which aircraft has the most miles or hours in the air?
 

What's the aircraft equivalent of that '66 Volvo P1800 with 2.2M miles on the odometer? I mean a specific airframe serial number, not an aircraft type of which there could be thousands. I figure a 747 crossing the Pacific Ocean daily racks up 35M miles or 70K hours over 10 years. Then as a retired airliner continues flying freight. Does anyone track these things?

A quick internet search revealed this old timer:

Sixto
87 300D

There are still DC-3 airframes from before WW II flying cargo in some places. They'd probably win for hours.

That's what I was thinking too.

The Wright Flyer has been in the air almost continually since 1948 when it was hung at the Smithsonian, so that's at least 568,000 hours. :)

Their must be DC3's running around the third world with a million billion hours on them.

A 747 owned by Southern Air (N748SA) passed 130,000 hours and was taken out of service in 2011.

Southern Air is a unique outfit. If you need oil field equipment delivered anywhere in the world quickly they can do it. Sort of a hotshot delivery service of the air.

Not cheap, but when you need it yesterday.......

But it's all relative. If it cost you $100,000 to have a pump jack delivered, and it is costing you $25,000 a day for it to be down, it makes sense to get it there now.

Breaking Records Looks like we were wrong.

Oh I'm sure their are a few 3rd world examples where records are not kept to well, that have more hours on them.

Air Force One in the last four years! Sorry I just had to do it.

Who keeps track of the DC-3s hauling drugs out of South America. I know a man that says he made a living rebuilding the engines on DC-3s for 10 years. When I ask who the planes belonged to he said, "I don't know and I don't ask. They pay me $5,000 per engine and pay in cash." I don't know if it is really true, but somebody has to do it. I'm sure some of them have broken records but no one will ever know. There is a DC-3 in the Charlotte air museum that is beautiful . They say it is flyable but needs some brake work. They still have the oil drip pans under the engines. I was told they all leak oil.

Paul

Wouldn’t one of the space shuttles have logged the most miles and hours, or is that not an aircraft?

Discovery, the veteran of the fleet, is NASA's oldest and most traveled shuttle. After 27 years and 39 flights, Discovery has logged 365 days — a full year — in space, and journeyed 148,221,675 miles (238,539,663 km). Over its career, Discovery also made 5,830 orbits of the Earth.

from: http://www.space.com/12173-nasa-space-shuttles-miles-flown.html