Death of an Airliner

[mfraser]

This did the rounds at work today....... it brings a tear to your eye!! Its the first Air New Zealand 747-419 to be broken up for scrap, which heralds in the new age of its longhaul fleet. Air New Zealand will replace the 747 fleet with five Boeing 777-300ER longhaul jets from Dec this year.

PLANE FACTS: During its 19-year career Air New Zealand's first Boeing 747-400 registration ZK-NBS:

- Carried 3.6 million passengers on 11,490 flights
- Has flown 88,300 hours, spending more than half its life airborne
- Travelled 80 million kilometres, the equivalent of about 2000 return trips from Auckland to London.

[happytraveller]

Is there any chance that I could have the cockpit to make the ultimate 747 sim???? Shame to cut it up when I could make good use of it!!!

smooth landings.

[IslandBoy77]

That's no way for a '47 to go out...

[AlisterC]

I can't believe it didn't get snapped up for conversion to cargo. With Air NZ's excellent maintenance records, I would have thought it would have been top on a cargo conversion list. I guess there is little market for 4 engine airliners these days..

[Ian Warren]

Matt , Noooo ... That and me Brain injury .. that really curdles my noodle !

amazing stat : It carried almost the NZ pop: in 19 years .

[pilotgallagher01]

Although it's done many hours, I don't understand why it has to be scrapped?
Surely it could still be used for something else as others have said e.g cargo ops
But is it cheaper for air nz to just send it to the scarp yard?

[andrewb]

QUOTE (pilotgallagher01 @ Nov 6 2010, 04:05 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Although it's done many hours, I don't understand why it has to be scrapped?
Surely it could still be used for something else as others have said e.g cargo ops
But is it cheaper for air nz to just send it to the scarp yard?

I'm not sure how these things work (aircraft leaving a fleet) but my guess would be Air NZ just wanted it off their hands (as they will with the rest of the 744's they're retiring), and there would be appropriate channels for aircraft to go up for sale or scrap and whoever makes the best bid wins. Not much they could do if no-one stuck their hand up to buy it for conversion to freighter or whatever...

[H500Fan]

I watched a program on Nat Geo the other day about scrapping a 747 like this, and "scrapping" it was probably not a fair representation of what went on. The very carefully stripped it down selling engines, electronics including gauges, panels and hardware, landing gear and even draining out the fuel and getting 30k just for that, not to mentions the hundreds of thousands in other parts they sold. they had 12 weeks to do it and the only part that was crudely ripped to shreds was the core fuselage and wing shells, everything else was removed and sold to go on other a/c.
I hear what your saying how could they just get rid of it, I guess as a company theres only so many seats they can sell so as new aircraft join the fleet the oldest have to go! Maybe the frame was near its life end but certainly component wise could easily be sold on.

[Splitpin]

Sad.. ....i wonder why we cant get a National aviation heritage centre built somewhere, and save some of these things. I read somewhere recently that the first 737 ANZ got was sitting in a yard somewhere....its all history. We can spend god knows how much on the bloody rugby world cup, but nothing where it could be of value to the next generation......take the best from all the museums and display all in one location......just a thought.

[LMerraine]

I thought it was also due for a major cert check, and it wasn't really worth it. They did have it up for sale if I remember correctly.

The 747 breakdown netted the crew $1m usd