This Boeing test flight, a B788, spent the last 14 to 15 hours drawing a massive B788 over the United States. Very nice Boeing 

https://www.flightradar24.com/BOE004/e54ad6b

Expensive picture.  But very impressive.

Nice!

That's a good one. Getting neater.

Previously they wrote 787 and drew the Boeing logo when doing the longest etops test ever. Google Boeing logo and flight radar to see them all. Writing max was pretty precise too.

Chris

That's pretty cool, although I hope they do a barrel roll in the thing too to round off the flight, in a Tex Johnson stylee.

Woah. They draw a perfect plane by actually flying a plane and I can't even draw one as good as that on a piece of paper...

I was curious, so I did a few calculations about this flight. All values are approximate:

Flight time was about 18 hours. 787 burns 2.5 tons of fuel/hour, so a total of 45 tons of fuel consumed. Jet fuel weighs 6.84lbs/gal at 60F, so that's 13,158 gallons of fuel. At a current price in the US of $1.588/gal, the fuel cost is $20,894. CO2 emissions from jet fuel are 21.5lbs/gal fuel which is 141.4 tons of CO2 emissions. 

That's enough math for today.

BBC website have just given it coverage:

A Boeing jet has drawn an outline of a plane by flying over America using GPS tracking.

During the stunt, the 787 Dreamliner will have travelled further than any commercial route in operation around the world.

When it lands in Seattle, it will have travelled 9,755 miles - compared to the 9,021-mile distance between Auckland and Doha.

It will have also been in the air longer than any current route.

The Boeing test flight will have been in the air for 17 hours and 45 minutes compared to 16 hours, 10 minutes between New Zealand to Qatar

God it'd be sooo tempting to alter the flight plan in the FMC so it wrote 'bollox' instead, or drew the shape of an A350 Airbus lol.

I'm not sure that the test parameters were for the flight, but generally I have to assume they needed to fly for approximately the same number of hours as it would take to draw the aircraft - so hey, if you have to be airborne... why not?  Plus any publicity is good publicity.

 

Flghtradar24 tweeted this:

When you have to test your new @RollsRoyce engine for 17 hours, you might as well have a bit of fun.

That's about as big a statement as you can make... and so good to see there are real people over at Boeing, not just faceless bean counters running "Programmes".

The world needs some more of this kind of stuff.

That is very cool

Clap clap clap!!! Genius!

Thought this was pretty interesting and funny!

Quote

Over the course of 18 hours on August 2-3, Boeing test pilots took N7874 39,000 feet above the United States to perform ETOPS testing on the new Rolls Royce Trent 1000 TEN, which will power the 787-10. Not content to just fly around in circles, they made things a bit more interesting with a giant 787 in the sky.

It was not so much skywriting as it was skydoodling. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/04/541595580/boeing-dreamliner-crew-draws-enormous-outline-of-their-plane-in-the-sky

To pass the time during a routine test flight, a team of Boeing pilots used their own flightpath to draw a giant outline of the very plane they were flying — a 787-8 Dreamliner. The picture they sketched stretched over 22 U.S. states and took 18 hours of flight time to complete.

"The nose is pointing at the Puget Sound region, home to Boeing Commercial Airplanes," the aircraft maker said in a statement.

"The wings stretch from northern Michigan near the Canadian border to southern Texas. The tail touches Huntsville, Alabama," it added.

There's no word on how flight controllers reacted to the rather unique flight path. But the folks at Flightradar24, a flight tracker website, took note when all but the trailing edge of the starboard wing was complete.

And they weren't the only ones to notice as #Dreamliner showed.

Back in February, a team test flying a Boeing 737 Max pulled a similar maneuver, writing the plane's moniker in the sky.

 

2 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Thought this was pretty interesting and funny!

 

Devon,

I merged you post with this one since it was already being discussed and is easier to follow on topic.