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posted by chromas on Tuesday February 11 2020, @04:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the 555 dept.

British Airways 747 just set subsonic speed record for Atlantic crossing:

Here's a good piece of trivia for you: what's the fastest commercial airliner in operation? As of Sunday, the answer might be "the Boeing 747"—not bad for an airliner that first entered service 50 years ago. On Saturday evening at 6:47pm ET, British Airways 747-400, tail number G-CIVP, took off from John F Kennedy (JFK) airport in New York. It landed at London's Heathrow Airport (LHR) at 4:43am local time—a crossing time of just 4 hours and 56 minutes, and a new record for subsonic aircraft.

Of course, the venerable jumbo had some help. Neither Boeing nor BA have rolled out a surprise engine upgrade, but Storm Ciara[*]—a weather disturbance currently rearranging British landscapes—gave the plane a helping hand with 200mph+ (320km/h+) tailwinds. G-CIVP set a peak ground speed of 825mph (1,327km/h), although its peak airspeed remained subsonic at around Mach 0.85.

That's a huge improvement over the prior record for a commercial, non-supersonic aircraft of 5 hours and 3 minutes!

The all-time record for any aircraft was managed in comfortably under 2 hours!

I was actually quite surprised to learn they were still in use as passenger aircraft. I'd taken a vacation 40 some-odd years ago to a Caribbean Island. I don't recall what the exact model plane it was that brought me there. But I do recall that all two dozen or so of us who were returning on a red-eye at the end of the week found ourselves as the sole passengers on a 747! Never mind trying to catch a nap with your seat in the reclined position... We just tipped up all the armrests in a center row of five seats and had plenty of space to sprawl out and sleep! If you ever get a chance to fly one before they are all retired, highly recommended to add to one's "bucket list."

*Ciara; pronuounced /ˈkɪərə/ KEER-ə


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:43AM (#957123)

    Engines and a total interior are a quarter to half of the price of a new airliner, depending on how fancy you want the inside. You can take your old 747 air frame and put on new engines in less than 30 days, 40 if you do the interior at the same time. Much cheaper, spares can be used on older planes still in the retro queue, and not having to pay your pilots to get a new type rating on their license. For example, they could retro a 20 year old Boeing 777-200ER and get the exact same fuel consumption per passenger-mile as a brand new Boeing 787-9 and avoid all the additional costs of changing changing planes while also saving the cost of the new plane.

    However, if they already had plans to downsize planes and are already in the wait queue, then you might as well get a brand new one, since all of those costs come with it anyway. But barring a change in flight size, the economics aren't there because the real savings are coming from increasing the number of passenger-miles with more passengers per flight or increasing aerodynamics by using smaller planes with the ability to faster turn around with business class balancing out some loss in fuel savings in terms of passenger-miles. Most major airlines have already made major transitions from the spoke-hub model anyway, so those needs for smaller jets are slowly petering out.