Aviation News - May 2016

Jumbo Fan

I was disappointed to read in the April issue

that the production rates for the Boeing 747

are to be cut to just 0.5 aircraft per month.

The jumbo made long-haul travel attainable

for the masses and we should not forget that.

My  rst long-haul  ight was on a Virgin

Atlantic Airways 747-100 and one of my

fondest memories of air travel was when I

was invited to visit the  ight deck of a British

Airways 747-200 on a trip from London

Heathrow to Boston in the US.

For such an iconic aircraft to be fading

away like this is extremely sad. Slowly but

surely airlines have been phasing out the

jumbo in favour of the Boeing 777 or Airbus’s

A330 or A380, arguing that they are more

economical. While I understand that from

the airline’s point of view making money is

the objective, the type’s replacements – be

that the 777, A330 or A380, somehow fail to

evoke the same awe.

The crumb of comfort though is the news

that British Airways is upgrading 18 of its

747-400s, suggesting the type still has a

healthy future with the carrier. Long live the

Queen of the Skies.

Brian Bond

Morden, Surrey

Thanks for the two very informative articles on

the Antonov An-124 in the March edition. You

mention in the ‘Russian Air Force Ruslans’

piece about the transportation of the Land

Rovers from Farnborough to Bratsk in 1990.

In fact, two An-124s were involved – both

in air force markings (09 black and 10 black).

I was lucky enough to see them land from

outside the The Swan pub on Farnborough

Road. Interestingly they used their civil

registrations for part of their call signs with

09 black as ‘Aero ot 82038’ and 10 black as

‘Aero ot 82026’.

It was a strange sight at the time to see

two Russian Air Force aircraft landing at an

MOD air eld.

John Murray

Farnborough, Hampshire

B-2 Reinvented?

There has been speculation concerning

the USAF’s new stealth bomber for quite

a while, so I was especially interested to

see the artist’s impression released of what

is now known as the B-21 and read more

details about it in your Headlines pages

(April issue). From an enthusiast’s point of

view, I was very disappointed with the look

of the new aircraft in the artwork – it appears

to be very similar to the B-2 Spirit. Pushing

the boundaries of aerospace technology

has produced some unusual looking aircraft,

such as the F-117 Nighthawk and indeed

the B-2. The  rst Spirit was rolled out in

1988 and was signi cantly different from

the F-117 because technology had moved

on. I naturally assumed that what the

USAF has referred to as the bomber for the

21st century would look very different to

something that  rst  ew in the 1980s.

From what I have read, the USAF is

wanting to reduce risk (and presumably

cost overruns) in the project by using

technology already developed – so that may

partly explain why this seems to be such a

conservative design. Perhaps there will be

more to it than meets the eye, with some

elements of the design held back from the

public for now. It will be interesting to see

how the real aircraft compares with this  rst

impression.

Daniel Weston

By e-mail

Ruslan Revisited

http://www.aviation-news.co.uk 63

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Letter of the Month winner John Murray,

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Military Helicopters – Military Aircraft

of the 20th Century.

LETTER

OF THE MONTH

One of the two Russian Air Force An-124s that visited Farnborough to

pick up Land Rovers for the ‘Camel Trophy 90’ rally in Siberia. John Murray

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