#3: World’s oldest 747 completes final service
Another aircraft was popular enough to earn a bronze medal in our Air Cargo World popularity contest – and it wasn’t even a freighter. Last month, on Nov. 26, we published this image of a KLM 747-400 passenger jet, known as the “City of Bangkok,” and retiring as the oldest operational 747 then in service. The photo was taken after its final Los Angeles (LAX) to Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) run, completing more than 29 years of service, 134,000 flight hours and 36,000 take-offs and landings. The end of an era – in this case, the reign of the four-engined widebody – tends to make even the toughest of aviation veterans wistful, and readers showed that with their clicks. It will be a slow goodbye, however. Today, KLM has eleven 747-400s left in its passenger fleet, all to be replaced by 777s and 787s by 2021.