United Airlines Boeing 727 Exhibit Video- Museum Of Science and Industry Chicago

[Music] the versatility and reliability of the boeing 727 the first trijet introduced into commercial aviation made it the best-selling airliner in the world during the first 30 years of jet transport service several jetliners including the boeing 707 were developed before the 727 but none came close to its sales record the 727 was the only boeing-built tri-jet in its time and it was designed to operate out of small airports with shorter runways than were used by the 707 something about this airplane it has very effective speed brakes so it will come down faster than almost any airplane i'm aware of so it makes a very maneuverable airplane if air traffic control accidentally gets us high and close to the airport we can always get down with this airplane boeing's initial design studies for the 727 began in 1956. production of the 727 extended from the early 1960s to august 1984 a remarkable length of time considering the original market forecast was for 250 airplanes as it turned out 1832 were built in 1984 when the last 727 was delivered this versatile fleet was carrying 13 million passengers each month introduced into service in february 1964 the 727 tri-jet became an immediate hit with flight crews and passengers alike it was a very quiet airplane with the engines at the back when you shove the throttles up you really didn't hear anything you just felt the push in your back and the other thing that was interesting about it it was fast it was one of the fastest airplanes around and still is one of the fastest the tri-jet design offered the redundancy of three engines better climb performance than a twin engine and improved operating economics over a four-engine jet this is obviously a three-engine airplane and people always ask how far can this fly if an engine quits how far can it fly if two engines quit and i always tell them in the training center during our training we actually had to make single engine approaches and go around with only one engine operating and it will climb out on one engine a little a little bit of a dog on one engine but it will do it one of the main questions that people ask me as they look into the cockpit of this airplane is why are there three pilots because having flown today you'll notice that almost every airplane has just two pilots and i explained that the third pilot in those days was the flight engineer and he or she would control uh fuel pressures and the temperature in the cabin and hydraulic pressures and a lot of the systems of the airplane the pressurization system things which these days are mainly taken care of by computers allowing the need for just two pilots who monitor that computer and make sure it's doing the right thing the 727 was also built as a freight transport and as a quick change version which meant airlines could convert from a passenger transport to a freighter or a combination of both as they chose more than 300 727s built as passenger airplanes were converted to freighters the museum 727 logged 66 000 flight hours covering 28 million miles while carrying a total of three million passengers you'll be amazed how many people uh have not been in airplanes and one of the other questions is they ask is this a real airplane you know and i says not only is it real but i actually flew this airplane and when i say that their eyes really light up because they said boy that's really neat that you actually flew this airplane and i said well it's been about 25 years ago but i actually flew this airplane the first time i did this volunteer at the museum i went to my logbook and i looked up this particular airplane and there it was a number of times and it kind of gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to know that hey i'm part of this airplane and when people ask me is this a real airplane i can say not only is it real i've flown it the boeing 727 holds a permanent place in the annals of aviation history as one of the most significant airplanes in the development of the world's jet transportation system you may be asking yourself now how did they get this 727 100 into the museum well the story begins back in september 1992 when united airlines donated the decommissioned jet to the museum first officer ray waddell flew the plane from chicago's o'hare airport to the former meigs field on chicago's lakefront on september 28 1992. that was the final flight of our 727 and it was the largest aircraft ever to land at meigs from there the jet was loaded onto a barge and ferried to burns international harbor in indiana where it would be temporarily stored plans were made and carried out as how to best gut move dismantle clean reassemble ferry and then install our 41-ton jet about a year later the aircraft was ready to be loaded on a barge and moved to the museum september 22nd 1993 was the day extreme caution was taken throughout the restoration and the move of the plane special ramps were built and a trench was dredged to allow for the transfer of the aircraft from the barge to the shoreline ramp then they rolled the plane off down a ramp across the parkway on the east side of lake shore drive then across the street in front of the 727 crossing signs and down the parkway on the other side nearly 2 000 people gathered to watch with excitement as our 727 crossed lakeshore drive much like the u-505 did back in 1954 at the time that we brought the plane to the museum the parking garage was not in place it was a parking lot out in front we had cleared the parking lot and taken down all of the lights traffic lights and so on so it transversed across the front of the museum it made a turn onto cornell and was parked into our west parking lot on the west side of the building now we had to get our jet into the museum because of the size of the fuselage and engine mounting pylons one of the museum's massive columns had to be temporarily removed engineers and concrete specialists studied the columns and came up with a plan after carefully removing the column it was time to disassemble the 727 bolt by bolt workers reduced the plane down to fuselage wings and tail and beginning on november 18 1993 moved it inside on a custom-built ramp we had to keep the plane intact in order to get it over to the parking lot once it was in our west lot we enclosed it and then we started to remove the items that were going to have to be removed in order to get it in the building or items that we were not going to use for example the left wing is not here we did not use it because it is cantilevered off the balcony the right wing is attached but in order to get it into the building we had to remove both of those an interesting piece of science that goes with that is that they used water jets to cut the wings off once inside and draped with plastic it was time for a beautiful new paint job the fuselage sat in a special wheeled cradle that allowed for an easy overnight move across the museum's rotunda and in position to be lifted up to the balcony to lift the plane up to the balcony level we used a typical mover's gantry situation a gantry towards the front of the plane another gantry towards the rear slings around the airplane and then the jacks raised it up into the position where they could slide in the structural steel and mate it up to the balcony the plane actually weighs less than the portion of the balcony that we took out to put it in here so the concrete and the steel and the railing of the balcony weighed more than the airplane weighed but the important thing was how to mate the structural steel of the building to the airplane nobody had ever put a plane inside the building and attach it to a balcony before so there were a lot of engineering reviews to figure out the best way to do so number one and then the other thing we had to really take a look at what was the purpose of having it here in the building what did we want to accomplish what was our message what were we trying to educate the public about or entice our visitors to learn more about and allowing guests to come through the aircraft itself and see how it's made and how thick the skin of the aircraft really is not and to be able to look through portholes of glass in the floor so you can see what is below the seating area which most people never have the opportunity to see by mid-may 1994 nearly two years after first officer waddell landed at meigs field the 727 was securely anchored to the balcony and ready for passengers once more from the point that the plane landed on the beach to the point where it actually opened to the public was a couple of years after that we did a lot of work inside the museum it has been repainted it was retrofitted and what i mean by retrofitted is all of the flying surfaces in the landing gear of the plane are totally operational but they operate on pneumatic or air power instead of hydraulic or oil power so all this took time in getting all the systems together and getting it to work in a fashion that we had wanted it to this is the final boarding call for all passengers on the museum of science and industries boeing 727. welcome aboard you

Channel: Amy Thurston

Views: 76,831

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Id: -cVzn-1NLLs

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021