Inbound

Nor was it the wry graffiti from some wag thanking the venerable 747 for “rescuing” so many A380 passengers during its later years.

It wasn’t even the slightly unusual feeling of being on a hot, un-airconditioned airliner baking in the sunshine. (Believe me, I’ve been on enough aircraft without APUs or with electrical issues in my time. ) No, the strangest part of walking around the airliner was the idea that the inflight product on board – the award-winning Skybed Mark I angled lie-flat beds, the premium economy recliners that are still the standard in their category, and the economy class seats that, frankly, didn’t seem all that old – were now officially museum pieces.

VH-OJA’s guardian, HARS, is starting new extended tours of the aircraft, with the opportunity for particularly enthusiastic visitors to make cabin safety announcements, sit in the left or right seat of the flightdeck and clamber all around the aircraft, so a trip to Sydney on either side of a weekend seemed like the perfect time to nip down and reminisce while exploring the aircraft.

And the things that struck me while underneath and on board were of just how well I remember avidly watching out of the window at airports worldwide to catch a glimpse of wingletted, double-length upper deck 747- 400 aircraft, having grown up on the classic jumbos. How fancy the looping video screens seemed after craning my neck to see the overhead for so long! How amazing to be able to both choose a window seat and also watch a film! How advanced to visit a cockpit during flight and see the modern flightdeck with just two pilots and no flight engineer in it! I certainly remember reading avidly about the ultra-long nonstop flight from London to Sydney that VH-OJA made in August 1989. Decades later, I flew on the world’s longest regularly scheduled flight – Newark to Singapore on Singapore Airlines’ all-business class Airbus A340-500 aircraft – shortly before it ceased operating in 2013, and count it as one of the best flights of my life. Ultra-long-haul flying is the way forward.

The holy grail (or Pandora’s box) of 20-hour flights that OJA opened up still captivates passengers and airlines alike. Singapore Airlines is indeed looking to reactivate a New York nonstop route with its upcoming long-range Airbus A350-900ULR aircraft, while Qantas has been quietly mooting its own ultra-long-haul flights on Boeing 787-9s, with London from Perth and New York from Sydney approaching the realms of aviation economics sense rather than pie in the sky. When Sydney to Dallas/Fort Worth is a daily fact of life for travellers, that extra few hours on the same plane rather than having to transfer sounds very attractive.

Much of the passenger experience innovation VH-OJA and the Boeing 747-400 introduced we take for granted today to make those ultra-long-haul flights bearable. Next year (2017) the iPhone will celebrate its tenth birthday, having revolutionised the way people (including airline passengers) expect to interact with their personal entertainment screens. What now seems like slow, clunky inflight entertainment was, of course, once state of the art. Yet small seatback screens were once innovative, as was the seating at the time of OJA’s delivery – and the seating on board at the time she was donated to HARS.

Indeed, many airlines are still operating inflight products of the generation of VH-OJA’s final configuration to and from Australia. Notably, Qantas’s Business Suite (see feature elsewhere this issue) isn’t yet installed throughout the Airbus A330 fleet, and not all Qantas’s 747 fleet has been upgraded to the fully-flat Skybed Mark III – and it’s certainly not the only airline to still use the product.

Yet speaking with seatmakers, airline executives and a wide range of passenger experience professionals at the most recent Aircraft Interiors and Airline Passenger Experience expos, it’s clear that the angled lie-flat business class product is indeed heading towards the status of museum piece. None of the seatmakers expect to be producing any more of them, and none of the airline executives expect to order them.

The angled lie-flat seat, introduced by Virgin Atlantic in 1999, 10 years after OJA debuted, will soon be joining the aircraft in the annals of history alongside the aircraft that popularised them.