Boeing Fuselage Carrier Details

[Raeder]

Hi all,

Here is a string of shots a conductor shot for me of a Boeing fuselage carrier sitting in a yard.

s632.photobucket.com/albums/uu41/Raeder/Boeing%20Car%20Detail%20Shots/

Here is a link to building one of these cars.

people.ucalgary.ca/~keay/planedoc.html

That airplane model is no longer available, but you can get decorated models on eBay for cheap, so the project can still be done loaded if you want to do that.

Additional Boeing cars are available here

www.con-sys.com/product_737_Carrier.htm

[lindsaya99]

Guppies on rails. Very cool. Thanks for posting this.

[chock]

You know they had to increase security on those Boeing 737 fuselage carriers because apparently people would take potshots at them as they made the trip to the final assembly plant? According to Boeing, it is not really a big deal to patch the skins up though, since it's a well proven technique used to repair combat damage on modern fighters that can be applied equally to fixing the odd hole in an airliner fuselage, but it is interesting to think that your 737 you take a trip on might have a few patched up bullet holes on it.

Incidentally, if you want to knock up an HO scale B737 fuselage carrier, there are a couple of options, the old Aurora kit can be found on Ebay, but that is a Classic and not an NG 737 variant, so you'd have to tweak the model a bit (not much, since it'd only be the fuselage and most people wouldn't know the difference between a classic and an NG variant). Alternatively, there is a new kit of the 737 available from Welsh Models. It is pricey, but it is the correct NG variant. Both of those are 1/72nd scale and not 1:87, but it would be close enough in scale to not really be noticeable since the 737 at 72nd scale is still feasible on an HO wagon. The Welsh Models 737 can be found here: www.welshmodels.co.uk/MJApage.html

Al

[Raeder]

Yeah, I had heard of that sort of thing happening. A buddy of mine in the Air Force mentions they had to repaint their missile transport cars for the same reason, as the big Air Force star made a tempting target while in transport. He had never heard of a missile going off on one of the cars, but you have to wonder if people would have been shooting at the car in the first place if they knew what was inside it!

I've also heard there were fuselages being wrapped in Kevlar to protect them against this sort of thing, but I have no idea on the truth of that, or which fuselages had that treatment applied.

As a really random note, most of the time when I go flying somewhere, I fly on Southwest airlines, and they fly 737's exclusively. Now I'll have THAT thought about patches rolling around in my head the next time I'm up...

[chock]

Well, you could always think about this instead: The 737 is statistically the safest airliner in the world, and it is the best selling airliner of all time too with around 8,000 built so far. There are so many of them in service, that on average, a 737 either takes off or lands somewhere in the world every five seconds.

When NASA wanted a test aircraft to use for a whole raft of its flight research work, they bought the B737 test prototype off Boeing for that purpose (it cost them 2.2 million Dollars). That first prototype was actually built in 1967 and was the aircraft which did all the flight testing for the type's initial certification as an airliner, after that it sat around at Boeing in storage until NASA's purchase in 1974, whereupon they used it regularly for flight testing right up until 1997. It is now on display at Boeing Field, which means that the very first 737 Boeing built was good enough to be used for test flights for the best part of thirty years.

And even after being around as a design for over forty years the 737 is still innovative; US Navy's brand-new Poseidon anti-submarine patrol aircraft is essentially a Boeing 737 with souped-up wings and a missile launch system. So even with a bullet hole in it, designs don't come much better than the 737.

Al