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Posted
  PromoTheRobot said:
Ever see a Lockheed C5-A up close?  US Military transport plane bigger than a 747 or this Airbus.  I saw one when I was a teen visiting my brother at Griffis AFB in Rome NY.  (long gone now)  Anyone know if they still fly them?

 

http://www.ece.osu.edu/~daim/pcx4/C5A.jpg

 

PTR

203229[/snapback]

 

They still fly them, and they are still the biggest cargo plane (by far) in the US fleet. The Russians have bigger ones, but they are designed like sh--. Of course, now that the C5 is getting older, it spends most of it's time in maintnance. Just too damn big to keep running well.

Posted
  DC Tom said:
Maybe the US airline industry.  In other places, it's about volume.  There's a reason Japan uses 747s for inter-island hops: enough people fly the routes that as a practical matter, they can't use smaller planes.  There's a limit to the frequency of takeoffs from a single runway (about a minute, I think), once you hit that limit, the only way to push more people through a given runway is to increase the size of the planes rather than the frequency of flights. 

 

As far as I can tell, there is no real market for super-jumbos in the continental US routes; rather, there's a need for increased efficiency and decreased cost-of-operation that Boeing's 7E7 is intended to satisfy.  But that doesn't mean the rest of the world necessarily shares the same needs.  I wouldn't be surprised if JAL ultimately started buying A380s configured for 700 or 800 seats for their short-hop routes.  That's how the 747 evolved...and the basic needs of the market haven't changed since then.

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Similar situation in Europe as Japan, where runway space is at a premium (Heathrow for London for example). Transatlantic flights will use these as well as whatever monster Boeing brings out in the near future.

Posted
  ROCCEO said:
The little vertical ad on the side has a picture of a 747 landing in st. maarten, I've been there and stood on teh beach, which is right accross the street from teh runway, it quite the site, but I found it a little uncomfortable to be right behind the runway(holy sand in the face).

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I've seen many photos of that and they just amaze me. I'd love to be on that beach sometime.

 

http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=1075

 

http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=15

 

http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=6

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