Boeing 747 Trivia
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58 free Boeing 747 trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Boeing 747 trivia quiz covers the Queen of the Skies from Juan Trippe's request for a jet two and a half times the size of the 707 to the last freighter rolling out of Everett in 2022. The easy questions ask how many engines it has, which airline launched it, what its nickname was, why the cockpit sits in a hump, and which presidential aircraft is based on it. Then it works through the development story: the design team called the Incredibles, the 28-month schedule, the factory that is still the largest building by volume on Earth, the first flight in February 1969, the engine troubles and the debt that nearly sank Boeing. The hard end is for aviation obsessives: the CX-HLS military competition that gave it its raised cockpit, the depleted uranium counterweights, the truck-mounted taxi trainer called Waddell's Wagon, the 747SP, the two-crew glass cockpit of the -400, the 1,087 passengers airlifted on one El Al flight, the fifth-engine pod, the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and SOFIA, the deadliest crash in aviation history and the final tally of 1,574 built. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the Boeing 747, the 747-8, the 747SP, the Everett factory, the Tenerife disaster and the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our aviation history and Concorde quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Unlike the Boeing 747, which airliner is twin-engined?
Boeing 777
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.'
Q 02The space behind the 747's cockpit, first planned as a crew rest area, became what on early jets?
A passenger lounge
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.
Q 03Pan Am's Juan Trippe asked Boeing for a jet more than twice the size of which airliner?
Boeing 707
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.
Q 04Which engineer left the 737 to lead the 747 design team?
Joe Sutter
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.
Q 05The 747 first flew in February 1969, three weeks before the maiden flight of which other famous airliner?
Concorde
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.
Q 06The 747 entered service on January 22, 1970, on which Pan Am route?
New York–London
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.
Q 07Who christened Pan Am's first 747 at Dulles on January 15, 1970?
Pat Nixon
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.
Q 08The 747's nickname 'jumbo jet' borrows the name of Jumbo, a 19th-century celebrity who was what?
An elephant
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.
Q 09Why was the 747's cockpit placed on a raised upper deck, creating its distinctive hump?
To fit a nose cargo door
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.
Q 10Just before launching the 747, Boeing lost a 1960s Air Force contest for a giant transport to which Lockheed aircraft?
C-5 Galaxy
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.
Q 11Because of the pace of the 747 programme, the people who worked on it earned what nickname?
The Incredibles
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.
Q 12The 747 factory at Everett, Washington, set what world record when it opened?
Largest building by volume
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.
Q 13Which engine maker developed the JT9D, the high-bypass turbofan built to lift the first 747s?
Q 21Which 747 variant of 1989 introduced a two-pilot glass cockpit?
747-400
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.
Q 22What does 'SP' stand for in the 747SP, the extra-long-range model of 1976?
Special Performance
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.
Q 23Pan Am named one of its 747SPs after which famous aviator, a long-time adviser to the airline?
Charles Lindbergh
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.
Pratt & Whitney
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.
Q 14What was 'Waddell's Wagon', built so pilots could practise taxiing the towering 747?
A mock cockpit on a truck
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.
Q 15Before the 747 flew, its new JT9D engine was first tested in the air slung beneath which bomber?
B-52 Stratofortress
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.
Q 16Early 747s carried counterweights made of which metal?
Depleted uranium
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.
Q 17Which British airline began flying in June 1984 with one leased 747?
Virgin Atlantic
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.
Q 18The 747's wings are sharply swept back, at 37.5 degrees, mainly for what?
Faster cruise
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.
Q 19Pan Am's first 747 to roll out, later named for Juan Trippe, ended its days in South Korea as what?
A restaurant
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.
Q 20The 747 was the first 'wide-body' airliner, meaning its cabin was the first with two what?
Aisles
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.
Q 24The 747-300 of the early 1980s was distinguished by what change?
A stretched upper deck
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.
Q 25Two unsold 747-8s bought by the US Air Force to become presidential jets were built for a bankrupt airline from which country?
Russia
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.
Q 26Which director bought a real 747 and crashed it into a hangar for a 2020 spy thriller rather than use effects?
Christopher Nolan
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.
Q 27Which heavy metal band toured the world in 2016 aboard a Boeing 747 flown by its own lead singer?
Iron Maiden
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.
Q 28The last 747, completed in 2022, was built as what?
A freighter
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.
Q 29The US Air Force's E-4B, a 747 built to command forces during a nuclear war, goes by what nickname?
The Doomsday plane
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.
Q 30'Air Force One' is not the president's 747 but what?
A call sign
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.