747s with 5 engines
As noted by earlier posters, several large airliners have had the capability of carrying a spare engine to an outlying station. It was originally thought that this would prove utile to airlines, however in practice the capabilty has not been widely utilized. Engines are usually transported by other means, sometimes in a chartered freighter, everything from a C130 to a 747 has been used.
It is interesting to note in the picture that the fan has been removed and only the core engine has blockers installed….no doubt this reduces the drag compared to blocking the entire engine…….. though I suspect the drag is still significand and that the resultant performance of the mother ship still leaves a lot to be desired. Carrying an extra 15,000lbs or so would also be quite a significant payload hit. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the commercial forum can actually locate some performance charts for carrying a spare engine around this way.
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
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