It’s not a secret that Iron Maiden lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson is an accomplished pilot, but he’s taking his flying skills to one of the highest levels. The British metal band are setting out on a fantastic 35 country wide tour in 2016 and will be using a brand new 4 engine Boeing 747-400 jumbo jet to do so.
The new version of Ed Force One will take the band, crew 12 tonnes worth of equipment the 55000 miles around the world to tour on every major continent on the planet. Exact details on the tour aren’t exactly finalised yet, and we won’t be able to find them out until October, but in the mean time here’s what Bruce had to say on the tour.
“When the opportunity arose from my friends at Air Atlanta Icelandic to lease a 747 for The Book of Souls World Tour, of course we jumped at the chance, who wouldn’t? The greatest benefit of travelling in a 747 is that because of its colossal size and freight capacity we can carry our stage production and all our stage equipment and desks in the cargo hold without having to make any of the immense structural modifications needed to do this on the previous 757, the extent of which fans will have noted on the Flight 666 DVD.
“Although in reality we cannot carry much more gear the savings in complexity, time and cost make using the 747 even more practical. All we will need to do is “paint” it and move a few seats around, with the added advantage that there is much more room for band and crew – our Krew can almost get a row of seats each to catch up on sleep on the flights! Furthermore, it is marginally faster 0.85 MACH and the range of around 7000NM (13,000 km) is much greater which means we will not have to make the refuelling stops we needed to with the 757.
“However, even though we have worked out the logistics of taking a plane of that immense size out on tour, I still have to learn to fly it before we can go anywhere! So, I’m currently doing my training to qualify as a pilot and Captain on a Boeing 747. I’m doing this at Cardiff Aviation, my aircraft maintenance facility in Wales, where we recently took possession of a rather splendid 747 simulator which I can’t wait to get practising on!
“We’re all really excited at the thought of bringing our brand new tour to fans who have never seen us play live before, and of course re-visiting all our old friends again too. You can rest assured we are all working hard to put together a spectacular show for our fans”
We’ll let you all know on details of the tour as and when we get them.
