Recently I got to take a long flight aboard a 747-400.  Though I have been in love with this aircraft forever, I have never been able to fly on one before.  As many airlines are starting to phase out their 747's in favor of more efficient, long-range aircraft, I was beginning to despair that I might never get an opportunity to fly aboard one of these legendary airplanes.

Well, on a recent trip between the U.S. and Japan I finally had my opportunity, and I made the most of it.  Throwing caution to the wind, I humbly approached the flight attendants and asked if I might take pictures of the upper deck.  Once there, the flight attendant servicing the upper deck asked if I would like to take pictures of the cockpit and talk with the flight crew.



Boy, would I ever!  After entering the cockpit and after my brain started working again (perhaps a minute or eternity after my jaw went thunk on the floor), I started taking pictures of the cockpit.  First thing I noticed was how roomy the 747-400 cockpit is.  Without the flight engineer position that earlier 747's had, the 747-400 cockpit could easily sit 4 people (indeed, it does have four chairs; two at the flight controls and two just behind those).  At one point, we had 6 people in the cockpit: two, two-man flight crews (normal plus relief? it was a 13 hour flight), one maintenance worker (to quote the pilot as he pointed at his displays, "My maps keep disappearing."  ), and myself.

The other thing I noticed was that I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the flight controls I recognized.  Of course, there were about a million or so switches and buttons whose function I could only guess about, but there was a lot of the controls I recognized from Flight Simulator (NO WAY was I going to bring this up though; I just humbly said I was an aviation enthusiast and left it at that; no sense risking coming of as a know-it-all jacka**).  If you look at the pictures I have attached, you can see how favorably the FS cockpit compares with the real thing.

Fortunately, I did manage to get a few shots of the cockpit that actually came out.  Unfortunately, my flash was being damnably uncooperative that day, so I didn't get as many good photos as I had hoped.  Of all the shots the co-pilot took of me while I was sitting in his seat, only one was salvagable to decent degree.  All that being said, here are three shots of the 747-400 cockpit:

Looking straight ahead.


From the co-pilot's station.


"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your guest co-pilot speaking . . . hey, what's this button do?"


Oh, I should mention before anyone has a heart attack, we were on the ground at the time of these photos.  None of the pictures from when they let me do barrel rolls came out. 

hehe.. I got pics from the A340 taking me to Japan Also on the floor though...

The pic I took were absolute Crap ah well at least it was fun to have seen the cockpit

beaky wrote on Aug 15^th, 2007 at 9:09pm:


Let me wear the hat?    Oh, no.  The co-pilot was quite insistent!  Apparently they don't get too many hyperactive, 35-year-old "kids" that want to see inside the cockpit.    Well, I gotta be young at heart, cause the rest of me is wearing out prematurely, heh heh. 

As for wings and a lollipop, I got neither.  And they wouldn't let me take the throttle quadrant with me, either, which is what I really wanted!  I just love the look of those four throttles together; it says, "Power, baby!"    When I start assembling my own home-built VC, I am getting the CH Products throttle quadrant with four throttles even though I fly single-engine prop planes 90% of the time.  Every now and again I fly 747's and 737's . . . I just can't resist; they're such marvy aircraft!

Far too fancy and modern. Where are all the needles!