The first Supertanker was a Boeing 747-200 (see in the video above – N470EV) that was been modified to fight fires. Currently Evergreen uses a Boeing 747-100 (N479EV). It can hold 24,000 gallons of water or fire retardant. The Supertanker fought its first fire in the US on August 31, 2009 at the Oak Glen Fire. The aircraft is housed at McClellan Field outside of Sacramento, CA and is ready to go at any time.
Private Boeing 747-400 that unwanted hitch hiker got a ride on. A6-HRM
It seems that sometimes the dumbest people also get to be the luckiest. A 20 year old man wanted to get from Vienna to London to find a job and didn’t want to have to pay for a ticket. Instead, he climbed under the security fence and climbed up the undercarriage of a private Boeing 747, who belongs to a high-ranking sheik from the United Arab Emirates.
The 747 took off with no passengers aboard and luckily they ran into some thunderstorms. I say luckily because the plane had to fly at about 25,000 feet, which meant the temperature and lack of oxygen didn’t kill the stowaway. However, it is reported that he wasn’t doing too hot (ha, get it not hot) by the time he arrived in London after his 90 minute flight.
“Due to specific circumstances of this flight, he is lucky to have survived, because survival in these cases in quite rare,” said Sidney Dekker, a professor of flight safety at the School of Aviation at Sweden’s Lund University told the Huffington Post. “But on another level, this incident also illustrates the absurdities of security checks.”
Even though there is no official word on his condition, Heathrow officials are stating the man is in a cell and not in a hospital.
Different places on the internet say this pilot was landing in severe crosswind, others say he just wasn’t set up to land correctly. Either way, this is one impressive landing.
Hopefully you never have to experience the safety slide deploying on an aircraft first hand. This video is from 1984 and shows a safety slide deploying from an American Airlines Boeing 747.
