Unlike Airbus aircraft, IIRC there is no design life limit on Boeing aircraft, so does it really matter how old the airframe is? As long as its looked after and maintained IAW its AMP and EASA regulations, that's fine isn't it?

And to compare it to Ryanair... please! A BA 747 would operate around 600 cycles a year? Whereas a FR 738 is thrashed up to approx 1800-2000 cycles per year, over a 5 year period before they sell them on.

There are still A300s in operation from the 1970s! The vast majority of components are replaced during the life of the airframe, so in essence its a new aircraft anyway. And the more safety critical components are 'lifed' and replaced or O/H after a certain number of hours/cycles.

Nah, just break out the smartphone with a gps chip. Works in a car :}

Well yes and no. If you're talking about rotable components, that's true, but most of the primary structure will be as delivered from Boeing. We're not talking about, say, RAF Hawks - some of which are flying around with new wings and new fuselages. :O

But your point is a valid one. When airlines retire aircraft it's normally because they have become too expensive to operate (fuel burn, maintenance, etc) compared to what else is available, not because they have started to fall out of the sky.

Old at 17? The Vickers VC 10 has just retired after nearly half a century of service! Yes I know much of its service has not been comparable with daily airline service, but still an impressive innings to show how long a well engineered plane can last.

Monarch has 4 A300-600R still in service (absolute workhorse) since 1990,
and never really played up that much.

also some 757 flying around still with a few holiday airlines are late 1980's vintage

BA's 747-136 PW powered started life in the very early 70's and went on for well over 20 years, until late 1999 with BA!

the Roller powered -236 series didn't have such a BA long life in comparison.

If you progress to big aeroplanes you'll find out why not - unless you absolutely have to.
p.s. Edit to note that you are the first person I've seen use the DR term correctly and not call it 'dead reckoning' :ok:

Not now. Used to be 12 or 15k when leased by rental company from manufacturer and mileage limit was just there for resale value.
Now some hire companies buy cars and run them up to 50k miles. Y'all check those tyres :ok:

Monarch has THREE A300-600R in service. One went to the graveyard in Tupelo Ms last November, followed a few days later by a 1992-build A320. All three remaining A300s are due to be withdrawn by next March, along with two of the older A320s.

ah thanks for the update...i knew their time was close for withdrawal...

Eddie Stobart does operate 24 year old ATRs, albeit under a different brand.

This serves as a reminder: I'll have to dig up my DVD of White Nights and re-watch it.

Hardware problem much more likely..

Way back when, the Boeing design life was 20 years/60,000 hours/30,000 cycles. I'm pretty sure it's higher now, but I don't know the specifics.

That being said, Boeing is on record as saying that "with proper maintenance" their airplanes can be flown indefinitely.

In the aftermath of the Aloha 737 "Convertible" (when the upper half of the forward fuselage ripped off in flight) the FAA developed new 'aging airplane' requirements - basically additional inspections and such that were needed on older airframes. Boeing has supported the development of these requirements (I presume brand A has done the same).

There are a number of (relatively) low cycle 767 and 747 aircraft out there that are north of 100k hours. While most of the high time 747s are freighters (i.e. freighter conversions), most of the high time 767s are still passenger versions. I've heard that the operators really like the 767 for long routes thin routes - easy to fill and low maintenance.

A few years back I had to do a flight test on a BA 747-400 out of the BA maintenance base in Wales. Word was that the airplane in question was headed to the desert for storage as soon as we were done with it (it was one of their early -400s). Wondering around the airplane, I noticed that coach was, well, coach. Business was damn nice, but First Class stunk - I considered Business to be much better than First.

Ditto - not only is a "new" s/w problem unlikely on an aircraft that was certified 24 years ago, equipment cooling has minimal s/w involvement.

As proven by Sriwijaya Air, Express Air and Trigana Air in Indonesia who still operate B737-200s on regular commercial flights!!

The largest airline in the world is still flying around DC9-50s from the 1970s. They even have Wi-Fi.

dead reckoning
 

@Basil
I had always used "dead reckoning" - so I looked it up.

The Oxford English Dictionary has never heard of ded reckoning or ded-reckoning but has an entry for dead reckoning.

The origin of the phrase is not known.

World Wide Words: Dead reckoning has one explanation of the origin of "ded".

I'll be staying dead.

Even by PPruNe standards, this is an old chestnut.

From 2005:

www.pprune.org/african-aviation/176448-attention-ded-reckoning-navigators.html

p.s. Edit to note that you are the first person I've seen use the DR term correctly and not call it 'dead reckoning'

Some of the old skills sometimes come in handy. I remember reading an article in a very old The Log about the exploits of a BA B747-200 skipper. If I remember correctly they were over the Pacific and picked up a yacht radio call on 121.5. The yacht skipper was lost. The BA skipper, who must have come off the old B707 fleet and even before, was navigator qualified: sextant and all that good old fart stuff. He asked the yachty some pertinent questions about start point, time of trip, planned route, guesstimate of location, sun direction & angle etc. He calculated a likely grid position and gave a steer to nearest landfall. I believe it worked. You'll appreciate the memory is very dusty, but DR with a few added tit bits can work wonders.
Francis Chichister did something clever on his Tiger Moth trip across the Tasman Sea. First solo crossing with a very light fuel load for the trip. Could not afford to get lost. He had no wind information in those days, just a guess. He pre-calculated some astro fix readings and set off on a track which he believed would take him either left or right of target ( I can't remember which he decided to opt for.) That way he knew which way to turn once time was up. After an allotted time he took a sun reading and plotted actual position; compared it to pre-planned position and thus calculated the wind. He could then re-plot his next sector and repeat. He made it very accurately. An epic piece of flying and navigating. DR is alive and well but perhaps not best suited to B747's over perhaps hostile territory.

A Flight Navigator was required for any flight of 1000 nm over water or 1500nm over land, or more and must have a sextant, a drift sight and some means of checking the compass. A F/N licence was required for a Commercial Airship Licence. ( Why? I don't know !) That was in the early 1950s.

Francis Chichester's flight and his chart were published in " The Lonely Sea and the Sky" and were taught later as Astro Homing to would be Navigators.
'
He wrote a paper for the first issue of the Journal of the Institute of Navigation ( not yet Royal) called " Is Met really necessary". He suggested that a Navigator should be able to work out the pressure distribution for his flight from his own observed W/Vs.

Astro was much easier with HO249 or ANT pre-computed tables. I never tried spheroidal trigonometry in flight. But I was able to get a few Captains to take some star shots and plot them for themselves for the first time. ( I cautioned them with the story of G-ALDN, the Hermes in the desert.)

LT

Lonely Sea & Sky is a wonderful read. I obtained it in mid-60's. Inspirational. I know very little of astronomy and all the twinkling names. Never did astro nag, but now I see the newbies with their iphones pointed at the sky and marvel that they now know the names of the heavens. But do they know the stories behind the names, or is that for wikipedia to tell them. How much you could learn flogging across the world behind IRS/GPS with so much free time, until it all goes tits up as with BA 747's. Doesn't the iphone have a "home James" app?

In a manner of speaking, yes. ;)

Cant help myself.. But when someone calls out the 744 in BAs fleet as old (refering that to the Irkutsk diversion) is just being blatantly ignorant. And then to compare that with Ryanairs fleet? Come on!

If some of you had the slightest clue to how much wear and tear those 738s have to tackle compared to BAs 744, you'd be thinking twice before boarding a Ryanair machine again...

When I attended Antwerp maritime academy, we still had to know 60 stars by sight, perform astro nav. ( bloody difficult I tell you) and use and maintain the sextant. One time, during a apprenticeship exercise on a Belgian Navy ship, we had an English Navigational officer onboard via NATO cooperation ...she wasn't taught the use of sextant, never heard of astro nav... So even in shipping, things are quickly changing and the whole art of Navigation is quickly disappearing.

At least we must know in the Northern Hemisphere to identify Polaris, Ursa Major, the Orion belt, Rigel, Betelgeuze and Sirius. Most FO's do not have a clue, I try to enlighten them:)
We owe it to our profession to keep at least some traditions intact.

jimjim1,
Re: ded. or dead.
Much indebted for another viewpoint.

I wouldnt "think" at all. I'd rather walk . . .

If the ones who think age is all would have any notion of the differences between handling characteristics of the supercritical wings of the A330, B777 et al, compared to the "heavy metal" of the 25 year old B747, they would think twice.
On the B747 you seldomly use the "fasten belts" switch. Says it all....

is not relevant with long haul aircraft.
The issue was reliability and not fatigue bytheway...
And I was pointing out that the older aircraft, with their disadvantages of perhaps lower reliability dispatch rates, still have some huge advantages.
For instance a stable and smooth ride...
When I hear others complaining about the ride I hardly see a ripple in my coffee on my "unreliable" dinosaur.
And while landing in a storm in a B777 or A330 can be a challenge, in the B747 the only challenge is if the windspeed is over the door-limit....

Travel time, the same
 

Must have something to do with the speed of sound...

It did, but then Concorde was retired:sad:

Mr WHBM Senior :ok: (WW2 nav, Halifax and later DC3) once told me he took along a few times his log tables and 12" slide rules from school days and on the sector home did the calcs from first principles.

I recall being on a BA One-Eleven service out of Birmingham in the 1990s, in the last couple of months of service. The interior was immaculate, totally clean, nothing broken, nothing even discoloured. This after 25 years of service.

In contrast the BA European 767s, even a few years ago, had been allowed to get into a dreadful state internally, and regulars on the Moscow flight on Flyertalk started a list, by aircraft registration, of all the unresolved cabin issues which plagued those flights, including broken, missing or filthy cabin fittings, many of which should have been standard stores items. The worst was G-BZHC, whose cabin lighting had some longstanding intermittent issue that caused all the lights to flash on and off at random - this aircraft gained the long-running soubriquet of "The Disco", and regulars said their hearts would sink when they saw it on the gate. Now at the time ZC was the newest 767 in the fleet, less than 10 years old. There really is no excuse for such maintenance budget cheeseparing, and to be frank, saying that it's only non-vital components that this is done with, having two completely different maintenance regimes for different components, strains credulity.

http://www.pprune.org/passengers-slf...ml#post5777138

Ded Reckoning
 

Ded -for Deduced Reckoning. -And to be nit pickitty; looking out of the window with a map is called 'Pilotage'. Ded Reckoning calls for a chart & a stopwatch, and works in IMC (in principal)..:rolleyes:

Irkutsk is quite nice. I can think of plenty of places I'd like a lot less to be stuck for 10 hours - Heathrow, for example.

You'll be pleased to know WHBM that all of the short haul 767s had an interior upgrade last year and are now actually quite nice. They even have flat screens hanging from the ceiling rather than those flickery old monitors that never used to work!

As for the 747s, some of them are falling to pieces and others are still quite nice. I flew on G-BNLR last week from BKK. Dreadful thing. Hopefully the most dilapidated ones will get the boot soon. Some of the older 747s with New First (Prime) are being retired over the next few months. The new-ish cabins from these aircraft will be used to replace some of the middle-aged 747s that still have old First fitted.

Despite moaning about the interiors, I still love the Queen of the Skies!

Champ