The almost 20 year-old aircraft is the last of the airline's standard Boeing B747-400 aircraft, powered by Rolls Royce RB211 engines. The remaining six Boeing B747s in the Qantas fleet are B747-400ER, variants which are powered by General Electric (GE) CF6 engines.
VH-OJU was delivered to Qantas in the year 2000 and has completed more than 90,000 flight hours and flown over 70 million kilometres.
Central Queensland plane spotters had the pleasure of photographing VH-OJU during the recently joint Military Exercise Talisman Sabre 2019 (TS19) when it operated a troop charter flight into Rockhampton Airport arriving from Sydney and departing to Adelaide on Monday 29 July - see more HERE.
And during the middle part of this week, it was announced that VH-OJU will have a second life flying as a Rolls-Royce test aircraft. Qantas Airways has sold the B747-400 to Rolls-Royce, which will convert the aircraft to a flying test bed.
 |
| Rolls-Royce / https://www.flickr.com/ |
After arriving into Los Angeles at the start of the week, it spent two days on the ground at Qantas’s Los Angeles Airport maintenance facility. VH-OJU was then ferried to Grant County International Airport at Moses Lake in Washington State where, reportedly over the next two years, all 364 business, premium economy and economy seats will be removed to make room for the instruments and testing equipment for Rolls-Royce’s engine testing program.
Rolls-Royce currently flys an almost 40 year old Boeing B747-200 classic jumbo registered N787RR.
 |
| Rolls-Royce / https://www.flickr.com/ |
 |
| Rolls-Royce / https://www.flickr.com/ |
This particular aircraft was once flown by Cathay Pacific Airways as VR-HIA/B-HIA and Air Atlanta Icelandic as TF-ATD before being acquired by Rolls-Royce as a test bed aircraft in June 2005.
Photos taken by Bernie Proctor, Scott Harris, 'IAD' and Steve Vit ©
No comments:
Post a Comment