Now it's the DC-8's turn!

Where did all those Delta re-engined ones with cfm 53s go,
Remember flying them late 80s when they were just redone.

 

CFM 56.

A lot became freighters.

Story on the CFM conversion for the DC8: Boeing and GE/Snecma worked on re-engining the 707s. They do it for the US military. During the development Boeing would make presentations to the airlines promoting it as a retrofit. After the presentation the Boeing salesman would tell the airline to forget about it and instead order the 757. Boeing killed the retrofit for the civilian aircraft but GE had data rights from the development. GE switched over to the DC8-62 and -63 as they were the last iterations and it was not a stretch to make the underlying data from the 707 program apply.

 

Thank you that was interesting, and boeign pushing the 757 made sense. Curious though that the 757 and 767 were abandoned as programs, and we still have the 737 why was that..
I also read that as the landing gear was lower on a 707 it could not be stretched as much as the DC8, therefore converted DC8s had higher passenger capacity and were more worthwhile to convert.

Last flew a delta DC8 with CFM's prob 1985 from new Orleans to Atl..

 

The 757 died because of no sales. Boeing was holding on for an order that kept getting delayed and delayed. Boeing announced that there was a deadline. The order only came after it was too late. Move forward a few more years and the airlines now wanted to have the 757 again but it way, way to late. The 321LR picked up that market but it still doesn't do what the 757 did easily. Pax capacity and no excuse coast to coast range.

The 767 got overtaken by the 787, except for freighters and as military tankers.

 

I thought the military was also buying up the 707s, both for programs like the J-STARS and for spare parts?

 

The re-engine 707 development was in the late 1970s. I believe that J-STARS came along later but I remember there already being a number of mutant 707s with various military equipment my the mid 1989s at E Systems.

 

I do remember a mutant 707 built as a military with CFMs. As I remember it, Comtrans (Doug Jaffee) in San Antonio bought it as a new aircraft with the intention of peddling it to a foreign government for VIP. It could not be a US registered civilian aircraft as it did not have a standard type certificate. Don't know whatever happened to it just that it was a hard sell because it was such a strange build. This had to of been sometime in the 1980s, maybe even late 1980s going into the early 1990s.

 

JSTARS flew as a prototype in Desert Storm (1991) with a mix of service and contractor aircrew.