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Passengers really miss the true perspective of climbing in and out of clouds. The cockpit view is just completely different, and awesome.
To me bush flying is a throw back to the 30's. Where these guys go hasn't changed in all those years. The spirit of the adventure of flying still lives on.
The contemporary Saunders-Roe Princess was a similar dead end. Again, only one was built. Image Unavailable, Please Login
I was also thinking of that and one wonders what the thinking was at the time. Monstrous dead ends. A return to the days of Empire where size and luxury was most important? Programs ignoring the concurrent progress taking place at the time?
Things were progressing so fast that I imagine a lot of stuff which made sense on the drafting table was obsolete by the time they bent metal.
To me, airplanes of immense size have never made sense. Not one has been successful. They were supposed to be aerial cruise ships and transport thousands to their destination in lazy extended luxury. Airplanes don't work that way. Look at the A380, the last of the failed mega planes.
The 747 was obviously the optimum sized "big airplane". It wasn't a mega plane for its time. I worked on several enlarged version of it, one of which was 5 feet shorter than a football field, and they didn't make good sense at the time. They were shelved...and then came the A380.