This is VH-OJA, "City Of Canberra", a Boeing 747-400 which was, until Sunday, the oldest in the Qantas fleet. It also holds the distinction of making the longest non-stop commercial flight; London to Sydney in 1989.

But this is the last time she'll be airborne, on one of the shortest routes she'll ever fly. YSSY (Sydney Kingsford Smith airport at Mascot) to YWOL (Illawarra Regional Airport). Wollongong airport handles 747's?? Welll... yes and no. The longest runway at YWOL is 16/34 which weighs in at little over 5200 feet. You can get a lightly loaded 747-400 into there if you're good enough. You just won’t ever be able to get it back out again.

And so it is with VH-OJA. She's going to lifelong retirement at the Historical Aviation Restoration Society (HARS) which operates a wonderful aviation museum that I regret I have yet to visit. And photograph. She'll be the only 747 on permanent public display in the world. It certainly beats the alternative fate of heading for the aircraft boneyard in Arizona. I shudder to think how much work the maintenance on this baby will be though, even as a static exhibit.

I considered going down to the airport to shoot the landing but there were warnings of limited accessibility. Except that a few thousand people ended up getting quite good accessibility and got some wonderful shots of this beast coming in to land. I, thinking that I wouldn't get a clean shot, opted to go to the point where I knew it would make landfall, at the lighthouse on Flagstaff Hill. Unfortunately she was still up around 4500 feet at that time and so I was glad of the 40-150's company. No point worrying about the coulda-woulda-shouldas.

The plan was to land her at 07:47, but they missed that by a minute; the landing was at 07:48. Near enough. And with that, 85 million kilometres of flying has come to an end, unless one day someone extends the runway by a factor of about 100%.

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