#i’ve got brainrot but i physically cannot do another listen

[lazylittledragon]

mentally i’m still here 🖤🖤

[theresa-of-liechtenstein]

@lavstar i was so incredibly stupid and i deleted your ask while i was drafting it… i swear i didn’t forget to do it 😭 anyway i’ve FINALLY finished it so let’s jump into the compilation of the most planes i have ever brainrot ❤️ because no ❤️ you cannot expect me to pick one ❤️ it is impossible ❤️

two airbus A320s taking off from parallel runways, five nautical miles apart ‘cause they’re not gay!

btw i genuinely do not care about military aircraft (never have, prob never will) so these are all to do with civil aviation. also huge disclaimer i did all the commentary off the top of my head (i did have to wikipedia some of the stats im not martin fucking crieff) so if i mess up a term or something that’s on me

of course no post about my favorite planes cannot leave out the OG. my first love, the most plane i have ever ridden; the one, the only, the increasingly irrelevant due to industry shifts, the beloved Airbus A380.

(L) just look at this big beautiful girl! + (R) a view of i believe scotland? as approached from the north

i don’t know why i love this plane so much, because lots of other people certainly don’t for a lot of reasons. her size makes her the main character out of necessity at every airport she comes across, and she’s an inconvenience for air traffic controllers for that reason. her origin story is [twitter stan account voice] a bit problematic. given changes in industry trends, she is also quickly becoming irrelevant. airbus my beloved please just admit that the four engines thing was nostalgia and go. she’s a marvel of engineering sure, but when all is said and done…the B747 came, she served cunt, and then she got phased out. the A380 was made with the intention of doing the same…unfortunately, she didn’t really complete the second step.

wait holy shit. i know why i love this plane so much. it’s because this plane…is me ❤️

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and now for thee og in terms of famous big-ass planes that everyone loves: the B747. everyone loves the 747. even if they say they’re not into planes, they are. for me, not gonna lie: a very big reason for why i love the Queen of the Skies so much is mark vanhoenacker’s book, skyfaring. he flew the 747 for bri’ish airways (when they still had them) and loved that plane so much and man who am i to blame him.

(L) i think i teared up when i saw her through the big windows for the first time bc i was like oh my god. i am going to be on her. this icon of aviation, the arguable symbol of commercial aviation. so much history, so much significance… + (R) the past, the present, and the future of british airways in one image 🥺

i was on a 747 twice in my life. once on a cathay pacific flight to the philippines, and on my last flight abroad, on a british airways flight to heathrow. little did i know i was flying one of the last of their 747 flights—they phased them out completely the following year, a bit earlier than anticipated due to the pandemic.

as enzo ferrari once probably said, “ask a child to draw a plane, and certainly he will put a hump and four engines on it.” in terms of sheer iconic power and energy, the Queen (and she is the only earthly being to whom I shall ever refer as such) would far and away be the top on anyone’s list, save for the fact that i don’t have a top to this list and i have other planes to get to dear god this is getting long do you know what you’ve got yourself into!! the Queen really said “flight belongs to the people now” and the airlines just had to shut up and listen!! she is truly the main character!!!

genuinely don’t remember what river this is except that it’s in the UK… 🙈

i feel like everything else i say about her is just going to be a pale imitation of how evocative skyfaring was, so honestly i really recommend the book it’s so good and it’s one of my favorites. my copy is sort of falling apart now bc i kept bringing it around to places 😭 anyway, the number of airlines using her for passengers is decreasing, but you know who still use converted versions of her as well as purpose-built models? cargo airlines! anyway, ups and their brown planes my beloved 🤎

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this slot was going to go to the B767 and 757, and i was going to rhapsodize about how aesthetically the 767 looks like a nicer plane to me because of Chonk, but the 757 is really endearing because it’s a narrowbody jet and it’s got landing gear that is long in a useful but unusual-looking way, which in essence what i’m trying to say is that if the 757 were a person, it would be esteban ocon.

so i was getting ready to write all of this down in much more words than i needed, but i remembered suddenly the very reason i was making this post in the first place. and that, my friends, is the B777.

honestly you don’t fully understand how big the 777 is until you see it in person. because we are all acclimated to think of like the 747 when we think of ‘big plane.’ but the 777 is massive. even i forgot about it when i wrote That Fanfic.

the 777 and 787 are the future of long-haul commercial aviation (and i say this as an A380 stannie). widebody jets with 2 big-ass engines are most likely what we’re going to see in the sky going forward when it comes to long-distance travel, and the pandemic pretty much confirmed that.

that aside, i love the 777. so much that i wrote a whole fanfic around one making an emergency landing ❤️ i really pretended ETOPS (the thing where a plane can fly for a long time on one engine) did not exist for six chapters and an alternate ending and i think that’s just very quirky of me aha 🤪

dear god do not mind my hat i literally bought it because of fred fucking thursday of endeavour… what the FUCK was teenage me on 😭

the 777 was supposed to be a trijet (one with three engines, two under each wing and one built into the vertical stabilizer) but as the mcdonnell douglas and lockheed martin trijets (cba to look up the numbers) were not projected to continue to be successful, they got rid of the trijet 777 idea and instead made it have two engines. another thing i think is neat is that all the examples of the 777 that you will see in the wild right now don’t have winglets bc the wings themselves are so long and raked back that they’re not necessary. which would be a weird thing for me in particular to find neat, because if you know me well you know i have a thing for winglets. (the 2022 f1 car’s front wing my BELOVED WAKSKDKSJSJ!!!!!) i also think the way the wingtip lights are incorporated into the wings are so neat. the upgraded version they’re trying to make now, the 777X, will have foldy wingtips so you can DIY your own winglets and i think that’s hilarious (and also cool).

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genuinely i think i’m the only plane person that likes this last aircraft: the Embraer ERJ-175. i like her for purely nostalgic reasons. she reminds me of how i returned to my roots and decided to pursue engineering.

so okay this is going to have nothing to do with the plane, but i was lucky enough to be given a visit to the flightdeck after landing back home from a weekend trip. i was so excited to be allowed to sit in the first officer’s seat, and got to poke around the flightdeck for like ten minutes. which was cool, but all this was with the sinking realization that even operating a regional jet might be too physically demanding (read: unsafe) for someone of my… [exhales knowing EXACTLY what i’m about to walk into] height.

that is one fully glass cockpit. also those yokes are specific to embraer, boeing’s look more like f1 steering wheels with stuff cut out of them i think, and airbus’s are operated by side stick. it’s almost funny especially when watching flightdeck videos of the a380 cause it’s like… you’re doing All That *gestures vaguely at plane* with THAT *gestures at thing that looks like a chicken drumstick with semiconductors implanted in it*

so that was piloting as a career done with for me (much to my family’s relief.) and then i thought “hm i don’t have to be flying planes all the time to be working around them…why don’t i work on developing them instead?” and i was passively interested in matsci already, so that’s how and when i decided to pursue engineering, with hopes of working for airbus or boeing and in civil aviation.

we’ll see how that pans out, i say as i side-eye the exponential growth of my interest in motorsport.

thanks for the ask! i’m so sorry i was stupid and deleted it but i hope you like this very long, drawn out, and frankly deranged response 💚