The Boeing Dreamliner.

[FLYER]

Originally Posted by stevestrat

Mid '90s I flew to the Philippines with Philippine Airlines when they still flew from the UK. It was a pretty old 747, they're on the 747/400 now, I think this was a 747/0, creaks and groans all the time. You know the cool drawer in that galley where they chill the canned drinks etc, taking off after one of the intermediate stops I watched this wave of water spill out of the cool drawer and run down the aisle next to me. I'm thinking to myself, ****, there's probably all kinds of wiring under there

i once flew in a aged prop plane from frankfurt to a wee airport in the frankenwald and it was like something out of the flight of the phoenix .

[Dorset Bob]

Originally Posted by FLYER

Would you get on one .


Fuel leaks .
Dodgy brakes.

No thanks.

Can we read about this in your latest issue George?

[FLYER]

Originally Posted by Dorset Bob

Can we read about this in your latest issue George?

brilliant ......

[stevestrat]

Originally Posted by FLYER

i once flew in a aged prop plane from frankfurt to a wee airport in the frankenwald and it was like something out of the flight of the phoenix .

I can beat that George. When I was in the air cadets in the early '70s our summer camp was at RAF Kinloss. Some guys went with a patrol flight in a Nimrod, I was lucky enough to cop a 9 hour patrol flight in a Shackleton out of Lossiemouth. Bang up to date WW2 technology, they were described as "10,000 loose rivets flying in close formation" or "The contra-rotating nissen hut"

[Leyland Worldmaster]

Apologies for going off topic; what is the typical service life of a 'plane?

[Terrorfex]

Originally Posted by leopard680

Apologies for going off topic; what is the typical service life of a 'plane?

Simple answer: it varies very much according to the mission profile and working life of the aircraft.

Case in point, some aircraft (like the DC-10) were all retired from passenger service long before they necessarily became too old or expensive to fly; they fell out of favour because other factors like more fuel efficient alternatives, or more sophisticated advancements by competing aircraft made less economic sense to continue running them.

Other aircraft have truly lived forever. The Nimrod, as mentioned above, was a variant of the Comet airliner and flew for decades until its eventual retirement a few years ago.

The B-52 strategic bomber has been in service for well over half a century, and other aircraft like the Lancaster bomber flown by the RAF's Battle of Britain Memorial Flight have been on the go for seventy years.

The defining limitation isn't really age; it's fatigue - how quickly do the systems and materials that make up the aircraft tire out and require replacing. Sometimes an aircraft is designed superbly, and its fatigue life turns out to be either so good - or its working life so easy - that it lasts forever.

The DC-3, VC-10 and the 707 are examples of aircraft that have demonstrated excellent fatigue life.

Sometimes, things don't go as well. The Comet airliner notoriously suffered from catastrophic fatigue failure as a result of poor understanding regarding stress concentrations and pressurisation stress. The Valiant Bomber was retired from service ingloriously after it was discovered that a switch in its bombing style - it was designed to fly high and fast - to low and fast generated massive fatigue of its wing spars.

If fatigue isn't a serious issue, an aircraft can serve for anything up to sixty years - sometimes longer!

More likely, better models (more efficient engines, more sophisticated on-board systems) mean aircraft typically "live" for around 30 - 40 years for successful models.

Military aircraft, being subjected to different certification processes and design considerations often serve much longer; especially when they're in niche roles like the Nimrod was that can't easily be carried out with an alternative airframe.


As for the 787 conundrum, the aircraft is safe enough to fly. Certification is requires tens of thousands of hours of flying time, and anything catastrophic enough to prove a design flaw capable of bringing down the aircraft would almost certainly have been sniffed out.

More likely, the current issues stem from Quality Assurance problems. For example, one of the recurrent problems was a malfunctioning overhead electrical panel that kept cutting off power to non-essential systems. This was traced to a faulty batch of boards.

Take this with a pinch of salt, because it's only what I've heard while I'm at work in the industry, but allegedly one of the main problems stems with Boeing's use of a Li-Ion battery as the main aircraft rechargeable source for the first time.

Aircraft are prohibited from carrying Li-Ion batteries over a certain size due to safety concerns regarding their cooling and charging. The 787 is the first aircraft to have a waiver allowing it to carry a larger battery.

[MangoMan]

The oldest plane I went on was a Vickers Viscount from Jo'burg to Salisbury in 1976, I thought it was great at the time because the pressurization was switched off so we had to fly below 10,000ft which was only about 4-5,000ft above the ground most of the time! And such BIG Windows!!!

Of course 2 got shot down by terrorists..... The "Umniati" (79) & the "Hunyani" (78).

[topman]

I'd fly on one, these things happen with new aircraft.

[Leyland Worldmaster]

Thankyou very much for one of the most interesting and informative posts I've read Mr Terrofex.

Didn't realise they could last so long in regular use; having said that I regularly travelled on trains that had underframes dating back to the 'twenties- good old Southern Region Electrics!

Bill, a brilliant photo' there; and yes they're massive windows!

[Dorset Bob]

Originally Posted by MangoMan

The oldest plane I went on was a Vickers Viscount from Jo'burg to Salisbury in 1976, I thought it was great at the time because the pressurization was switched off so we had to fly below 10,000ft which was only about 4-5,000ft above the ground most of the time! And such BIG Windows!!!

Of course 2 got shot down by terrorists..... The "Umniati" (79) & the "Hunyani" (78).

The oldest Boeing I have been in, was a Boeing Stearman, she was made in 1943. Like one of these.





I remember it well, as it was a balmy summer evening, in 1997, and we went up to do some aerobatics. Very big windows on that one, being open cockpit

My first flight in a passenger aircraft, as a kid, was in a Bristol Superfreighter. Our family car, a Singer Gazelle, came with us on the trip.
Ryan Air would have a fit if you weighed one of those in, to take with you lol