After 43 years of airline service, the Douglas DC-10 retired as a commercial passenger carrying aircraft on the afternoon of February 24. The final flight was carried out by S2-ACR of Biman Bangladesh Airlines, from Birmingham Airport. The last trip carried aviation enthusiasts on a one-hour pleasure flight over the UK's western coast, before landing and being saluted by an arc of water, courtesy of the airport's fire section. Biman's chief executive Kevin Steele said: "We wanted to share this historic last flight with as many people as possible, and I think we have given an aircraft that served us so well a good send-off. We look forward to welcoming passengers onto our new Boeing 777s on our service from Birmingham to New York, which starts in the summer." S2-ACR was the last but one of the 446 DC-10s built and was delivered new to the airline in 1988. It flew back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, on February 25, and landed with around 80,000 flying hours on the airframe - the engines and any useful parts will be sold, and the rest of the well-travelled jetliner will be scrapped. A number of DC-10s still fly with the USAF (as KC-10 Extender tankers), plus three examples serve on with the Dutch military, two with the Bolivian Air Force, and a handful are operated by civilians on military contracts.
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