Boeing 747 C-5A competition

Origin story of the 747. Boeing lost the four-or-five-billion-dollar C-5A military airlift contract to Lockheed (Marietta, Georgia); used their sunk investment to pitch the 747 as a commercial transport. Used to teach the magnitude of bet-your-company aerospace programs.

Does anybody know how Boeing got the 747? They lost the C5-A contract to Lockheed Martin — actually it was a different aerospace company then, in Marietta, Georgia. I can't remember; one of my best friend's fathers worked there when I lived in Atlanta as a kid. The 747 was a twenty-billion-dollar bet-your-company project. The earlier bet-your-company project, four or five billion dollars, was the competition to build the super-size air transport for the Air Force, and the C5-A Galaxy won. Before that, they used the C-130, which is much smaller. The C5-A, you can drive a couple of M60 or M1 tanks onto. The army wanted an airlift to take tanks around the world, and the 747 was Boeing's entry into that competition back in the 60s. Boeing had lost the competition, had invested billions of dollars of their own money, and they said, well, why don't we make a commercial air transport. And everybody thought, whoever wants to have 400 people on a plane? Well, I remember taking off out of Tokyo Narita once, and we circled over the airport and I counted 47 747s on the ground. Forty-seven 250-million-dollar airplanes — you're talking ten billion dollars worth of planes right there at Narita. It's one of the largest hubs for 747s.