58 Fun Facts About Boeing 747

Unlike the Boeing 747, which airliner is twin-engined?

Boeing 777: twin-engine jets are cheaper to run, and once rules let them cross oceans hours from an airport, airlines dropped four-engined jumbos. One analyst's verdict: 'The biggest enemy of Boeing quads was Boeing twins.'

The space behind the 747's cockpit, first planned as a crew rest area, became what on early jets?

A passenger lounge: shown the empty space in a mock-up, Pan Am's Juan Trippe ruled that it was for passengers, and early 747s offered sofas and cocktail service up in the hump.

Pan Am's Juan Trippe asked Boeing for a jet more than twice the size of which airliner?

Boeing 707: Trippe wanted each seat to cost about 30% less to fly and thought far bigger jets would ease crowded airports. 'If you build it, I'll buy it,' he told Boeing's Bill Allen.

Which engineer left the 737 to lead the 747 design team?

Joe Sutter had to fight to keep his engineers, because Boeing's best talent was going to its supersonic airliner. That project was cancelled in 1971, while his 747 stayed in production until 2023.

The 747 first flew in February 1969, three weeks before the maiden flight of which other famous airliner?

Concorde first flew on 2 March 1969 and looked like the future of air travel. It was retired in 2003, while the slower 747 stayed in production for another twenty years.

The 747 entered service on January 22, 1970, on which Pan Am route?

New York–London: the first jet turned back with an overheating engine, so the passengers waited for a substitute 747 and finally took off at about 2 a.m.

Who christened Pan Am's first 747 at Dulles on January 15, 1970?

Pat Nixon did the honours as First Lady. The jet she named was due to carry the first paying passengers a week later, but an overheating engine forced a last-minute swap for another 747.

The 747's nickname 'jumbo jet' borrows the name of Jumbo, a 19th-century celebrity who was what?

An elephant: Jumbo was the star of London Zoo until the showman P. T. Barnum bought him in 1882, and his name became a word for anything huge.

Why was the 747's cockpit placed on a raised upper deck, creating its distinctive hump?

To fit a nose cargo door: planners expected supersonic jets to take over passenger travel, so the 747 was shaped to haul cargo as well, loaded straight in through a nose that swings up.

Just before launching the 747, Boeing lost a 1960s Air Force contest for a giant transport to which Lockheed aircraft?

C-5 Galaxy: the contest produced the big high-bypass engines that made a jumbo jet possible, though Boeing says its designers reused nothing else from the losing bid.

Because of the pace of the 747 programme, the people who worked on it earned what nickname?

The Incredibles were some 50,000 Boeing people, from mechanics to secretaries. They had 28 months to design the jet instead of the usual 42, and built the first one in a factory that was still going up.

The 747 factory at Everett, Washington, set what world record when it opened?

Largest building by volume: Boeing had no plant big enough for the 747, so it bought 780 acres beside an airfield, and work on the first jets began before the factory was finished.

Which engine maker developed the JT9D, the high-bypass turbofan built to lift the first 747s?

Pratt & Whitney's JT9D sent most of its air around the engine core rather than through it, which made the 747 both thriftier and far quieter than the screaming jets that came before it.

What was 'Waddell's Wagon', built so pilots could practise taxiing the towering 747?

A mock cockpit on a truck: it sat on stilts three storeys up, and the pilot steered by radioing instructions to the truck driver below.

Before the 747 flew, its new JT9D engine was first tested in the air slung beneath which bomber?

B-52 Stratofortress: the bomber carried a prototype engine aloft in June 1968. Even so, the JT9D gave so much trouble that finished 747s sat at the factory waiting for engines.

Early 747s carried counterweights made of which metal?

Depleted uranium is far denser than lead, so a small block makes a heavy counterweight. After a 747 cargo flight crashed in Amsterdam in 1992, the metal in its tail led to years of health inquiries.

Which British airline began flying in June 1984 with one leased 747?

Virgin Atlantic's first flight went from Gatwick to Newark. Its parent company was a record label, and it sold seats with the same publicity tricks it had used to promote pop bands.

The 747's wings are sharply swept back, at 37.5 degrees, mainly for what?

Faster cruise: sweeping a wing back delays the drag that builds up near the speed of sound, so the huge 747 could cruise efficiently at about 85% of it.

Pan Am's first 747 to roll out, later named for Juan Trippe, ended its days in South Korea as what?

A restaurant: a South Korean couple bought the retired jumbo from a California aircraft graveyard in 2000, but the business failed and the 747 was broken up in 2010.

The 747 was the first 'wide-body' airliner, meaning its cabin was the first with two what?

Aisles: with so much width to play with, the designers broke the long cabin into separate 'rooms', using galleys and lavatories as dividers, so that it would not feel like a tube.

Which 747 variant of 1989 introduced a two-pilot glass cockpit?

747-400: digital screens replaced hundreds of dials, so two pilots could do the work of three, and it became the best-selling 747 of all, with almost 700 built.

What does 'SP' stand for in the 747SP, the extra-long-range model of 1976?

Special Performance: to cross whole oceans non-stop, Boeing chopped a section out of the fuselage to save weight and added fuel, trading seats for range.

Pan Am named one of its 747SPs after which famous aviator, a long-time adviser to the airline?

Charles Lindbergh advised Pan Am for decades and flew survey flights to plan its routes. The airline named the jet in 1977 to mark fifty years since his solo Atlantic flight.

The 747-300 of the early 1980s was distinguished by what change?

A stretched upper deck: lengthening the hump behind the cockpit gave airlines a second full cabin upstairs, and every later passenger version of the 747 kept it.

Two unsold 747-8s bought by the US Air Force to become presidential jets were built for a bankrupt airline from which country?

Russia: the airline Transaero ordered the jumbos but went bankrupt in 2015 before taking them, so they sat in storage in the Mojave Desert until the US Air Force bought the pair.

Which director bought a real 747 and crashed it into a hangar for a 2020 spy thriller rather than use effects?

Christopher Nolan planned to use miniatures and effects for Tenet, then ran the numbers at a California aircraft graveyard and found it cheaper to buy a retired jumbo and wreck it for real.

Which heavy metal band toured the world in 2016 aboard a Boeing 747 flown by its own lead singer?

Iron Maiden's singer Bruce Dickinson is a qualified airline pilot who trained on the jumbo for the tour. The band chose it because the whole stage set fitted in the hold without rebuilding the aircraft.

The last 747, completed in 2022, was built as what?

A freighter: the 1,574th and final 747 went to the cargo airline Atlas Air, because passenger airlines had switched to twin-engined jets while freight carriers still prized the jumbo's huge hold.

The US Air Force's E-4B, a 747 built to command forces during a nuclear war, goes by what nickname?

The Doomsday plane can be refuelled in mid-air for a grim reason: in the kind of war it was built for, there might be nowhere left for it to land.

'Air Force One' is not the president's 747 but what?

A call sign: any Air Force aircraft with the president aboard uses it, so even the specially built 747s, officially VC-25s, give up the name the moment he steps off.

NASA modified two 747s to carry what on their backs?

Space Shuttle orbiters could not fly themselves home after landing in California, so a 747 ferried each one piggyback across the country to the launch site in Florida.

NASA's SOFIA, a 747SP with a door cut in its side, carried what?

Infrared telescope: the door stayed open in flight, above almost all of the atmosphere's water vapour, and the German-supplied telescope studied planets, stars and galaxies until the jet retired to a museum in 2022.

In 1991 a 747 carried a record 1,000-plus passengers while airlifting Jewish refugees to Israel from which country?

Ethiopia: for Operation Solomon the seats were stripped out to fit more people in, and two babies born on the way raised the count. Reports of the total run from 1,078 to 1,122.

Aviation's deadliest accident, two 747s colliding on a runway in 1977, happened on which island?

Tenerife: both jumbos had been diverted there by a bomb at Gran Canaria's airport, and 583 people died. The Pan Am jet was the very 747 that had flown the type's first passenger service in 1970.

In June 1969, months before entering service, a 747 crossed the Atlantic to appear at which famous air show?

Paris: Boeing sent a test aircraft for the jumbo's public debut, even though the flight-test programme was still struggling with its new engines.

To ferry a spare, a 747 can carry a non-functioning fifth powerplant where?

Under the port wing, inboard: the spare hangs between the fuselage and the nearest engine. A launch company later fitted a pylon at the same spot so that its 747 could carry a satellite rocket aloft.

In 1970 the first 747s crossed oceans without a navigator on board, relying instead on which system?

Inertial navigation tracks every movement from a known starting point with gyroscopes and accelerometers, needing no outside signal. Pan Am's 747s carried three sets, so that a spare could take over if one failed.

The digital cockpit fitted to later 747s did away with which member of the three-person crew?

The flight engineer: screens and computers took over the job of watching hundreds of dials, so later jumbos flew with a crew of two instead of three and airlines saved on crew costs.

Which two three-engined wide-bodies followed the 747 into airline service in the early 1970s?

DC-10 and L-1011 TriStar: both were smaller than the jumbo, which suited routes too thin to fill a 747, and even Pan Am ended up flying the pair alongside its 747s.

Which aircraft finally surpassed the 747 as the largest passenger airliner in service, in 2007?

Airbus A380: it can seat up to 853 people, yet it sold poorly as airlines turned to smaller twin-engined jets, and Airbus stopped building it in 2021.

The 747SR was a short-range jumbo packed with 500 or more seats for busy domestic routes in which country?

Japan: its domestic flights were short but packed, so Boeing traded fuel capacity for seats, creating a jumbo that worked like a commuter shuttle.

The bulbous 747s that fly jetliner sections to Boeing's factories load their giant cargo how?

The tail swings open: the whole rear fuselage is hinged and a special truck pulls it aside, so wings and body sections built by partners around the world can slide straight in.

What did the architect David Hertz build in Malibu from the wings and other parts of a scrapped 747?

A house: the retired jumbo's wings and tailplane sit on walls as its roofs, and the rest of the aircraft was cut up to make a studio and other outbuildings.

Boeing rebuilt four 747s with a swollen fuselage to fly wings and fuselage sections for which aircraft?

787 Dreamliner: the wings and fuselage sections are built by partners around the world, and shipping them by sea was too slow, so Boeing created an outsize 747 cargo carrier, the Dreamlifter, to fly them in.

The YAL-1 was a 747 armed with what to destroy missiles?

A laser: in a 2010 test its high-energy beam destroyed a ballistic missile in flight off California, yet the programme was cancelled the following year and the aircraft was scrapped.

Boeing's first concept for the 747, soon scrapped, was what?

A full-length double-decker was what Pan Am's Juan Trippe wanted, like an ocean liner with two rows of windows. A Boeing engineer is said to have won him over to one wide deck by stretching a rope across Pan Am's boardroom.

Engines for the first 747s arrived so late that finished jets left the factory with what hanging from their wings?

Concrete blocks stood in for the weight of the missing engines and kept each airframe balanced, while rows of new jumbos waited outside the factory for the engine maker to catch up.

Which airline, then the biggest passenger 747 operator, retired all its jumbos in 2020?

British Airways had planned to keep its jumbos until 2024, but the pandemic's collapse in long-haul travel made a four-engined jet too costly to fly, and the whole fleet went at once.

Which museum preserves the very first 747, the prototype named City of Everett?

Museum of Flight, Seattle: Boeing kept the prototype for itself, using it for some twenty years as a flying test bed, and its last flight in 1995 was the delivery to the museum.

On early 747s, what led passengers up from the main cabin to the upper deck?

A spiral staircase curled up into the hump and became a symbol of 1970s jet-set luxury. Pan Am was showing it off in advertisements two years before the aircraft had even flown.

Which airline retired the last US passenger 747 in December 2017?

Delta flew three of its last four on a farewell tour from Seattle to Atlanta, Los Angeles and Minneapolis/St Paul.

In 1976 Pan Am's new long-range 747SP began flying non-stop from New York to which Asian city?

Tokyo: no standard 747 could then fly that far non-stop with a full load, but the 747SP, shortened to save weight and built for range, could.

In 1982 a 747 lost all four engines over Indonesia after flying into a cloud of what?

Volcanic ash clogged the engines. The captain told his passengers they had 'a small problem' as all four had stopped, and the jumbo glided for a quarter of an hour before they restarted.

The 747's cabin was made about 20 feet wide so that the freight version could carry two of what side by side?

Cargo containers: Boeing expected the jumbo to end up hauling freight, so it sized the fuselage around two standard eight-foot boxes, and passengers got the famously roomy cabin as a by-product.

Which six-foot-tall devices did the 747's wings gain with its 1989 redesign?

Winglets, the upturned tips of the wings, cut drag, so the redesigned jumbo burned slightly less fuel on long flights; a special short-range version was built without them.

To mark its 50th birthday in 1977, Pan Am flew a 747SP around the world by which unusual route?

Over both poles: Flight 50 left San Francisco and came home by way of London, Cape Town and Auckland, a trip that only a jumbo built for extreme range could make with so few stops.

Besides 'jumbo jet', which nickname has long been attached to the 747?

Queen of the Skies: airlines used the name with real affection, and when the pandemic grounded one great fleet in 2020 its owner said goodbye to 'our magnificent queen of the skies'.

Which musical extra did some airlines install aboard their 747s in the jumbo's early years?

A piano: American Airlines put a piano bar in the economy cabin of its 747s in the 1970s, one of the extras airlines added because the first jumbos were so hard to fill.