2008.10.28 – 21.47 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)
Excel Airways Boeing 737-8Q8 photo by Rui Sousa
Somehow, I think I’d feel somewhat uneasy about boarding a plane that had so much damage done to it that it required a door replacement… though you can’t argue it’s not shiny!
Reminds me of a story my dad told me about a business trip to the United States back in the mid 90s. He and some of his American work colleagues were walking across the tarmac to board a Continental Airlines DC-9 when his boss abruptly stopped dead in his tracks and said he refused to fly on such an old plane. He later revealed that he was an airline enthusiast and that he recognised the registration printed on the side from a fairly serious accident and that they had obviously just patched the plane back together again. Scary stuff.
2008.05.10 – 02.33 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)
Despite WordPress assigning this post as p1155, this is in fact the 737th post! Yes, it’s time for another one of our favourite Useless Rubenerd Blog milestones!
I thought I’d celebrate this useless post by espousing some facts on the Boeing 737 which, ironically, has the same family model number as this post.
A late Ansett Australia Boeing 737-377 showing the weird landing gear wells and triangular engines, by Frank Schaefer
- Sales
- The 737 is the greatest selling aircraft family of all time; placing the value of the design even higher than the revenues from Jim Kloss Domestic Airways before he sold out to Alaska Air. Wondered how he managed to buy all that land and audio equipment? Now you know!
Wikipedia claims that since 1967 there have been over 7,800 ordered and over 5,600 delivered (as of 2008), there are over 1,250 of the type airborne at any given time and on average a 737 departs or lands somewhere every five seconds.
- Weird design!
- Unlike virtually any other modern jetliners, the landing gear in the 737 aren’t covered by any doors, they retract into special wells and become flush with the fuselage.
The turbofans are also weird in that they’re not circular or elliptical, but almost a rounded triangle shape! This was due to the fact that the earlier generation 737’s from the 1960s used long, thin turbojets wheras the more modern airframes use CFM56’s turbofans which are shorter and much wider, and therefore require a hell of a lot more ground clearance!
- Design nostaligia
- The cockpit section (at least externally) is close to identical to the Boeing 727 trijet and the 707, America’s first and the world’s earliest commercially successful jet airliner from 1958!
These three designs also share the same fuselage width, and their use of tires on the landing gear and doors to enter and exit the aircraft.
More than you ever thought you needed to know, or wanted to know I’m sure. What can I say, I’m a guy with a lot of varying, unrelated and highly unnecessary interests!
737 flying over Adelaide :). Taken by David Morrell.
The black building right in the background in the CBD is where my office at Oracle was. It really is a beautiful city.
2007.08.07 – 18.01 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)
It’s just one of those things: when you start unpacking a after moving house you rediscover all this old crap you probably hadn’t looked at for years. In this case I stumbled upon not one, but two pieces of old Ansett Australia memorabilia!
If you didn’t know, Ansett was an Australian airline that went belly-up in 2001 due to financial mismanagement, rising costs and lower passenger numbers after the 11th of September attacks in the US. We’ll blame Air New Zealand 
This was an older model I finished of a 747-300, you can tell it’s not a -400 series because it doesn’t have the winglets. The weird camera angle is the result of my trying to disguise the fact that during the move the starboard wing had snapped off. Yes, it has only one wing. You can’t tell though… right?
The second model was a kit for a Boeing 727-200 my dad picked up in Japan of all places, with all the original parts and little paint jars. Good times.
Being a business traveller my dad and us had flown with them extensively during the 90s before we moved to Singapore and SIA became my favourite airline ;). We always preferred them to QANTAS, the service was generally better even though the planes they flew were older.
Post to del.icio.us
