QANTAS / Last Boeing 747 Retired

Back in 2015, I posted about QANTAS flying their first Boeing 747 into the tiny Shellharbour Airport (WOL) just to the south of Sydney to be put on exhibition at the HARS Aviation Museum there.
QANTAS had gifted the City of Canberra (VH-OJA) to HARS because of its special place in Australian aviation history.
Thousands gathered at vantage points across the Illawarra and around the airport in 2015 to watch the aircraft's arrival when it retired after flying more than four million passengers around the world and covering 85 million kilometres in the process.
In August 1989 VH-OJA flew the first non-stop flight from London to Sydney, a Qantas delivery flight record distance of 18,001 kilometres in 20 hours, nine minutes and five seconds.

Yesterday they retired their last 747 which performed a low flyover (500m!) at the same airport on its way to Los Angeles (LAX).
From there, it will make its way to the Mojave desert aircraft graveyard where it will parked and stripped for parts.
And to top things off they took a flight path just off the coast that 'drew' the QANTAS insignia on tracking radar.

This is the end of an era for Australian aviation.
I had my first flight in a 747 in 1973.
This was not planned.
I had been working in Germany for a few months and taken a few week’s holiday afterwards in Scandinavia.
The flight from Oslo to Frankfurt to pick up my Lufthansa connection to Sydney was many hours late so I missed that flight.
Lufthansa put me on PanAm 747 flight 002 which originated in New York and flew around the world eastbound. Flight 001 flew westbound.
Talk about a long flight.
From memory, the route was Frankfurt-Istanbul-Beirut-Tehran-New Delhi-Bangkok-Hong Kong where, after a night’s layover, I transferred to a British Airways flight to Sydney via Darwin.
In fact it took so long my company reported me missing! This was partly my fault as I hadn’t let them know about missing the original scheduled flight. Granted communications in those days were not as easy as they are now.

A few things I remember about the trip were tanks meeting the flight in Beirut and escorting us to and surrounding us at the terminal. No one was allowed off.
Landing in Tehran we blew a tyre and had to wait hours for a new one to be flown in from somewhere. Again, no one was allowed off.
And finally the BA flight had more flight attendants than passengers, it was so empty.
So for years afterwards international 747 travel was the norm, right up until just a few years ago when United took them off the Sydney to USA route.
I still miss them. Listening to those four engines spool up to full throttle at the end of the runway as you rolled for takeoff always produced goosebumps.