747-300SR

The 747-300SR is a short-range, very high capacity 747-300, built for Japanese domestic routes. Japan Airlines operated them with more than 600 seats on sectors such as Okinawa–Tokyo.

Only four were delivered — the rarest of the -300 variants.

The Japanese domestic problem

Japan’s trunk routes were unlike anything else in the world: sectors of an hour or two, flown many times a day, with demand that justified the largest aircraft ever built. The constraint was not range but cycles — takeoffs and landings, which fatigue an airframe far faster than flight hours do.

Boeing had already solved this once with the 747-100SR, by reinforcing the wings, fuselage and landing gear and cutting fuel capacity by about 20 percent. The -300SR applied the same thinking to the stretched-upper-deck airframe, where the extra upper-deck cabin pushed seat counts past 600.

It was done again a generation later for the 747-400D, which went further still and deleted the winglets — on a one-hour sector they never repay the weight they add.

Freighters

Boeing never launched a factory-built 747-300 freighter. Used passenger -300s were converted to cargo from 2000 onwards instead, which is how a number of these airframes finished their working lives.

JAL and JALways flew the -300SRs on domestic leisure routes and to other parts of Asia before retiring them.