DLR and NASA Retire Boeing 747SP “Sofia” | Hacker News Reader

DLR and NASA Retire Boeing 747SP “Sofia”

aviation.direct

17 pointsTomte10 comments

I have long wondered whether this was inherited in some way from the military research project AOA, "Airborne Optical Adjunct" my brother worked on, decades ago, while a young engineer at Hughes Aircraft. They too used a 747 with a hole in the top and an infrared telescope exposed to open air pointing out of it. Keeping a telescope steady with wind blasting past at hundreds of miles an hour is uniquely challenging.

That system was meant for some sort of missile defense project.

Interesting, so maybe similar to Hubble in that way. I would love to learn more about this. Seems like fodder for Scott Manley and his ilk.

The system you described reminds me of astronomic navigation used in SR-71: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-sr-71-astroinertial-navi...

I was lucky enough to tour this aircraft and meet the crew years ago. Somewhere there's a photo of a much younger me sitting in the captain's seat and grinning stupidly.

The 747SP is a special piece of aviation history, this one especially. There are still a few flying (one with Las Vegas Sands and two engine testbeds, according to Wikipedia), but their days must be numbered.

It is a shame to retire these at all. Surely there is a great deal more that could be done with them.

Eventually the cost of maintenance exceeds the value you can create with them.

You can imagine how sad some of us were when the last remaining flyable SR-71s, maintained in flyable storage by NASA Dryden for flight experiments, were finally retired for good. Here's a NASA page on them, but I haven't seen anything explicitly published on when in the early 2000s the decision was made to pull the plug: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-03... One year they were still doing J58 runs, another they were on static display out of the hangars. @jhugo's comment is right.

>SOFIA has completed around 2014 scientific flights annually since 100.

This is remarkable!

3,866,880+ flights!

Farewell old bird

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