Originally Posted by
WHBM
Consolidating a couple of recent bonus questions from myself and JL, and adding several others, I thought I'd put together some questions for the last airliners of a type delivered new to an airline. Bonus for getting the date roughly right as well. So which carrier took the last of the line :
- Boeing 707 (for an airline - they continued for years for air forces and governments)
- Lockheed Tristar
these are the only two that I think I have a reasonable shot at guessing:
I joined Boeing in Jul 1978, which I'm pretty sure was not long after the last delivery of a 707 to a commercial customer; it seems to me that it was a -300C that went to an African carrier ... I want to say Royal Air Maroc, but I may have that confused with the 707-700 flight test jet with CFM56 engines (I actually logged a handful of flights on N707QT as a test engineer; the jet was ultimately restored to -300 configuration and delivered to the Govt of Morocco) ... how about Sudan Airways?
I started work at Edwards AFB in the summer of 1984, when the last few L-1011-500s were still on the ramp at Lockheed's Palmdale facility (along with N1011, the #1 jet) ... I recall several dark-grey or black tails which were most likely Alia Royal Jordanian aircraft, and if I had to guess I'd say N1011 was there by its lonesome early the following year