Farewell to the Boeing 747, the Queen of the Skies. Long Live the Queen!

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Nope. It was photos like in this article.

Your photo is of a BA 747-400 that was introduced to service in in July 1989. That we 18 years after BOAC introduced the 747 and 15 years after BOAC & BEA merged to form British Airways.
 
That is why I posted "like this". There was a photo on the front page of the national newspapers of a 747 coming into Heathrow, actually more spectacular than the one I posted, it looked like the plane was going to crash into the houses in the foreground, but most of all it looked MASSIVE.
 

Key words: "Like this.."
 
In a different age of innocence, in 1986 myself and the other guys I was with were invited to go to the cabin on a Jumbo going to Japan via Anchorage a great experience, extremely cramped with the crew and two other "bods" in it.
 
A 747 was the second plane I ever flew on, lifting off from O'Hare on 31 Oct 74 bound nonstop for Schipol. Aside from other 747 flights before and after, I also flew on Pan Am's Clipper Victor in 1976, about a year before it was destroyed in the disaster at Tenerife. Reading about that accident as a ten-year-old, and realizing I'd been aboard it, was creepy.
 
Oh, man ... that's horrible. In early 2002 my wife and I went to Thailand via Taiwan. She went out a week ahead of me to visit her sister who was living in Kaohsiung. Between us, we flew 5 times on China Airlines 747s - their fleet at the time was 5 aircraft. In May, one of them broke up in flight with 100% loss of life. The cause was faulty repairs for a tail bump 20 YEARS before, leading to a catastrophic failure of the after bulkhead and subsequent loss of the tail. I don't KNOW for sure we flew on that plane, but the odds are high. It still makes my skin crawl......
 

I'm not familiar with that crash. JAL 123 had something of a similar fate, iirc.
 
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I'm not familiar with that crash. JAL 123 had something of a similar fate, iirc.

He is referring to China Air Lines flight 611. It suffered a tail strike in 1980. The repair of the tailstrike was not done IAW the Boeing Structural Repair Manual (SRM). 22 years later in 2002, the incorrect repair failed causing the 747 to break up in flight killing all 225 souls on board.








 

Thanks for the correction, and apologies to Warspite63 for my misunderstanding.
 

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