7 Boeing 747 Facts That Will Shock You

You already know the 747. You have seen it at airports, watched it take off, maybe even flown on one. But knowing what it looks like and knowing what it actually is are two very different things. Because behind the most famous passenger jet ever built is a collection of facts so strange and so surprising that most people who have flown on the 747 their entire lives have never heard any of them. Here are seven things about the Boeing 747 that nobody ever told you. Start with the number that most people find genuinely hard to believe. Boeing only expected to build around 50 passenger versions of the 747 before the whole programme shifted to cargo. When Joe Sutter and his team were designing it in the 1960s the assumption inside Boeing was that supersonic travel would take over within a decade. Passengers would switch to jets that flew faster than sound and the 747 would quietly become a freighter hauling cargo between continents. The passenger version was almost an afterthought — a way to make money in the short term before the real future of aviation arrived. Boeing's internal projections suggested they might sell around 50 passenger 747s before demand dried up entirely. They ended up building 1,574. The plane that was designed to be temporary became one of the longest running production programmes in aviation history and one of the most profitable aircraft programmes ever undertaken. Every single person who ever flew on one was riding in an aircraft that Boeing never really expected anyone to still be boarding fifty years after it was designed. The supersonic future never came. And the aircraft that was supposed to disappear quietly into cargo duty ended up carrying more people than any jet in history.