Ganze Doku: Der letzte Flug einer Boeing 747-400: Eine Queen wird eingemottet

Video from the channel PlaneMania about Boeing 747, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 33:46. Language: German. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary about what may have been the last flight of the Lufthansa Boeing 747-400 known as "Tango Lima": a roughly 270-kilometre hop of barely half an hour from Frankfurt Airport to Twente Airport, near Enschede (Netherlands), a former military airfield where the aircraft was to be parked indefinitely. With the coronavirus crisis, the airline was retiring aircraft much earlier than planned. The camera follows the cabin crew from the preparation through to handing the aircraft over to the team that will store it.

The aircraft had been in service with Lufthansa for 18 years on routes all over the world; the day before it had still flown from Riyadh to Frankfurt with passengers, luggage and cargo. In the summer of 2002 it carried the German national football team to the World Cup in Japan and South Korea, and during the pandemic it took part in the German government's operation to repatriate citizens from destinations such as Christchurch or Panama. The documentary depicts an almost empty Frankfurt: the northwest runway, closed to operations since 23 March, was being used as aircraft parking, more than 87,000 Lufthansa Group employees were on short-time work during the lockdown, and the airline was operating around ten percent of its pre-crisis flight programme.

The flight, with no passengers or cabin crew, is carried out by two pilots: Captain Andreas Münzenberger as pilot flying, and Maximilian Reuter as pilot monitoring, in charge of the radio. Before departure they check the empty cabin and the galleys to make sure nothing is left loose, and the captain carries out the external inspection. Twente has no air traffic control: the tower only provides weather and traffic information, the pressurisation has to be set manually because the airfield is not in the aircraft's database, and the approach ends in visual flight, with a traffic pattern at around 500 metres before turning onto final. The clouds were lower than expected and they spotted the runway late, but the landing went as planned on a 2,400-metre runway. Afterwards, a technical team seals the engines, seals the doors against moisture and dust, and drains the tanks. According to the crew, of the fleet's 13 Boeing 747-400s, five were being permanently retired and eight placed in long-term storage, while the 747-8s remained in Frankfurt. The pilots fly home that same day in a borrowed Piper Seneca.