Boeing’s Newest, Oldest Airliners Fly Together

[Blue_Tires]

Boeing’s chief test pilot Mike Carriker was able to take a brief break from the busy flight test duties earlier this month to fly formation with the oldest flying Boeing airplane. After photos were leaked on the internet last week, many were thinking it was a creative digital editing job, but the photo shoot has been in the works for a long time.

“It really took a lot of work and planning,” Carriker said. “When I came alongside the Model 40 against those big puffy clouds it was unbelievable: Here is this 1928 biplane flying with a 2010 airplane side by side.”

With owner Addison Pemberton flying the Model 40 as fast as possible, Carriker was able to slow down the 787 enough so a Pemberton’s son, riding in a third plane, could take the image as the 787 flew by its (great-great-great-great?) grandparent. The two airliners were flying near Mt. Rainier southeast of Seattle.

The Boeing Model 40 was the first aircraft built by the company that was designed to carry paying passengers. With the new airplane, Boeing won the contract to carry mail from San Francisco to Chicago in 1927.

In addition to carrying mail in a compartment in front of the cockpit, the Model 40 could carry two fare paying passengers! Within a few years the company expanded service nationwide operating as the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation. Soon Boeing and other airplane makers were building aircraft to carry many more passengers to accommodate the growing demand.

The Boeing Model 40C pictured above was restored by Pemberton and Sons Aviation. The airplane had crashed in 1928 and flew again after thousands of hours of work in 2008.



Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/05/boeings-newest-and-oldest-airliners-fly-together/#ixzz0qGpVUKX2

[petronius]

1. Neat! Pretty impressive that they were able to restore an 80 year old wreck;

it probably wasn't stored too well for all that time. Stories like that tend to reduce my nervousness about flying - planes are a lot tougher than I assume...

[hayu_lol]

2. Trivia comment: Pilots were issued parachutes in these...

passenger-carrying aircraft...the passengers were not. Some pilots refused to wear chutes since the passengers did not have any.

[petronius]

8. The site that guitar man linked to below sort of alludes to that

In the original crash, the pilot apparently made a choice to try and fly under some clouds because he knew the passenger couldn't parachute to safety if they got trapped above the clouds. However, the passenger ended up dying anyway...

http://home.comcast.net/~biplane0/boeing40/CRASH.pdf

[guitar man]

6. reconstruction photos

It's very impressive, they had to hand fabricate a whole lot to put it back together

http://home.comcast.net/~biplane0/boeing40/construction/

[petronius]

7. They practically built a whole plane

It's a little creepy that the passenger was killed when the plane originally crashed - I wonder how the 1928 pilot would feel to know it's flying again.

Beautiful plane, though, and quite an achievement...

Edit - thanks for the great link!

[guitar man]

9. Pretty much

About all you really need is the tube fuselage frame and a set of data plates and you can pretty much hand fabricate the rest of the airplane around that to the blueprints which is what they did . Thousands of hours of meticulous work. A beautiful airplane, I agree.

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. Oh, man - the first passanger plane! I bet there was no security/safety talk,

"There will be no meal or beverage service on this flight", and nothing about "in case of loss of pressure".

:rofl:

I bet the whole pre-flight safety talk went like this:

Pilot: Are you in? Good. Hold the hell on, because this gets rough.

[Archae]

4. "In case of emergency..."

"Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye!" :-)

[Old Troop]

5. Well that's cool. It also makes me feel better about flying today -- an

open cockpit is really uncomfortable.

[applegrove]

10. A local businessman bought a spitfire airplane. He called a friend of my dad's,

who is in his nineties and who had flown spitfires during WWII,for advice on how to fly it. The business man also offered to let my dad's friend fly it....did I mention he was in his nineties? Anyway. My dad's friend's wife had a "bird" and said no way. LOL!

[Blue_Tires]

11. wow...amazing...