Amsterdam Schipol offers splendid views.
It also happens to be, as the base of KLM, and a key cargo airport, one of last places in the world where you are surrounded by lots of three-engined jets close up.
They're disappearing quickly and KLM's large passenger fleet is unlikely to last too long before they switch to big twins. This is the final evolution of the DC-10, designed during 1967. I always stand and marvel at how the Douglas engineers got that engine up onto the tail. They patented the tail design, apparently.
John Newhouse's 1982 book, The Sporty Game, tells the astonishing story of how two over-confident US aircraft manufacturers - Douglas and Lockheed - effectively killed eachother's commercial airliner businesses by designing two competing airliners when there was only ever a market for one. The DC-10's rival, the Lockheed TriStar, technically the better plane, lost Lockheed $2.5 billion by the time production ended in the early 1980s. And that was in 1982 money. McDonnell Douglas, the demon of the pair because it launched the spoiler product, couldn't keep pace with Airbus's growth, had no development cash and sold out to Boeing in 1997. The upgraded MD-11 was dropped. By the 1990s there was enough confidence in the reliability of high bypass engines, still an unknown quantity when the DC-10 was designed, to fly long distances over water (and over the Rocky Mountains) on a 'big twin'.
If you pass through Schipol, enjoy the sight this year. Everything else looks the same now.
Posted by Mark Charmer. Mark is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.
Originally uploaded by Charmermrk
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