Boeing 747 Introduced - Sept. 30, 1968

The Boeing 747 was introduced on this day in 1968.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and as septem
the Boeing seven forty seven debuted on this day in

(00:24):
nine and it was huge at the time. It was
the world's largest jet. It was so big that Boeing
had to build a new factory in Everett, Washington just
to be able to build the thing. It was so
big that airports had to redesign their terminals to accommodate
the planes themselves and their passengers. The seven forty seven
could carry more than twice as many passengers as the

(00:45):
Boeing seven oh seven, and that made the per passenger
price tag for the airline about half as much as
on other aircraft, at least if the flight was completely full.
But it also meant that the airports needed more passenger
accommodations to go along with it. All those things that
support the coming and going of aircraft, from refueling tankers

(01:07):
to catering trucks had to be updated too, and the
pilots had to learn how to fly this gigantic aircraft.
The training program involved a model of the cockpit that
was on stilts on a truck that moved around so
that pilots could simulate what it was like to be
so far off the ground during takeoff and landing and taxiing.
It took a team of fifty thousand people sixteen months

(01:30):
to design and build the seven forty seven. The first
flight took place on February nine of nineteen sixty nine,
and the first commercial passenger flight was on January of
nineteen seventy. This was a pan Am flight from New
York to London. The first hijacking of a seven forty
seven was that same year, on August three of nineteen

(01:51):
seventy on a flight from New York City to San Juan,
when a passenger pulled out a gun and said he
wanted to go to Cuba. The plane did go to Cuba.
It was met there by Fidel Castro when it landed.
The three sixty passengers and nineteen crew aboard were unharmed,
although they did arrive in San Juan after it was
all over about seven hours behind schedule. There are still

(02:15):
a lot of seven forty seven's in use around the world,
although the last flight of a seven forty seven by
a United States carrier was on January. A lot, but
not all, of the seven forty seven still making flights
are used for cargo rather than for passengers. Modified seven
forty seven have also served as the US presidential aircraft

(02:36):
known as Air Force one, and as the Shuttle carrier
aircraft during the Space Shuttle program. The seven forty seven
was originally designed to work as a cargo plane because
Boeing really thought that passenger aircraft were going to go
the way of supersonic flight. They thought that they needed
to future proof their sub sonic aircraft, so they needed

(02:57):
to make the seven forty seven to be able to
load an un oad huge amounts of cargo as a
matter of future proofing. This focus on cargo loading is
also why the seven forty seven has a humped design
at the top. The cockpit is up above the main deck,
with a space behind the cockpit that was originally a
passenger lounge, but during the fuel crisis of the nineteen seventies,

(03:19):
on most flights it was converted to additional passenger seating.
This arrangement of the flight deck up above the main
deck with the space behind it was so that the
nose of the plane could be on a hinge to
be opened up for cargo loading. Some of the seven
forty seven is no longer in service, have been scrapped,
hundreds are in airplane graveyards, and about fifty have been

(03:42):
written off after crashes or some kind of other irreparable damage.
The first one ever assembled still exists, though it's at
the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where it underwent a
two year restoration process that ended in It had been
sitting out there at the museum for quite some time
and was in need of a lot of both cosmetic

(04:03):
and structural refurbishing. Thanks to Eves Jeff Cope for her
research work on today's episode, into Tari Harrison for all
of her audio work on this podcast. You can subscribe
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in tomorrow for the establishment of a nation