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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

YouTube video of 500 foot above ground level (AGL) approach of the runway shutdown to accommodate storage: https://youtu.be/zIbXai0l174

Airport details: https://www.airnav.com/airport/KVCV

Runway 3-21 is the temporarily closed runway being used for storage

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I got curious about the airplane wheelie record. Seems it was set the day before this video was posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLRZDDORFcY

So, one runway filled with dozens of airliners, the other one has someone doing three-mile wheelies in a Cessna :)

Funny seeing this from on here from the FB group where the pilot posted. :)

Whoa, this is weird: https://youtu.be/zIbXai0l174?t=344

What is with that plane in the middle? You can make out the Qantas kangaroo on the tail (normally white on red), but it's been painted out in red?

Mothballed or to-be-scrapped planes often get their paint jobs covered up, as no one wants to see a Qantas plane looking like it's falling apart.

Yeah this seems likely. I think Qantas were retiring most of their 747's.

Everyone is. They're being scrapped or converted to cargo (passenger 747 hasn't been made in a long while now, only cargo).

Except for the replacement Air Force One aircraft which are to be a modified 747-8s.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27179/exclusive-photos...

> Also, some have posited that buying aircraft that were already built to standard airline specifications may end up actually costing more to convert them into VC-25Bs compared to just ordering new aircraft as some modifications and provisions for certain unique systems, electromagnetic hardening, and wiring could not have been made on the production line and now they need to be retrofitted. Considering that a brand new 747-8i costs roughly $400M, the aircraft themselves were never a massive part of the overall program's cost.

It is amazing to me that the planes are under a fifth of the cost of the project: over $5 billion. This project is more expensive than the stupidly (expensive, 2x over budget) WTC Path Station!

Lufthansa is still flying their 747s and bought a bunch of -8s for passenger use.

https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-boeing-747-retirement/

Part of the true story is that most of the other carriers didn't want to perform the fuel inerting retrofit that the FAA mandated to be completely done by the end of 2017. This was the end result of the TWA800 explosion back in 1996 which was believed to have been caused by ignition in the fuel tanks.

https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...

That's (not-coincidentally) the date United and Delta retired their 747s with a big publicity splash which let them avoid the real question of why they were flying their craft without fuel interting systems right up until the day before it was mandated.

Qantas had originally scheduled to retire their last 747's over the coming year, but the pandemic shutdown pretty much made them re-schedule their plans for immediate retirement.

Qantas now no longer operate the 747. Which is a strange feeling when you consider that at one point in the 80's, they were exclusively an ALL 747 fleet operator!

I will certainly miss the 747. Alitalia, BA, Cathay, KLM, Korean, Lufthansa, Quantas, Thai, Virgin, just a handful of operators I've flown on it with. Best ride was KLM (front row seat under the cabin), best food was Lufthansa (seemingly unlimited dinners, and a cheese board - in economy), best random time Thai (serve yourself bar and becoming best friends with a DJ sitting in the next seat), best sleep Alitalia (that was an old one even for the time; the least mod cons = the best sleep).

More modern airliners seem somewhat beige. More fuel efficient, that's certainly positive, but bland.

So what fraction of operational airplanes are in flight at any given (pre-Covid-19) time? Are they normally "stored" in the air?

Keeping a plane in the air requires extremely expensive amounts of fuel. These planes would otherwise be active on routes, at airport gates, on the ramp temporarily, in maintenance, or stored at a base owned or partnered with by the airline (in the worst case). A big part of running an airline is making sure you are using your fleet to make money since planes are expensive to own, maintain, insure, and fly. These airlines may be switching over to freight for supply runs but don't have their own storage capacity for the planes that would normally be flying now-closed passenger routes and can't be repurposed for freight.

To a large extent they normally are "stored" in the air. A typical narrowbody aircraft in the US clocks 9-10 block hours a day (a little less in the air) and widebodies even more. So somewhere around 40% of all commercial passenger aircraft are in the air at any given time (higher during the day and lower at night, of course).

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