The pilots of the liner helped him to draw a huge self-portrait in the sky
When testing the engines of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner passenger plane, it was necessary to lift it into the air without passengers, and then return it to the same airport. The pilots built the route so that the flight path, superimposed on the map of the USA, repeated the outlines of the aircraft.
(6 photos in total)
An unusual trajectory was noticed on the Flightradar24 website, which tracks the movement of aircraft. Now there you can follow how the Dreamliner moved.
After an 18-hour, 22-state test flight, #BOE004 is back on the ground.
https://t.co/Ljzc72f4c2 pic.twitter.com/2c6ELDHDKb
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) August 3, 2017
The airliner took off on August 2, flew over 22 states of the country and covered a distance of 16 thousand kilometers. At the same time, the "drawing" was completed at the 15th hour of the flight. The journey started from the Boeing Field airfield, located near the main office of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes in Seattle, and 18 hours later the plane landed in the same place. He developed a speed of up to 1000 kilometers per hour and climbed up to 11 thousand meters.
The outline of the route stretched for 2,500 miles from the Upper Peninsula in northern Michigan to the southern tip of Texas. The real plane is 40 thousand times smaller than its image.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner was commissioned in 2011. It is positioned as a new generation aircraft that surpasses previous models in energy efficiency. The liner is capable of carrying up to 359 passengers. According to Flightradar24, during the test flight, the pilots tested the Rolls-Royce engines, which will be equipped with the Dreamliner 787-10 model.
Drawing planes was not invented yesterday. For example, this greeting in English was drawn in the sky over Hamburg.