Barrys New Job

Tales from the weird world of the 747 LCF, Seattle and China -

How to fund your Bahama cruise

Well amigos - its cold and snowy here in the wonderful Pacific NW. Took an hour to drive 4 miles today. I dont know how these people live here - ridiculous. Give me a ruddy Texas sunset over the refineries anyday.

So, how did I come to be in Seattle you might ask? Well, here’s the scoop.

My entire career has been to fix, modify, repair and basically f@#$ around with big airplanes. Boeing, decided to undertake the largest modification of an aircraft ever attempted.

And the view from inside - looking forward

Its not really painted like a hot dog, it just looks like one.

At any rate, I was attracted to this project - strictly from professional curiosity mind you - certainly not aesthetically - and, well, one thing led to another, and so here I sit in Seattle working as a contract engineer (thats a temporary hired gun - they pay lotso cash for my services, but no bennies) trying to iron out some of the issues that come with building something this crazy. Basically, you take an old beat up 747-400, cut off the tail and the top 2/3 of the fuselage and reassemble as shown.
The airplane is intended to fly big pieces of other Boeing airplanes around - sort of a massive package delivery system. The tail swings open to load the pieces for transport.
Kinda cool -

There will be four or five of them built. All in Taiwan, so I’ll be heading off to Taipei in the near future for a couple of months. The contract is for no more than a year, Sandi stayed with Sunner - we’ll visit often I’m sure - and she wont pass up a chance to come to Taiwan. Anyway, when the contract is done, I’ll take the cash, make my way back to Texas, and take Sunner and the Admiral on a long, well-deserved cruise to the Bahamas.

See ya’ll around - take care of each other and do at least one tack and one jibe for me every week.

Later dudes -

Barry (yawn) in Seattle