You can self publish the eBook/Kindle and if it gets traction pull it and give it to a publisher/agent. Worth checking to see if you have the right to do that in Amazon's T&C.

Heard today that Boeing delivered the last-ever 747. Was this one you flew? Any thoughts on that model being discontinued?

Sad to hear that. I never got to fly the 747, though I have several friends who have. About three years ago, I flew a MLB charter, taking the Seattle Mariners home from Tampa. On the layover, the FO and I decided we should visit the Boeing factory and I’m so glad we did. We saw the 747 assembly line and they had several 747-800s being built...all of them for cargo carriers (UPS and Lufthansa). They were no longer making them for passenger service at that time.

To me, the 747 has always been the best looking plane ever built. It looked great in flight and also looked regal on the ground. I’ve flown it as a passenger several times. I got first class seating (upper deck) on a flight from DFW to Tokyo...probably the best passenger experience I ever had.

I'm so old I flew one that had an upstairs piano bar/lounge.

The ones I flew to the Olympics had all business class upstairs. First was on the lower deck, front. Northwest had a non-stop 747 Detroit to Seoul.

I took a 747 from Chicago to Hong Kong around 10-12 years ago (on United obv). I splurged and it cost me $500 to upgrade to business class on the upper deck. Imagine getting an upgrade for that price these days. I had a window seat and it sucked to have to climb over the feet of the person with the aisle seat to get up.

How easy is this, and is it dangerous? The last 747 produced flying to it's new home

i came here to post a different image of the same thing
for scale: Moses Lake to Pullman is 100 miles as the crow flies, Moses Lake to Kennewick is 65.

with traffic




seems like a proper salute to me

747s were at 57 billion nautical miles flown in 2019 when they turned 50, and have carried almost 6 billion people to their destinations over the years.
(and by 'almost' i don't mean the rest didn't make it)

I flew TWA from STL to London on a 747 back in the early 90s, and as an apology for a royal screw-up that kept us from flying the day before, they upgraded us to Ambassador (business) Class, which was upstairs. Better than first class, imo, in those days before full flat seats. It was pretty cool. Still had the spiral staircase, IIRC.

Did TWA flights 1 and 2 St. Louis to/from Honolulu back in the 90s on a 747. Nothing special except takeoff and landing in such a big plane is way more... majestic than a "small" MD-80 or 737. The 777 is similar but not the same. I bet the A380 is as impressive.

Those when the days when St. Louis mattered to the airline industry. Now, except for Southwest, it's a ghost town.

This happening in 2023 seems very, very bad:



Who has the most 'splainin to do?

furniture on the runway

WOW! I wonder if any of the passengers on the SWA flight could hear the FedEx plane and freaked out.

not that it isn't troubling bc it obv is, but remember that visibility was reportedly an 1/8 of a mile during that incident (easy to forget that watching the simulation)

Or, in other terms, the length of ~3 747's

I don't think the tower eyeballs the planes coming in to estimate how far they are.

not saying they do

was pointing out the fact that visibility was very poor for ppl watching the simulation that might not have been aware of that fact

This thing reminds me of a post I made a few years ago - And W0X0F's response -

Did you fly on boeing 737?

I ask in case my father also a pilot and he works on boeing 737! It's amazing as for me!

I’m thinking it’s the controller, although the SW pilots should be visually confirming that final is clear when they begin taxiing onto the runway.

When Tower clears SW for takeoff, he calls the traffic and says it’s on a “three mile final.” At a nominal approach speed of 130-150 kts for FedEx, this would mean that SW had a little over a minute to get airborne. But it was actually just over 30 seconds when FedEx was coming up on the runway and decided to go around. So it seems that FedEx must have been much closer than 3 miles when Tower cleared SW and he should have just had SW hold short for landing traffic.

I noticed that too. The closed captioning was full of errors. When SW tells the Tower that they are “on the roll”, the caption says “on the road.”

Was that just a simulation? It looked like actual video! And you can plainly see FedEx as SW taxis onto the runway. But if viz was actually 1/8 mile, then this is 100% on the controller.

I flew the 737 for a little less than two years. We had three models: the -700, -800, and -900. The 700 was the stubby version, carrying about 130 pax. Because it was the smallest version, it had great performance and climbed really well, capable of going straight to FL400 in most cases.

The 900 carried around 190 pax and was considerably longer, which meant that care had to taken to avoid a tail strike on both takeoff and landing. In fact, the plane would automatically print a “report card” within a minute of each takeoff and landing showing the deck angle at liftoff and touchdown, respectively. Anything more than about 9° would result in a tail strike.

We used the 737 for domestic flights and Caribbean flights and I enjoyed flying it. It was the only aircraft type in the Delta fleet that came equipped with a HUD (Captain’s side only), which made it really easy to hand-fly an instrument approach to extremely low-vis minimums.

hmmm, maybe that video is actual footage of the real incident as it took place. does anybody know for sure? i'm doubtful bc i haven't seen this video on the major tv news channels which you'd assume they'd obv have aired it by now

i'm a bit confused now bc the original tweet where i saw the simulation was two tweets which i'm posting below. the bottom tweet says "For clarity, this isn't actual footage, it's a simulation based on the flight data." well we can clearly see that it isn't "actual footage" in that tweet from Feb. 9, so it must be talking about the real-life looking video tweet which came before the "For clarity, ..." tweet, right?

for some reason i thought i'd heard that visibility was poor during the incident. i've gone back and looked at a few articles and don't see poor visibility mentioned, so i must have remembered incorrectly

also, saw this reported in the linked article which is alarming that a semi-major city's airport like AUS (Austin, TX) wouldn't have this technology

W0X0F - i did a search to find out the other 34 USA airports that don't use ASDE but didn't come up with anything. do you know where this info might be found?

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/us/te...ion/index.html

I'm not sure where to find that information, but ASDE is irrelevant in this instance, as it is simply for detection of potential conflicts among aircraft on the ground. I remember when ASDE was a new thing and I'm surprised there are only 35 airports that don't have it.