Which presents no real problems whatsoever as far as I’m aware beyond the fact certain 4 engined aircraft can continue their journey (the 3 engined BA 747 that flew LAX-LHR a few years ago springs to mind) whereas a twin would have to divert if it were far enough away from its destination, although as usual I’m more than happy to be corrected. I’m no expert on such matters!

The BA 747 was hardly an incident to be proud of……the airplane had a second problem enroute, almost ran out of fuel, ended up declaring an emergency and landed short with something like 10,000 lb of fuel remaining (very light for a 747). IMHO, they should have landed somewhere in the U.S. and not attempted an almost Polar oceanic overflight on 3 engines.

Do they have the same drive trains and power plants?

From post 2 above it appears the LM 2500 is standard throughout.

I know that in the past in the USA the captain usually did all the landings. FOs were lucky to get a landing. That meant that when a FO got command, he did not have a lot of experience at landing. Is this still the case?

I do not believe that to be “standard” any more. Most U.S. airlines of which I am aware swap each leg, unless you are talking long haul/augmented crews or special/really bad weather situations. Normal operating practice in lieu of those two events is for the F/O to fly every other leg.

AA does seem to be in the middle of a bad run right now. Kind of ironic considering the somewhat extreme salary demands their pilots have been making for the last year or two….perhaps they have taken their eye off the ball?

Expansion and development of regional UK airports into long haul, point to point with newer, less fuel hungry types such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 would potentially take the pressure off of Heathrow and Gatwick to expand or indeed be replaced. I suspect those of us currently fed up being herded through LHR only to fly back across our own neighbourhoods enroute to North America, for example, would welcome such a development.

Thus the reason for my inclusion of some of the area airports. Perhaps I didn’t include enough of the outlying British airports.

WRT some of the other criticisms……I didn’t offer an analysis, just raw data. The topic doesn’t require any analysis….the case is pretty obvious on it’s face. Perhaps one should just consider the individual airports themselves:

ATL – 5
CDG – 4
FRA – 3
AMS – 6
JFK – 4
LHR – 2

How much analysis does it take to realize you can’t have a major hub in a city of 14 million people with 2 measly runways?

LGW and LHR are already saturated….The time for planning was 25 years ago. There should have been shovels in the ground years and years ago.

It was used fairly often in the early days of the 747…the P&W engines weren’t mature, I picked up the El Al one on approach to LHR 28R in 1972 when he declined a visual switch to 28L because he was carrying a 5th pod (and presumably didn’t wan’t to do any fancy flying once set up nicely on approach)…which gave me a chance to leg down to the ‘Travellers Friend’ for a photo :)…You can search them out on Airliners .net but you need to use various search terms like 5, five, fifth,spare, engine/s/d for 4-engined types and 4.four,fourth, spare etc… on tri-jets… there’s a cracker by Christos Psarras of a TriStar climbing from Athens with a spare…M West

Thanks for that. Perhaps I was wrong, it might be more accurate to say this capability hasn’t been widely used in the last 15-20 years.

Ooooh come one now, not this list again. Are you sure you can’t figure out how to post a link to the previous thread? It would not be related to us having shot this list to pieces last time around, would it?

Why don’t you indulge me and “shoot to pieces” the argument again?

The fact remains that London does not have enough runways for either it’s population or for it’s future status as a major hub.

But then why is 777-300ER so popular?

IIRC quite a few have been ordered by Asian carriers that used them to replace 747’s…..fulfilling the requirement mentioned earlier by eightandseven. When one considers that 1400 747s have been ordered/built, 400 odd frames isn’t really that impressive.