Air India staff at the Mumbai airport bid goodbye on Monday to one of their last Boeing 747 aircraft that has served the airline for almost five decades operating commercial, VVIP and evacuation flights.
Also known as the Queen of the Skies, the double-decker plane took off from Mumbai, performed a ‘wing wave’ manoeuvre and then departed for the US. The ‘wing wave’ is a dip of the aircraft from one side to the other in the air that is generally done for retiring aircraft.
The Boeing 747 has operated various important flights for Air India, including two medical evacuation flights to China’s Wuhan during when the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020.
Air India got the first Boeing 747 in 1971 and the iconic aircraft did its last commercial flight in March 2021 on a domestic route. The Boeing 747, named Agra, which flew out from the Mumbai airport on Monday, was inducted into the then government-owned Air India in October 1996.
Recently, Air India sold the remaining four Boeing 747s.
The 747s in Air India’s fleet had 423 seats, including 12 First Class, 26 Business Class and 385 Economy Class seats. The first 747 entered service on launch customer Pan Am Airlines’ New York-London route on January 21, 1970.
Air India was one of the early customers for these planes, inducting the 500-seating capacity aircraft in the fleet as early as in 1971. Besides using them for commercial operations for a little over 50 years, Air India also used two of these planes for flying the VVIPs, President, Vice President and Prime Minister which were replaced with two refurbished B777s in October 2020.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) deregistered all four 747s that Air India and later Tata Group, in November 2022, decided to sell them.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 22-04-2024 at 22:57 IST
