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.

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.