Flew this wonderful aircraft for KLM for fifteen years, now on the Boeing 767-300ER. Evolante is right in his breakdown of the different versions. We also had the first stretched upper-deck freighters, the PH-BUH, and PH-BUI. The “H” was sold to Martinair Holland back in May, 2003, and the “I” was just sold to Southern Air Transport, along with PH-BUL for spare parts. All the Boeing 747-200SUD/300 will have left the KLM fleet at the end of November. They will be replaced by Boeing 777-200ER, and one more Boeing 747-400 freighters at least (we have two so far).
Only three Boeing 747-200SUD/300 that we operated were full pax configured the rest were Combi’s.
The cockpit upgrade actually was done in concert with Canadian Marconi (I believe BAE now owns them). The project was started to replace the maintenance intensive engine tape instruments, and the Delco INS’s. It took a lot of time to get the Supplemental Type Certificate (two years longer than planned), and for the last three years of the aircrafts time we flew with the upgrade. I am sure that the long certification period had nothing to do with the fact that we choose the Canadian solution rather than the Boeing solution (at twice the price).
After the upgrade, our primary navigation was triple GPS, we also had triple IRS, as backup and to power the ADI’s and some additional systems. It also contained three FMC computers and three full color CDU’s. The HSI and ADI were replaced by EFIS LCD displays. It was a solid line-up giving us incredible accuracy and reliability.
In my years there wasn’t a continent we didn’t fly to with the Classics. The last few years we concentrated on North America, India, Carribean. And the freighters did a lot of work to Asia and the middle east.
These aircraft were incredible workhorses and my close to 10,000 hours on them will always be a cherished memory. The 767 isn’t bad though.
Regards, O.
