PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Airplane specific weight (hohohoho!..)
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Old 25th May 2004 | 02:28
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Specnut727
 
Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 150
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From: Bris, QLD, Australia
Numbers are only ballpark, because who outside Boeing would know the volume of a 747. Could submerge a model in a bucket and measure displacement I suppose. What we really need is a 3 dimensional cumputer model of the aircraft ! Back to Boeing.

I estimated 2,600 cu.metres, not far from Milt's 100,000 cu.ft.

Based on (round number) MTOW of 400 tonnes, this gives about 150 kg/cu.metre (about 9 lb/cu.ft). Density relative to water of 0.15

For comparison, polystyrene foam is about 50 kg/cu.metre (about 3 lb/cu.ft). Balsa ranges from 3 to 30 lb/cu.ft

I think Milt's figure for air volume of 20% is a bit low. Maybe more like 40% when you consider how much of the PAX and freight space is air. Using 0.9 kg/cu.metre (air at 8,000 ft) I get about 1 tonne of air.

Milt, within the accuracy of all our guesses, you're not far off the mark. Obviously using MTOW or empty weight makes a big difference.

I hope someone finds all this info interesting !

Spec.
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