`Boeing 747 C-5A competition`

Tom's anecdote about the 747 being Boeing's losing C-5A military transport design, repurposed as a commercial jetliner — used to illustrate the bet-your-company scale of aerospace capital investment. Tokyo Narita anecdote of forty-seven 747s on the ground.

Anybody know how the 747 came about as a commercial airliner? The Air Force had a competition for the C-5, and Lockheed won with the C-5A. The 747 was Boeing's design for military transport, and they lost. The government had paid for a large part of that development. And Boeing said, we've got to make some money out of this; we've invested too much of our own money plus government money. So they said, let's build a commercial jetliner. And everybody said, the world doesn't need one of those. I remember flying out of Tokyo once — we did a loop around the airport, and I counted forty-seven 747s on the ground. They're distinctive in shape. Forty-seven, just sitting there. And we weren't necessarily the first ones to take off; they take off in waves on the international flights. There could be fifty at Narita Airport. That's a lot of money. The 747 was the savior of Boeing through the 1970s and '80s — big cash cow.