Thailand flag carrier, Thai Airways, will take delivery of three brand new Boeing 777-300ERs. Even though it seems they are already in possession of these new aircraft for some weeks now according to some sources. It looks like the aircraft still needs to get its full livery painted on, but the plane will arrive at the airline at a time when it’s needed the least. Here’s what we know so far.
The information was released via The Points Guy who, in turn, shared a Twitter post showing the first of three jets being painted in Everett, Washington.
Line numbers for Boeing are somewhat similar to how Airbus uses its MSNs. The line number is unique within the family of aircraft. Unlike Airbus, Boeing resets the line number when the family of aircraft gets a significant update and is classified as another series. Thus, there can be a Boeing 737 from the Classic series and a 737 from the Next Generation (NG) series with the same line number.
According to BOE Family Flights, the aircraft was first spotted in primer on December 7th, just a day before the above Twitter post. The aircraft’s taxi and RTO (rejected take-off) checks haven’t been listed but since these are usually conducted after livery painting, it likely still needs to happen. Following that will be several test flights – at least two if not more.
With the aircraft’s registration listed as HS-TTA, our guess is that the two 777s after it will be HS-TTB and HS-TTC. This is a common pattern with multiple aircraft from the same other and our guess seems to check out as per a post on Airliners.net.
Source: simpleflying.com