FedEx 727 200 Short Field Landing with audio- Its last flight

nice mountains and good quality

 

The 3 holer is/was one of the great airplanes of all time...

I have a friend who used to fly them and he said it was really a very high performance airplane, lots of power, and lovely to fly (as opposed to pushing buttons and going for a ride)..

They don't build them like that anymore, and we likely won't see the likes of that ever again..

 

Very, very cool...



Smokey engines, reminds me of the Phantom II...

Different engines, though (I think).

 

That's nice to hear. I worked many hours on that airplane and conducted pre-production training classes to production and engineering to inform them of all the new technologies that the airplane would bring. It was a beautifully done airplane design-wise and manufacturing-wise. Three hydraulic systems to fully power all the controls, advanced high lift systems and a roll rate faster than a P-51. Very effective flight controls and a beautiful clean wing. A friend of mine flew them and said that when he gave a landing to a co-pilot he kept his hands , palms up, just below the wheel to make sure that the co-pilot didn't over-controll the airplane near the ground. Lew Wallick, the company test pilot, loved the airplane and did some exciting demonstrations in it. Rumors were that it was rolled more than once. It was one of Boeing's best and much of the wing and high lift system technology was used on the 747.

 

One of the great looking passenger aircraft too.

A friend used to fly them many years ago. He loved them.

 

At the 1970 Fort Lauderdale Air Races at Executive Airport, an Eastern 727 did a high-speed low-level pass, and then did a short-field landing. That was quite spectacular!

 

Wonderful airplane. Seeing that one on it's last flight makes me a bit sad.

Is FedEx getting rid of all of them?

 

757's
FedEx Express - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

A friend of mine used to fly them for Delta, said they were very fast. Never flown on one myself but I was a flight control mechanic on the FedEx versions at B.F. Goodrich (Tramco) at Paine Field right after I got out of the military.

There are a lot of cables, rig pin holes, slat lines crammed into the leading edges so tight I made special wrenches to remove "B"nuts on all those lines. I still have all those special tools I made for that and the mid flap cable system, should throw them out I guess.

On another note; on the short versions with the tanks empty you could dang near pick the nose up off the ground by hand and sit the plane on its rump without that 55 gallon drum of concrete hanging off the right side nose. It's been done way too many times by those without respect for weight and balance. In fact we did it to an F-22 in the factory once...

 

If my memory serves me, that cable, slaved to stationary structure, is what actuated the aft flap when the trailing edge flaps were deployed. There was a bell crank inside the mid flap....I think. That wing was a marvel of mechanicals that everybody said would never work all the time. It did work and was one of the trouble free systems in the airplane.With everything dirty , the high lift system doubled the lift coefficient of the wing but it took 70-80% thrust to make it all work right. One of the main worries was structural integrity of the fin in a flutter mode and one of the flutter tests was scary to watch. A fin or blade was mounted on the wing tip to induce wing flutter and a blade was mounted on the horizontal stabilizer tip. The frequency of the wing was considerably lower than the stab. and fin and when the two got going , the airplane looked like it was made of jello. On one test the FE's instrument panel was shaken loose. Passed with flying colors. The fin had two forged aluminum spars that were mounted deep inside the 48 Section, the front spar had a hole in the lower portion or the center engine duct. Made it look like a canoe paddle with a hole in the blade. The 727 is one of the greatest.

 

Got 4.5 years on the panel of the 727 and probably flew that one a time or two. I'll see if I can get the tail #, unless someone already knows it. Also spent four years flying C-130s at Elmendorf. Good to see my old stomping grounds and the Chugach Mountains in the background.

 

N492FE

 

Thanks Mule. Just reviewed the log book. Eight trips in that old girl.

 

Or donate them to this aircraft's recipient?

http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/aviation/

 

Don't. If you're serious about getting rid of them please donate them to a museum with a working one in their fleet. Or one doing a restoration or other project, etc.

I know how valuable special tools like those are, and it's very nearly a crime to toss them IMHO.

 

I grew up in the Memphis area (Fed Ex hub), and being an aviation enthusiast from a young age you always heard "rumors" of FedEx pilots maybe-perhaps-occasionally-when-nobody-was-looking doing rolls in 727's when they were empty. Always wondered if there was any truth to it or if the airframe could actually do it.

 

Could the airframe do it? No question, if done correctly.

I don't know about FedEx pilots doing it, but there have been enough of them in freight use for long enough that I'm sure a few have done it.

 

A barrel roll or aileron roll if correctly executed (as Don said) would be no problem for the airplane. Positive G all the way around is mandatory , however, due to systems operation. A slow roll, with all kinds of negative loading , would be a no no .

 

Sure, you could do it ONCE. The company gets so much information transmitted from each airplane on every flight that it wouldn't take long for the data miners to discover "an anomaly."

The crew would be looking for new jobs within a week, without their tickets (licenses) too.

Also have it on good authority those weren't FedEx pilots landing at Merrill, but rather contract ferry pilots. FedEx wouldn't accept liability but certainly liked the publicity. Smart company I work for!

 

In college I worked at a hotel driving the shuttle. 3 times per shift I picked up crews at the airport. Two airline crews and one freighter crew. The freight pilots were my favorite guests, they were the guys who had their own small planes they commuted with, always had a joke to tell, and had no fear of their corporate office paper pushers when it came to discrepancies in the hotel billing. Different mentalities.

 

What information does a 727 transmit to the company?

Are you thinking of the FDR? Those only get pulled in case of an accident, although I've heard of a few carriers which randomly pull them after maintenance or ferry flights to check for, ah, inappropriate behavior.

But a freight carrier doing it after every flight? I don't see it.

Far more likely to get ratted out by the FE...

 

Way more advanced than the FDR. There are all kind of little devices that can be hooked up. Now, is the 727 monitored at FedEx? Can't be sure, because that fleet has been retiring for several years now, but I know for a fact the rest of the fleet is. Airbus 300/310, MD10/11, 757 and 777s.

And you're right. Eventually someone would talk about it.