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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.

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

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

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