Atlantic crossing. And, oh, yes, Trippe added, the administration of President Johnson had given its blessing to the Boeing-Pan American 747 contract. That was the clincher. The board of directors asked a few questions, made comments, then did its duty. The members granted their official

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the first day of their careers: Congratulations, gentlemen. You’re going to be SST pilots. . . Chapter Fourteen Besieged We have an unround situation. —EVERETTE WEBB, Boeing 747 project engineer Well, maybe they wouldn’t be SST pilots. But Pan Am had the Everyman airplane, and it was almost ready to fly. On

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Seas had experienced an in-flight structural failure. Weren’t Pan Am’s 747s the oldest in the industry? CNN reported that of the 710 Boeing 747s constructed, Clipper Maid of the Seas was number fifteen. Her maintenance records contained a history of cracks, corrosion, one on-board fire, and an incident

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections

by Patrick Smith  · 6 May 2013  · 309pp  · 100,573 words

travel without the journey? We’ve come to view flying as yet another impressive but ultimately uninspiring technological realm. There I am, sitting in a Boeing 747, a plane that if tipped onto its nose would rise as tall as a 20-story office tower. I’m at 33,000 feet over

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eleven hours. Neither is it fair to say out of hand that one plane has greater reach than another. Does an Airbus A340 outdistance a Boeing 747? Some do, some don’t. Technical options, such as engine types and auxiliary fuel tanks, help determine endurance. Watch the dashes. There’s not just

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for the different operational regimes, including limits for taxiing, taking off, and landing. The Airbus A380’s maximum takeoff weight exceeds one million pounds. A Boeing 747’s weight can be as high as 875,000 pounds. For a 757, it might be 250,000 pounds, and for an A320 or 737

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the text read: “A stone monastery in the shadow of a Himalayan peak. A cluster of tents on the sweep of the Serengeti plains. The Boeing 747 was made for places like these. Distant places filled with adventure, romance, and discovery.” I so related to this syrupy bit of PR that I

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crash totals? Until there’s a formal consensus, here’s the generally accepted list of history’s worst crashes: 1. March 27, 1977. Two chartered Boeing 747s operated by KLM and Pan Am collide on a foggy runway at Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands, killing 583 people (61 people survive, all

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evacuation? One that comes to mind, maybe, is the 1985 Japan Air Lines catastrophe (see worst disasters). After a bulkhead rupture and rudder failure, the Boeing 747 floundered about for several minutes before going down near Mt. Fuji. Had chutes been aboard, we can speculate that some of the passengers may have

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town on Tenerife is Santa Cruz, and its airport, beneath a set of cascading hillsides, is called Los Rodeos. There, on March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747s—one belonging to KLM, the other to Pan Am—collided on a foggy runway. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed in what remains

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—almost to the point of absurdity—than on that Sunday afternoon almost forty years ago. In 1977, in only its eighth year of service, the Boeing 747 was already the biggest, the most influential, and possibly the most glamorous commercial jetliner ever built. For just those reasons, it was hard not to

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on the Internet today. The photo shows detritus and debris everywhere, wires and scraps of metal, all surrounding this impossibly still-dignified chunk of a Boeing 747, dead as a doornail. There’s the blue stripe, the paint barely scratched. And there, just above the oval cabin windows in frilly blue lettering

The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World's Most Mysterious Air Disasters

by Christine Negroni  · 26 Sep 2016  · 269pp  · 74,955 words

and breaks in the structure of an airplane have been known to cause decompressions. In one case, a passenger oxygen bottle exploded on a Qantas Boeing 747 in 2008. The bottle shot through the side of the airplane like a small missile, leaving a hole large enough to cause a rapid decompression

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between the antenna and the satellite. All three possibilities are extremely remote. Some clues, however, have not been pursued. One week into 2008, a Qantas Boeing 747 was on approach to Bangkok from London with 365 people on board. It was a clear and sunny afternoon—which was fortunate because as Qantas

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once it was on the ground, its doors could not be opened because the outflow valves failed to automatically release the cabin pressure. On the Boeing 747 and other Boeing jetliners, including the 777 and the 767, there is a galley located above the electronics and equipment room, called the E&E

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number of problems with the airline’s compliance with government and international aviation standards. Most significant was that on Malaysia’s wide-body, long-haul Boeing 747s* and 777s, which would include the plane flying as MH-370, flights could be tracked only every half hour, even though the airline was required

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in 1996 when I got a call in the middle of the night telling me about the crash of TWA Flight 800. It was a Boeing 747 with two hundred thirty people on board that exploded thirteen minutes after taking off from New York on its way to Paris. There had been

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be installed in fuel tanks to preclude the possibility of explosion by eliminating the oxygen, a necessary component of fire. During the development of the 747, Boeing even tested some systems specifically designed to do this. The manufacturer ultimately dismissed the idea, however, citing concerns about the additional weight. The recommendations for

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post-9/11 world, the twin-engine, mid-capacity, long-haul airliner on Boeing’s drawing board was the most eagerly anticipated airplane since the Boeing 747, which had redefined travel in the 1970s by opening up the skies to everyone. Forty years later, the 787 was going to allow airlines to

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quiet that had L-1011 customer Eastern Airlines calling the plane the “Whisperliner.” Yes, everybody loved the three-engine Tristar, but unlike its competitors, the Boeing 747 and the McDonnell Douglas DC-10, the L-1011 is not seen flying anymore. Only two hundred fifty were made, and aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia

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delay. Once the composite blade was replaced with titanium, the RB221 became one of Rolls-Royce’s best-selling engines. Updated versions still power the Boeing 747 and Boeing 767. The Dreamliner battery saga does not have such an unequivocal finish or even a dignified one. Aboulafia calls the stainless steel containment

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accomplish a task together. Yet in the cockpit, the stakes are higher. The deadliest aviation accident ever, the collision of a KLM Royal Dutch Boeing 747 with another 747 being operated by Pan American World Airways, made it very clear that more attention needed to be paid to the seemingly simple task of

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report, citing the other factors that must have been on the captain’s mind, including the heavy airplane, wet runway, and poor visibility. The KLM Boeing 747 was closing in on the other jumbo jet still obscured in the soup. On Clipper Victor, Captain Grubbs was startled to see the lights of

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, Norm, 102 Boeing 299, 209–10 Boeing 727, 9, 107–15, 160, 162, 223 Boeing 737, 11–17, 19, 23, 42, 83–85, 159–63 Boeing 747 and aircraft tracking systems, 60 and fuel tank explosions, 64 and the Lockheed L-1011, 190–91 and rapid decompression incidents, 42 and Tenerife runway

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even-numbered altitudes. * Airways, Pan Am employee magazine, no. 5 (July–August 1938). * Flying the Oceans, by Horace Brock. * Malaysia Airlines no longer flies the Boeing 747. * Spencer Rumsey, “TWA Flight 800 Exposé Takes Off at Stony Brook Film Festival,” Long Island Press, July 8, 2013, http://www.longisland press.com/2013

The Disappearing Act

by Florence de Changy  · 24 Dec 2020

monitored appeared in December 2015, when Kuala Lumpur Airport placed an advertisement in The Star, the Malaysian daily, asking that the owner of the three Boeing 747s that had been abandoned for several years on the airport’s tarmac come and collect them, otherwise they would be disposed of. This item triggered

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several ironic responses, such as ‘Anyone lost three Boeing 747s?’ and ‘Boeing 747s left unattended will be destroyed!’ Despite the months and years that have gone by, the French experts have not published a single detail on the

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coast through the Mozambique Channel, would have carried any floating debris from the Comoros along the coast of Mozambique and South Africa. In 1987, a Boeing 747 crashed to the east of Mauritius. Three distinct debris fields were identified. Some of this debris would surely have ended up on the east coast

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hypoxia. UPS Airlines Flight 6 from Dubai: a fire in the hold started by lithium batteries On 3 September 2010, UPS Airlines Flight 6, a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft, was flying from Dubai to Cologne. Twenty-two minutes into the flight, the pilots raised the alarm: there was a fire in the

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initially decided not to mention it here; that is until I received a first-hand account testimony that seemed somewhat related to it. The TWA Boeing 747 exploded 12 minutes after take-off from JFK international airport (New York) on 17 July 1996 at 8.30 pm and crashed into the Atlantic

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scenario. In 2013, former NTSB investigator Henry Hughes, who had worked on the case, told Reuters he believed a bomb or a missile caused the Boeing 747 to crash. He, along with five other investigators, petitioned the agency to reconsider the conclusion of its investigation, saying the initial probe was flawed. ‘The

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Authority of the United Arab Emirates, Air Accident Investigation Report on Uncontained Cargo Fire Leading to Loss of Control Inflight and Uncontrolled Descent into Terrain Boeing 747-44AF N571UP, 3 September 2010. 29 Factual Information: Safety Information for MH370, op. cit., p. 33. Acknowledgements For reasons of security and brevity, I have

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disappearance, 177, 300, 301, 371 Boeing 737, 49, 405; crashes, MAX, 397; crashes, other, see Flight 185 crash; Flight 752 crash; excessive automation, 396–7 Boeing 747: crash (1987), 218; TWA 800 crash, see Flight 800 crash Boeing 767-200 crash (1996), see Flight 961 crash Boeing 777-200ER, 5, 19, 41

The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

by Ernest Scheyder  · 30 Jan 2024  · 355pp  · 133,726 words

form, is corrosion-resistant, and binds well with other metals. Only silver conducts electricity better, but silver is more expensive than copper. The average 747 jetliner from Boeing has 135 miles of copper wiring, and every American household has an average of four hundred pounds of copper wiring and piping. Freeport-McMoRan

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success

by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland and Rob Wertheimer  · 13 Jul 2020  · 372pp  · 101,678 words

’t Boeing, I’m not going,” a marketing tagline reflecting Boeing’s desire to manufacture the world’s most advanced, highest-quality aircraft. The Boeing 707 and 747 revolutionized jet travel in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and served as a key source of pride for those who made them. Mainline employees

Aerotropolis

by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay  · 2 Jan 2009  · 603pp  · 182,781 words

the beaches (and the massage parlors). The number of tourists following in their wake has risen nearly fortyfold in forty years, made possible by the Boeing 747. The economics of its size, speed, and range ushered in the era of international mass tourism via chartered flights and package tours, creating tourism hubs

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