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After just 30 flight hours: Boeing scraps luxury liners

2023-02-16T10:30:12.168Z


It is the largest business aircraft ever built - and yet nobody wanted it. According to a report, after ten years at an airfield near Basel, the Boeing 747 embarked on its final journey – to a junkyard in Arizona.


Enlarge image

Boeing 747-8 aircraft (photo from 2019, symbolic image).

Photo: Gene Blevins / picture alliance / dpa

They are called »BBJ«, »Boeing Business Jet«.

These are elaborately modified versions of passenger planes from the US aircraft manufacturer, which governments or the super-rich use for their own purposes.

The largest aircraft of this type, with a cabin area of ​​5000 square meters, stood unused for around ten years in the three-country corner France-Switzerland-Germany, at the EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg.

Now the US news channel CNN is reporting that the 747 will be scrapped – after just 16 flights and just 30 hours of operation.

The machine was brought to Arizona for this, to a facility called Pinal Airpark.

It's an airplane graveyard.

It will be dismantled there by a Boeing contractor.

The largest business aircraft in the world thus finds its end as a spare parts store.

The individual parts are worth more than the entire jet

The background: The Boeing was originally intended for the Saudi royal family.

Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud should use the plane.

However, he died in 2011, a few months before the planned delivery of the aircraft.

Then the search for a possible other user began.

The business with "BBJs" is more of a niche, but a very lucrative one.

According to CNN, Boeing has sold more than 250 such converted passenger planes to date.

The catch: most of them are of the smaller 737 type. Of the larger 747, however, only ten "BBJs" were built.

The machine, which is now being scrapped in Arizona, even belongs to the Type 747-8.

It is considered the most modern of the series.

The jet's undoing, however, was its immense operating costs.

The machines could not establish themselves on the market.

And even for the 747, which was actually built for the Saudis, no buyer was found for many years.

"A total of ten aircraft were built and this is the first to be retired," CNN quoted Connor Diver of aeronautical analysis firm Cirium.

The plane made some test flights in 2012 and was then delivered.

"According to our database, it flew via San Bernardino and then San Antonio, Texas for a few months and then went to Basel in December 2012," says Diver.

Too expensive even for a bargain

In 2017, the plane, which had been stripped of its original purpose, was listed for sale for $95 million — a bargain considering its list price was $350 million.

But the machine is also expensive to operate.

"No one but a Saudi leader wants a four-engine business jet," says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at AeroDynamic Advisory.

In the end it is a miscalculation.

That's why the machine is now being cannibalized: because the engines in particular are more valuable on their own than built into the Boeing 747.

Boeing declined to respond to a request from CNN.

According to the TV broadcaster, the group bought the aircraft back from a German aircraft trading company in 2022.

On April 15 it set course for Arizona.

beb

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2023-02-16

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