Pat Flannery wrote:

Dick Morris wrote:



We also built a 767 with a hump on the back to carry an airborne laser
for missle defense, which could be mistaken for a 747 from the side, at
a distance. "Truncated" would be a good description for the hump, which
does not taper into the fuselage the way the hump does on a 747.


Didn't that one suffer a major fire? Or was that a KC-135?

Don't know, but the plane that I was thinking of was the Airborne
Surveillance Testbed (formerly the Airborne Optical Adjunct) which
apparently contained only sensors for tracking incoming missiles. Near
as I can tell, the last flight of that airplane was in Dec., 2002, so it
could not have been the airplane that was sighted. The "truncated" hump
probably refers to the original 747-200 upper deck as opposed to the
extended upper deck on the -400's we build now.

Pat