Qantas Museum Longreach QLD

Today we spent most of the day at the Qantas Founders Museum in Longreach. We had pre booked out tickets a few days ago and chose the Premium Economy package that included the museum and a tour of the planes in the Airpark. We spent a couple of hours becoming familiar with founders of this successful company from back in the early 1900’s after WWI until present day. It originally grew from the need for transport in the outback due to very poor road conditions especially after rain. 

First Class upper deck in the 1970’s

We both failed at flying ..

Mark feels more confident with the guns..

 

The long range fuel tanks.

For those interested in the fashion.. good job sewing these.

The Airpark tour was very interesting with lots of info on 4 planes- 

the Douglas DC-3 (very popular during WWII and then used for transportation of goods and people too but it was not pressurised so a pretty bumpy ride). 

The Lockheed Super Constellation (the first plane to offer economy fares)

So glad the flights are a lot shorter now..

The Boeing 707 (this model was 3m shorter than the others and was #1 and has had an interesting history. After not selling at the Paris air show having had a complete and expensive makeover to sell to the Arab sheik due to it having pig skin! It was eventually used by various famous people including the Jackson Five. On its way to Australia after Qantas bought it, it stopped in Florida to get a photo with #13 build with owner John Travolta, Qantas ambassador at the time).

The Boeing 747 (was knicknamed the ‘queen of the sky’ and symbolises for us the amazing engineering of how to get 327tons up in the sky!)

The ‘Black Box’ is actually coloured orange..

Ahhh.. I remember this type of travel …

The inside of the emergency door with the inflatable raftslide 

So this is what is behind all that interior panelling…

Wow so happy I don’t need to fly this plane.. so many buttons 

These engines are huge and weigh in at 6.3ton each and there are 4 of them! @ $6.5m ea 

The other planes included in the museum ticket were-

The Catalina amphibious aircraft whose longest nonstop flight was nearly 32 hours!

In the 1920’s built hangar were a couple of full size replicas of their earlier planes. One of them even had a toilet!

Oh … we also took a couple of photos around town. Tonight we returned to Apex Campground.