Thread: aircraft lifespan

hi nooluv. i take your word for that,im a bit of a novice at this and only looked on planespotters .net. like i said i thought it was odd they only had the one. cheers, ph.

purplehelmet, no hard feelings Both these photos were taken from a SAS DC-9-82 LN-RML during the flight from MAN to CPH in August.

Yeah PU just double click on Aircraft fleet!

Quote: That is why airlines install new interiors on older airframes. Passengers get very little opportunities to see the exterior of the aircraft but see the interior the whole time they are in flight. Up-grading an interior is much less expensive than a new airframe. Exactly my point ........ see post 8 above. Planemike

Quote: thanks for that intruder, wow thats some miles on the clock, can you please tell me was it still flying passengers all that time or was it a cargo aircraft? and any idea if it was the original engines? thanks. AFAIK , it was a freighter all its life. That means it operated at higher average gross weights its entire life. It is unlikely the original engines were on the airplane, because engines are routinely swapped among airplanes as...

Quote: remember watching a t.v. programme about the aloha 737, nearly all pax and crew had a very lucky escape, didnt it have some thing to do with it operating in a salty climate that caused metal fatigue? The Aloha incident led the FAA and other regulatory agencies to require all OEM's to establish a fatigue life for each of their models. However, once the fatigue life is reached it does not mean that the aircraft must removed from...

That was the reason I replied to you. I was applauding your post.

Just a small point for the answer glhcarl gave, what you are refering to is not the life limit that l was refering to. What you are refering to are the ALI inspections, which on Boeing a/c kick in at around 20000 to 50000 cycles, but on Airbus a/c kick in earlier and are a more in line with routine inspections. All these ALI inspections are mandatory and can not be extended, so no variations unlike normal inspections. On Airbus all these...

I would imagine that once maintenence costs rise significantly, and reliability suffers, airlines think about getting rid of old aircraft. There must be a point when it's simply not worth spending money to keep an aircraft in the air, good money after bad and all that. (A bit like an old car, really.) There must be much more to airlines' calculations, though. For example, fuel burn compared with newer aircraft, fuel prices, the cost...

Presume fatigue life must eventually come into play on some airframes.