110,000 hours on the clock. That must be up there with one of the oldest passenger airframes in Europe? I gather it would've been retired in the not too distant future?
What are BA doing with their retired airframes? Sending it to Victorville or somewhere similar? Or are they sending them to a salvage company?
Lufthansa retired the first couple of -400s with 118-120k hours. LH really maintains a gold standard of fleet utilization and dispatch reliability.
IIRC -BNLL had a heavy check just recently and definitely wasn't scheduled for retirement in 2014 and 2015. That may now change of course. Depending on the insurer.
It may cost less to put another frame scheduled for retirement through a D-check or heavy C-check (whatever BA does nowadays on the B744), than to repair this frame.
In any case, this proved once again that Boeing's 747 is a tank. Same goes for the 777 as shown at KSFO.