Dreamliner spells out "787" & Boeing logo over US during test flight

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/BOE236/history/20120209/2100Z/KBFI/KBFI

by ChrisArchitect • 14 years ago

315 80 14 years ago

dpcx• 14 years ago

There were some others:

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/GLF17/history/20070206/1... http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N750CX/history/20080307/1... http://flightaware.com/live/flight/BOE523/history/20110802/1...

shabble• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the 'biggest drawing in the world' viral image that went around a while back, which later turned out to be a hoax: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/artist-says-he/

Pretty cool that someone actually did it though!

bonzoesc• 14 years ago

The test pilots are basically told what part of the world and for how long they have to fly; when they turn in a plan like this basically for the sake of cuteness, that's a lot of work picking waypoints.

This pleases me.

matdwyer• 14 years ago

Can't wait for the green-team to have their arms up about wasting fuel to do this (even though it's a scheduled test flight)

bovine3• 14 years ago

It's great to see them do something interesting while they're already in the air burning time/fuel on the new engine testing. The test flight would have occurred for the same duration regardless of the path. They needed a flight that was about 19 hours long for extended operation certification purposes.

zrail• 14 years ago

19 hours and not over water which constrains them quite a bit. If they're going to run laps around the continental United States, why not make it fun?

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

They're already here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577583

cperciva• 14 years ago

Question for people with more aviation knowledge than me: Don't games like this make life hard for air traffic controllers? 35000' is right in the middle of normal airspace; isn't it much easier if planes are flying along standard routes between airports?

aaronpk2• 14 years ago

This flight got up to 42,000 feet if you look at the elevation graph. I didn't know planes flew that high.

cryptoz• 14 years ago

> I didn't know planes flew that high.

Well, it is a test flight of a brand-new plane. Also, some "planes" can go as high as they want in the atmosphere, even up to space (kinda).

nknight• 14 years ago

My flights between Taiwan and California in the last ~18 months were usually around 40,000 feet give or take a bit in 747s and 777s.

harshreality• 14 years ago

That's high for a large body airliner, but some smaller business jets can go higher because they have better aerodynamics and engines. Service ceiling figures from wikipedia:

  Gulfstream 550 and Dassault Falcon 7x: 51k

  F14, F18, B52, and B-2: 50k
  F15, F16, F35, B-1B, Su-47: 60k
  F22, Typhoon, and PAK FA: 65k
  U-2: 70k
  SR71: 85k

  A380, A350: 43k
  A340, A330: 41k
  A320: 39k

  Boeing 787, 777: 43k
  Boeing 757, 727: 42k
  Boeing 747-400: 41k
  Boeing 737: 35k

gvb• 14 years ago

<http://www.messybeast.com/dragonqueen/cockpit-chatter.htm...; (Flight level is x10000, so FL600 is 60,000 feet)

SR-71 Blackbird was crossing the control-zone of London Control. Evidently the controller didn't know the service ceiling of this aircraft is around 30,000 metres (yes metres, not feet!). There are so many variations on this item that the original event has evidently become part of aviation folklore or joke-lore.

Pilot: "Radar, Good Day, Airforce Blackbird, request FL 600(!)"

Controller (amused): "Sir, if you can reach, you are cleared FL 600"

Pilot: "US Air Force Blackbird, leaving FL 800, descending Level 600..."

marklabedz2• 14 years ago

I haven't looked at the route that Flightaware provides yet, but there are a LOT of defined navigational fixes and standard routes between these fixes. Its possible the crew simply assembled a series of fixes (and standard routes) to get the desired shape.

Enroute charts tend to look a lot more like a US highway map than an Interstate system map.

bengl3rt2• 14 years ago

Altitude is determined by direction in alternating chunks of 1000ft. So, say, southbound traffic flies at 29000, then 30000 is westbound, 31k north, 32k east, and then 33 is southbound again.

So at cruising altitudes every airspace can accommodate travel in any direction... the controllers along the way probably didn't even realize that anything out of the ordinary was happening except for talking to a Boeing callsign (as opposed to the call sign of one of the major airlines that typically operate flights at this altitude, Boeing operates its own "airline" in the regulatory sense just for test flights).

bdonlan• 14 years ago

Given the length of that route (and all those arbitrary GPS waypoints!) I'd think ATC would catch on pretty quickly.

bovine3• 14 years ago

The entire path is communicated to ATC in advance when the flight plan is filed, so they can foresee the route on screen when directing other traffic. Also, much of the flight was in the evening and late night, so traffic controlling load would have been lower for them.

Shivetya• 14 years ago

and here I was hoping they were stunt flying it.

blantonl• 14 years ago

A 19 hour flight? How was this even possible without running out of fuel?

bengl3rt2• 14 years ago

An empty plane is pretty light so it burns less fuel, AND because they don't have passengers and cargo counting against their MTOW (maximum takeoff weight) they can take off with more fuel.

Most planes don't leave topped-off - they leave with the right amount of fuel to hit the maximum takeoff weight given that day's load.

saalweachter• 14 years ago

Not to mention that extra fuel (20 hours of fuel on a New York to Chicago flight) becomes "cargo". No point in burning the fuel (and corresponding dollars) to ship fuel the most expensive way possible to an airport that already has plenty.

marklabedz2• 14 years ago

Newark - Singapore (Singapore Airlines Flight 20) is regularly scheduled for 18hrs and 50mins.

Wikipedia has a good list of long, regularly scheduled, non-stop flights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-stop_flight#Currently_sched...

EDIT: Flight is SQ21, not SQ20

davidw5• 14 years ago

19 hours on a plane must be quite a sufferfest. I do Europe->Oregon every year or two and 12 hours is already agonizingly slow. About the time you're thoroughly sick of the movies, reading, drinking or anything else, you realize you still have another 4 hours to go.

raldi• 14 years ago

It arrives two calendar days after it leaves!

ramidarigaz• 14 years ago

Massively reduced weight without passengers and cargo, maybe?

bovine3• 14 years ago

One of the pilots from this test flight even remarked, "As a matter of fact - we didn't even top off the fuel tanks."

Sanddancer2• 14 years ago

The 787 is designed for this long of a trip. There are a lot of trips out there, like the central US to the Far East where a direct flight is amazingly useful and economical.

sbanach• 14 years ago

WTF? Completely unreadable.

joejohnson2• 14 years ago

This seems like a waste of fuel for a stupid publicity stunt. Airplanes dump so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

wtvanhest2• 14 years ago

Would you prefer they tested it with passangers?

wtvanhest2• 14 years ago

My comment was serious. They have to test the plane, why not fly around in a pattern that is interesting?

MiguelHudnandez• 14 years ago

If it were just a publicity stunt, I might agree with you. But they have to use up the fuel in a test flight anyway. It's not like they can go up for 20 minutes and say "all good" and end the test.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

They were going to be in the air for 19 hours as a test flight anyways. Who cares what the path looks like?

There's being environmentally conscious, and then there's being a green freak.

joejohnson2• 14 years ago

That's true, I was being a "green freak."

cgoddard• 14 years ago

It's much more important to be environmentally conscious with the bigger stuff. One test flight isn't going to make the tiniest dent in worldwide carbon dioxide emissions. It's much more important to advocate for changes on an industry-wide and systemic level, rather than protesting one-off slightly wasteful novelties.

DavidChouinard4• 14 years ago

Similar attempts:

Gulfstream V: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/GLF17/history/20070206/15...

Cessna Logo: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N750CX/history/20080307/1...

Boeing 747: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/BOE523/history/20110802/1...

Also, a thread from one of the pilots: http://flightaware.com/squawks/view/1/7_days/popular/24611/B...

Interestingly, this required a lot of work on our side to pull this off. Since the route field on flights plans expects short input and this flight's route is dramatically longer, it caused an FAA system to split the flight arbitrarily into different legs.

(Disclaimer: I work for FlightAware)

davidw5• 14 years ago

> I work for FlightAware

Cool! Say, are you guys still running on Apache Rivet, just out of personal curiosity?

DavidChouinard4• 14 years ago

Yes, we do (we're about the only serious production site running Rivet left). Our codebase is almost entirely in Tcl (sigh). Apart from that, our core algorithms are in C and we run a pretty serious production Node.js app.

squeed• 14 years ago

I'd just like to say: Thanks for running such an awesome site!

I use FlightAware to hack airlines by trying to locate the incoming flight that is to be my outgoing plane. Any plane landing ~60 minutes before my departure whose make and model matches my flight is a suspect. I can usually predict whether or not we'll have an on-time departure long before announcements are made.

makmanalp• 14 years ago

On time prediction, my friend, is a profitable business. Just in case you decide to quit your current job :)

DavidChouinard4• 14 years ago

On some flights, we actually know what the corresponding inbound flight is. If we know, we show a small "track incoming flight" link and consider it in our delay prediction algorithms.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

Have you seen FlightCaster?

rmc• 14 years ago

~60 minutes before my departure

60 minutes? Wow. Ryanair here in Europe does a 25 minute turn around. Often you're through the boarding gate and queueing up before the inbound flight has even landed.

jcurbo• 14 years ago

I love FlightAware, thanks for making it awesome.

deepGem• 14 years ago

Just wondering if you guys are setting the default language of the site based on the browser's location. The site opens up in Hindi as I'm accessing it from Bangalore.

DavidChouinard4• 14 years ago

We do, unless you have (a) changed manually your language, in which case we save a cookie or (b) you're logged in and changed your language in settings. Also, (b) takes priority over (a).

peteforde• 14 years ago

I actually posted this about 16 hours ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3574619) and I point this out because it's always fascinating to me when the "right" time to post something on different sites is.

For example, I believe days start at 8pm PST on Flickr (can anyone correct me if I'm mistaken) and there's a power-user perspective that will wait to post things so that they can get a leg up on the "interestingness" algorithm.

Anyhow, this post makes me smile even the second time around.

m_myers• 14 years ago

I think part of it is the title also. "787 plane draws a 7-8-7" doesn't tell enough to interest me, while "Dreamliner spells out "787" & Boeing logo over US during test flight" elicits an immediate "Oh, cool!"

bomatson• 14 years ago

Timing definitely has something to do with it, but also consider the headline.

Yours was "787 spells 7-8-7", which is not as simple to understand as "Dreamliner spells out...". Instantly, this headline catches enough of my attention to click on the link.

For headline copy, sometimes it will help to search Digg/Reddit and see which keywords people have already clicked on the most. This applies to email subjects, website CTA, etc.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

My Flickr daily stats reset at 4pm pst, not sure if that matches the "interestingness" day, but it seems likely.

aptwebapps• 14 years ago

Which is midnight, GMT.

ChrisArchitect2• 14 years ago

(doh, wrote a long reply with thoughts a few hours ago from Hacker News Beta mobile app and it didn't post...fail)

sorry man, it was just the link I got. I'm all for first poster credit and respect, just sometimes same content can be generated from multiple links etc and stuff gets messed up. Annoying but you know how it goes.

On the time of posting thing...I know someone created a site to determine the optimal posting time for HN.... I have never used it tho! It's just naturally there'll be hotspots in the day based on simply where the majority of HN readers are from and the waves of social network activity.

Anyways, a good link indeed. A fun Friday afternoon share -- Great that the FlightAware guys are watching this and contributing too.

ChrisArchitect2• 14 years ago

ah, the 'tool' for optimal HN Pickup. Still interesting when you look at it. http://hnpickup.appspot.com/

Also, re: titles -- yeah, descriptive titles always -- I try to do that, since I appreciate it when others do

rjurney• 14 years ago

I can't wait to fly in one of these. The wings bow like crazy, can't wait to see them out the huge windows.

Dreamliner spells out "787" & Boeing logo over US during test flight

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