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747 cockpit from outside9/11/2023 ![]() ![]() A mammoth task, but one Boeing took up, even though it didn’t even have a factory large enough to build such a plane. Trippe gave Boeing another challenge: he wanted the aircraft to be delivered in three years. Pan Am would go on to order 25 aircraft, the order cost them $550 million, which at the time was the most expensive single order ever placed by an airline. Trippe and the entire aviation industry thought that supersonic air travel would be the future and that the aircraft could be used as a freighter once it became the norm. He wanted a double-decker aircraft and wanted it to be a nose-loading aircraft. Juan Trippe had some sway in the design of the aircraft because Pan Am essentially commissioned the aircraft. ![]() And the second was to solve the problem of congestion at airports caused by smaller jets. Trippe later said he had two reasons for his request, the first was to reduce costs by fitting in more passengers per route. The CEO of Boeing at the time, Bill Allen, called Trippe and asked him if he was dreaming. Pan Am’s president at the time, Juan Trippe is famously known for asking Boeing to build an aircraft that is two and a half times larger than the 707. Boeing’s biggest customer at the time and launch customer of the B707, Pan American World Airways, wanted to bring air travel to the masses and make air travel the norm and not a novelty. Boeing would eventually lose out on the CX-HLS contract, but the work would pay out dividends later.īoeing’s efforts with the B707 meant that traveling by plane had now become a viable form of transportation, but it was expensive and only the upper echelon of society could afford it. ![]() To remedy this, Boeing created a secondary deck to house the cockpit, the secondary deck would also extend outward to make room for personnel being transported, this is how the iconic hump came to be. The cargo door would open upwards, which meant that the cockpit will need to be placed higher to maintain visibility. The iconic hump of the B747 can also be credited to the military’s need for the aircraft to be loaded from the front, which made Boeing integrate the cargo door into the nose cone. Landing a defense contract is a guaranteed source of revenue for any contractor, so Boeing, along with the competition, raced to the drawing board to produce a large military transport aircraft. The project was named the Cargo Experimental-Heavy Logistics System (CX-HLS). In the early 1960’s the U.S Air Force needed a replacement for its aging Douglas C-133 Cargomaster. The B707 might’ve paved the way for the B747, but the actual groundwork for the B747 is credited to the U.S Military. The B707 helped Boeing usher in the era of commercial jetliners and revolutionized air travel and it was the catalyst for the modern age of aviation. But what I can do is educate every single budding aviator and aviation enthusiast who reads this aviator insider piece on what makes the Boeing 747 so special, because this queen deserves it. It’s been called the “Super Jet” and the “Jumbo Jet”, but it is the undisputed “Queen of the Skies”.Įvery pilot wants to be behind the controls of one, and yours truly is one of them, but I was born too late and lack the type rating, not to mention the hours. This quad-engined, double-decker behemoth of an aircraft single-handedly ushered in a new age of aviation, and in the process earned itself multiple names. The Boeing 747 is easily one of the most iconic passenger aircraft in the world and possibly many others. ![]()
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