170723_071434_0008 15 Minutes of Fame (OK, ONE minute) (Sun 23 Jul 17)

Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport (Mascot), NSW, Australia

Nobody knew it at the time of course, but the shelf life of the 747 (as a passenger aircraft, at least) was going to be dramatically shortened a little after 2 years after the shot was taken when the pandemic hit and the market for long-range air travel fell into a hole.

This is VH-OEH, named after a Queensland coastal town called Hervey Bay. It was the 4th of 6 Boeing 747-400s (747-438 ER variants) ordered by Qantas in 2001, and came off the production line at Boeing's Everett facility in December 2002. It was registered on 28 January 2003 (just after the Australia Day holiday) and entered service in February of that year flying the QF11 Sydney to Los Angeles route.

On the other bookend, its last paying flight was Tokyo to Sydney (QF 26) on March 27, 2020. That was about the time that extensive travel restriction started to be imposed.

It quickly became clear that commercial flights were not going to come back any time soon, and as quickly as May (the 19th, to be precise) the plane was sent to Los Angeles using the designation QF 6001. From there it was sent to one of the aviation boneyards. To the best of my knowledge, it's still there. Qantas has retired its 747 fleet and I don't think there is any prospect of us ever seeing it flying in this livery again.

Oh, the title? When VH-OEH took off on its final flight, there was a one-minute news story on the Australian breakfast television show Sunrise. You may even still find it on YouTube. It reported on the aircraft departing Sydney "for the last time", which is indeed probable since there's no reason to believe that she'll return. (It's almost as entertaining to watch the tortured banter between the two breakfast TV hosts of the time, and their complete lack of chemistry. It would see one of them moved on from the gig less than a year later, rarely to be heard from again. Nobody really noticed or cared.)

I could have cropped this shot - and was tempted to - but decided that I preferred a "big picture" view of the aircraft in its natural habitat, surrounded by taxiways, parking aprons, support vehicles and so on.
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Edit 21 June 2025: Interestingly Planespotters.net still shows VH-OEH as being "stored". There may yet be a comeback. Not to Qantas, but maybe to some "smell of an oily rag" outfit that is low on capex for new aircraft.

Oh, and the second host of the aforementioned breakfast show has retired. Well, aside from annoyingly cropping up with meerkat puppets flogging an insurance comparison site every second ad break, anyway. Australian TV is not worse for his departure, IMHO.

Taken in: Australia / New South Wales / Mascot (show map)

Taken on: July 23, 2017

Tags:

Mascot

Kingsford Smith Airport

Boeing

747-438

VH-OEH

747-438ER

Hervey Bay

NSW

Australia « less

Sets appears in: • Aviation: Sydney Misc Shots

Camera: Olympus E-M1, f/8.0, 1/125 sec, 40mm (=80mm), ISO 500 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Olympus E-M1
Lens:	OLYMPUS M.12-40mm F2.8
Aperture:	f/8.0
Exposure Time:	0.008 sec (1/125)
Focal Length:	40mm (35mm equivalent: 80mm)
ISO:	500
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Auto, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Gain Control:	High gain up
Sharpness:	Hard
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 25.9 (Windows)
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