Easter egg in flight path of last 747 delivery flight

> You wonder how pockets of this survive when top management comes and goes, who sometimes only know the company as just some logo or another corporation to be managed

This makes me so sad, all of our traditions which make companies unique will actually be eroded away by market forces. No wonder no one stays at a workplace anymore.

Boeing still needs pilots. They're a sentimental, capable, and stubborn bunch.

Every complex project lives and dies by a relatively small group of true believers.

From the outside, we don't know who they are, but sometimes we get a glimpse of their passion.

What's cool is that aviation can be so stifling at times with training, rules, regulations, etc, that it seems that certain very cool traditions are either set in stone, or born and survive relatively intact.

ADSB reporting, which powers these flight tracking sites that are available to the public, is (relatively speaking) a very new thing to aviation and the general public. And the fact that these maneuvers are absolutely fantastic training and aviation problem solving and you've got the perfect storm for a newly born tradition that will continue to survive and evolve.

I'm sure someone will get fired over this.

Why do you think top management isn't part of this? Many times it's top management itself that makes sure these traditions continue. Maintaining company culture is something incredibly important to a lot of executives, at certain companies at least.

And judging from the press, this was a highly coordinated event including thousands of spectators and John Travolta. [1]

Top management can love having fun and maintaining traditions too. They're people too.

[1] https://thepointsguy.com/news/boeing-747-farewell-celebratio...

I basically wear zero visible labels on my clothes because why would I wear advertising? I own a t-shirt with 747 on it and a picture. It's one of the great pieces of human engineering. Many of us, even those who have never had anything to do with it beyond seeing one in the sky and occasionally riding on one love it like any other great work of creation.

There would be people who think like that who joined boeing in the past couple of years...

As this involved an extra hour(?) of flight time, it cost thousands of dollars. It also required filing a particular flight plan, and probably coordination between Boeing and Atlas. So it seems safe to say that it required approval at a pretty high level. And given everything else that happened surrounding the delivery, that doesn't seem strange at all.

This is why people on the ground deserve more respect (and yes, pay) than they get.

> there are people who keep the pride of purpose and "olden days / traditions" in their memory and do things like this.

My inner cynic cannot ignore the fact that this was a planned flight, with several layers of approvals, not something a small group of enthusiasts did as an homage to the olden days. I bet this is a PR stunt and nothing else. Yes, I am very fun at parties.

https://aviationsourcenews.com/breaking/atlas-air-to-fly-spe... The ceremony is prepared by CEO himself in this case.

Heh, the last time two Marine aviators drew a suitable shape often doodled throughout the Corps[1] it was not as well appreciated! Though they were certainly keeping pride of purpose alive.

1. https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/11/marine-pilots-investigated-fo...

While I certainly appreciate the passion and artistry to design and fly a path like that, I also wonder if it's not incredibly wasteful to do that with a kerosine-burning 747.

Interesting narrative - all we need is Bruce Willis at the controls and we’re gold ;)

I’m sure it was all planned and coordinated with their marketing team. After all, they need to figure out important things like how much fuel, time to arrival, etc.

Right?

I read your perspectives on intellectual loneliness and wondered round for an embarrassing period (this is my first encounter with this site… I’m also a dinosaur) in an effort to thank you. It did a great deal for me, not because I’m a genius, not that I have a sob story, not like some genuinely have. I realised young that it was strange to ask why it was so important to seemingly everyone else that this ball, this fecking spherical sack of air, went over there. Fame fortune and sex if I was the cause of it resulting to be ‘over there’. Hahaha I didn’t hate it, it was fine. Still not 100 convinced that people can love it as much as they say they do though. Other authors are available :) As I say though. Thank you for spending the/your time. It’s made a difference

Thank you, I couldn’t see the interesting part due to zoom/number of other planes etc.

> What’s even the point of the popup then?

Complying with idiotic bureaucratic regulations. Nobody wants to be popping that thing up, but if they don't, they can get reamed by the EU.

Thanks. It wasn't showing anything for me at all, just a bunch of icons of planes. Much appreciated.

Make sure to choose “yes” to see the Easter egg

> Live flight not found

> The flight with callsign GTI747 is currently not tracked by Flightradar24. It's either out of coverage or has already landed.

> Do you want to see the flight history of this aircraft?

> [ ] No, close pop-up > [X] Yes, show aircraft history

There has never been a point to cookie popups, as with most things resulting from technically-illiterate politicians trying to help with technology matters.

Their ideas are at best slightly lower-quality than the results of letting my 2-year-old wash the windows.

You can also view it on Flightaware, which doesn't have the popup: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/GTI747/history/20230201/...

> What’s even the point of the popup then?

If you're in the EU you'll see a "Reject All" option. To confirm this, set a breakpoint in their JS, change your country to an EU one, and the option to "Reject All" cookies appears: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/09wcuy4yh3qqoaw/reject_a...

Here's a screenshot of where I set the breakpoint and changed my country to France: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ju41dpj14pn4onh/bp.png

SOS would’ve been a funny prank

The point is that you won't access the info you came for without shoveling all the tracking malware up your cookie storage.

Should note that's a 707 that Tex Johnston rolled, not a 747. I'm not aware of any barrel rolls performed in a 747.

there's film of Tex Johnston's Dash-80 barrel roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaA7kPfC5Hk

many years later, Boeing Chief Test Pilot John Cashman stated that just before he piloted the maiden flight of the Boeing 777 on Jun. 12, 1994, his last instructions from then Boeing President Phil Condit were “No rolls”. -- anecdote from https://theaviationgeekclub.com/that-time-tex-johnston-barre...

I wonder why "the suits" at Boeing are so against the barrel rolls? The pilots all agree it's not that big a deal, not dangerous, and anybody watching is going to love it.

this article https://www.straightdope.com/21341407/is-it-possible-to-loop... says that the bigger the plane, the more dangerous because it will roll more slowly, and during parts of the roll particularly 90 degrees off "flat" there is no lift and you're going to be falling.

I'm reminded of the tragic crash of a B-52 illustrating a similar circumstance, and this was the pilot's last flight before retiring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6io8Tjv7xk

That very plane is on display at the Udvar-Hazy center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, at Dulles airport. Plane nerds MUST go there!! Incredible place.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_F._Udvar-Hazy_Center

youtube video of the barrel roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_khhzuFlE

thank you... i was wondering why they did this.

> "She’s a darn good-looking airplane… An incredible honor for me"

don't all 747's look the same by definition? lol

Or here https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n863gt#2f0b1162 Took 2 1/2 hours to plot this :)

Is the dashed blue line their intended route, or what they would submit to ATC? Differs quite a bit from the actual flight.

It took them 2 hours and 40 minutes to complete the easter egg

They could also just spoof the ADS-B data right?

This is what I was curious about. Presumably ATC wasn't calling out vectors, they were doing it through their own navigation. So did ATC basically give them free movement within a certain box and certain altitude? It looks like they did the moves at about 10,000 feet.

Yeah, just look at how balanced the design looks. Either they programmed that flight path or the pilot spent a lot of time on an etch-a-sketch growing up.

There's cost and opportunity cost and marketing, so who knows? But it looks like it doubled the leg length, I'd guess cost and opportunity cost into the 100k+.

Not a flight buff, but...

- Jet fuel from NYC to LAX seems to cost ~$10k.[1]

- You pay a pilot $50 / hour salary. (+100% more with benefits?)[2]

- Double all of that for a bunch of random things I can't think of (airport fees?)

My napkin math seems to indicate this couldn't possibly cost Boeing more than $10-20k? Pretty small potatoes to such a large company.

[1] https://simpleflying.com/commercial-airliner-fuel-cost/ [2] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Commercial-Pilot-Salar...

Back of envelope ... 1 gallon of fuel per second [0], 2.5 hrs, $2.5 per gallon = $22,500

That's uh...pretty rough and I'm not a flight buff, but wanted to do the bare minimum for the exercise.

[0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/qu...

* edited the ppg

Wisdom of crowds and all that, i’m guessing around $30k ?

My working was:

+2 hours (a path that should take 0.5 hours took 2.5h according to flight radar)

According to a random aviation site, an unspecified 747 revision at unspecified altitude with unspecified engines burns 4 litres per second, so take that with a bag of salt!

Jet A1 fuel at $1/litre-ish

$30k-ish ?

I don't know anything about flight deliveries. But, including a set of basic flight maneuvers makes sense to me. In which case they would be maneuvering anyway and they decided to go out in style. Big salutes to them who set it up.

Former pilot here: $3-4 million easy. FAA regulations alone require $500k per sky-number drawn by any aircraft [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKOFTEN

I'm guessing it is in the range of 50..60k. The sibling posts come up with lower values, including only fuel, ignoring the cost of the required regular (flight hours in this case) maintenance.

Costs them $0 if they just bill the customer who the delivery was for.

Do it as part of a flight that needs to happen anyway (such as this one, which was a delivery)? Probably not much more than the fuel and overtime the pilots needed to fly a few extra turns.

Someone in a different thread estimated 2.4 tons of fuel, equating to 16.8 tons of CO2 emissions

For comparison the average US household produces ~7.5 tons of CO2 emissions every year so that's ~2.24 years of the average household's emissions

When you have been away from them for a while and you're used to just spending time in terminals with nothing but 737s everywhere, when you come back to a terminal with a 747 at the gate, it is a bit awe inspiring to see just how big these are. Similar to the first time walking up to a 777, A380, etc. They are just huge (or the 737 is tiny).

I flew on the upper deck a few times between Seattle and London - great way to travel! Even got to see the Northern Lights more than once...

Like most people a 747 was my first long haul flight. I've not been lucky enough to fly the upper deck but a few years ago, I did get to fly in the nose, seat 1A. A great experience, strange being in front of the pilots and surprisingly noisy when the nose gear is moving up or down

As for being the most beautiful civilian aircraft. I see your 747 and raise you a Concorde

I had the pleasure and privilege to sit under the pilot on a BA 747 from LHR to SFO. Amazing experience. That plane has been melted down and made into beer cans.

You can literally just give the flight computer a list of lat-lons and have it fly arbitrary routes in the sky in 3D.

If I was going to do it with my avionics, I'd do it with GPS user-defined-waypoints driving the auto-pilot.

Some of the turns are way too tight to be done by the autopilot. But it looks very regular, so I would suspect some custom control system was used. Would also be interested to know how they did this!

Given that they flew this below 15k feet, not requiring the full IFR flight plan which would be required above that altitude, I suspect they might have hand flown this out by Moses lake by following a magenta line on a map.

They could have also just programmed the FMS with the waypoints and the plane flew itself.

Was just thinking of HPGL when I saw this.

Would be neat to have an AutoCAD driver for the 747 navigation system.

Vector Display you say? Now... the next logical step is to make it play Doom (or Quake)..... with an extremely low framerate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMli33ornEU

I am grateful I don’t live in the world you live in

I'm sad you are getting downvoted for this. This was my first thought as well. You are not a party pooper and you live in reality.

I like the atmosphere/branding of aviation and prefer flights over train travel as an experience, but after my wife recently wrote an article about the handling of emission information by the sector and I read many of the more science- and engineering-focused studies she is referencing in her work I am now officially horrified by flying.

It's just so damned inefficient and the industry is so disingenuous about it (layers of fraud related to carbon offset schemes, lobbying, etc.) and tries so hard to talk customers out of caring that stunts like this do not read as the heartwarming celebration of the engineering crafts it once would have. Instead being this wasteful and callous makes a mockery of trying to engineer a better world.

It's a misuse of a magnificent tool we should respect more surgically for its utility and risks.

> I would've thought a larger fleet of smaller planes would be less efficient because it increases operational cost and you have more overhead weight to move around.

You'd be wrong. Airline bosses (Willie Walsh? Almost sure it was him) have said it literally costs less to have two 787 fly one after the other than a single A380. The fuel efficiency of twin engine planes compared to 3 or 4 older engines compensates for the lower capacity.

Jumbo jets are not being retired. That term applies to any airplane with two aisles between the seats or a "wide body". Currently produced examples from Boeing are the 767, 777 and 787. The 747 is simply not economical when compared to those newer airframes. Mot of the final run of 747s and I believe of those still in operation are used for cargo operations, this was an expected outcome even in the 1960s, although for different reasons. For airlines it is about running the plane at capacity and minimizing time on the ground. Airlines choose specialized models for the routes they run. The super jumbos are simply too big to be practical or economical.

Fuel economy is one piece of the puzzle. Another major piece is that passengers prefer the flexibility offered by smaller, more frequent flights instead of larger, less frequent flights.

Fuel efficiency is one part, but the increased consumer preference for direct flights is another, while the business model for the A380s was basically "ferry all your passengers to the nearest hub on A320s then use A380s to bring them from hub to hub". But instead larger twinjets like the B787 and A350 which could do these direct routes more economically won.

> if there's a spike in passenger numbers?

The number of airline passengers goes up every year except for a couple of years where there have been dips due to major world events.

Wendover Productions has a great video on this topic:

Big Plane vs Little Plane (The Economics of Long-Haul Flights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlIdzF1_b5M

Four engine airliners are 2x more expensive to maintain. The extension of ETOPS to longer distances was their death knell.

Interesting. I often feel safer in smaller (but not too small planes), where I don't see the wings visibly flapping. Something like a A320 or a 737.

With 747s the wings flap up and down quite visibly in turbulence, and you can even see the fuselage twisting if the curtains aren't closed between the sections.

There's also just the wall thickness to mass ratio. You ever notice that you can crash toy RC cars all you want and they never break, but if you crash a real car even mildly it's rather easily totaled?

Zooming in isn't even necessary because you can use the flight playback scrollbar to see the little plane move along the route.

Too late - it's gone past 747 points :(

I can't answer your question directly, but the modern 737 is a 2010s aircraft forced into a 1965 design. Many, many problematic design decisions have been visited upon the low-rise airframe, and many critics of the plane think the 737s should have been retired long ago in favor of a new narrow-body aircraft. I don't think those kinds of design problems are present in the 777, which was a new design from the ground up.

> The question in my mind is, what replaces the 747, and is it safe? Looks like 777X is going to replace 747.

The 747 has been replaced for passenger service for decades. This isn't the first time production has been halted. The 777 has been around since the 1990s. With the 767, 777, and 787 there's really no need for the 747 anymore, especially for passenger service.

> Does the 777X have the same design flaws as the 737 MAX, namely larger engine, positioned forward in way that destabilizes the airframe?

In a word, no.

The 777X looks more like the 737NG vs the 737 Classic. It's stretched and has new wings, but the engines on the 777 were already massive. The 777 started with 330cm diameter engines and the new ones are 335cm. Given the gear arrangement on the 777 I doubt they had to move the engines forward.

Further, the 737 MAX crashes weren't directly caused by moving the engines, it was more caused by MCAS and a lack of training and explanation. Boeing tried to make the 737 MAX feel like a 737NG, but the plane itself wasn't inherently unstable.

The 777X does not have MCAS:

> Boeing stated that the 777X does not have an equivalent of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that is installed on the 737 MAX and that played a role in two crashes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777X

Does the GPDR even apply here? If it does, maybe I should start blocking all of Europe’s netblocks….

Y'all stop downvoting this, it's a legitimate complaint.

Not sure what device you're on, but on desktop Firefox, I see a "Show Purposes" button and have the option to configure which cookies I want and don't.

Seems fair. Why should they treat their (voluntary) web-visitors any better than the owners/pilots of the aircraft they collect data from without any form of consent?

> Couldn't they have just paid FlightAware to add some data to the track?

Huh? Why would FlightAware agree to this? What would the point even be?

By that logic Boeing could just pay to have their carbon numbers falsified too. May as well falsify the population numbers too while they are at it.

You can criticize the carbon emissions but why advocate for falsifying data? They could have just... not done the flight.

> I thought all new Boeings flew out over the pacific so at the moment the customer signs the paperwork receiving the airplane, it was someplace where there would be no state or local sales tax.

I'm pretty sure that's an urban legend; I've seen the same story, but never evidence for it.

And I suppose Boeing put down $1.00 on the bill of sale? Give me a break. It's not a handshake deal on an El Camino. Give the IRS some credit here please. If this was feasible every bank and e-commerce site in the world would be hosted in international water.

Really? You're going to downvote me because I'm reporting something I heard, not even trying to pass it off as fact. Okaaaay.

Very unlikely the same height. They could be kilometers apart. It's a 3D space.

Without knowing how far you're zoomed in on the map or the altitude of the two planes, I can assure you that they're nowhere near each other.

The planes are not drawn to scale. Looks like your screenshot is over South Dakota. Looking at the scale on the map those planes are around 6km apart, not considering altitude differences.

That seems neither close nor something special. There are different flight levels, so planes can cross each other safely.

Now that you know, see if you can find an airport with bad weather and check out the holding patterns they do. You'll se a half dozen planes in the same circle separated by 1,000ft vertically.