Boeing and the 747

The original 747 was built in response to the Douglas Corporation's decision to significantly increase the number of passenger seats in the DC-8 during the mid-1960s. As Boeing began to build designs for a bigger jet, oversized military cargo planes were responsible for giving them their ground plan:

Although Boeing was still thinking about stretched versions of the 707 during 1965, the legacy of the military design studies obviously contributed to the rapid progress of the 747 design, once the company decided to go ahead with the project in 1966 (Bilstein, 1984, p. 262).

In contrast, the beginning of the 767 widebody jet was catalyzed by the aging of the airline industry's fleet of jets. By the end of the 1970s:

some 1,200 jet transports out of 4,800 in service outside of Soviet and Soviet-bloc countries were reaching retirement age. Since the sales for new airliners in the 1980s were estimated at $80 billion, this high stakes market generated unusually strong interest among aerospace firms on both sides of the Atlantic (Bilstein, 1984, p. 288).

This paper will be compare and contrast the Boeing 747 and Boeing 767 model jet airliners.

The first ceremonial unveiling of the 747 took place in the fall of 1968. Production deliveries began in December of the following year. Pan Am, impressed by the new plane's specifications, placed the first orders for 25 planes. The 747 planes were remarkable for their new capabilities, but they also posed special problems in logisti

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two-place cockpits, designed to eliminate the flight engineer and save considerable money. In compensation for the displaced engineer, advanced cockpit instrumentation relied on a cluster of cathode ray tube displays and computers to call up information at the pilot's command or to indicate potential problems (Bilstein, 1984, p. 289). The 767s were designed to do more than save money by eliminating the flight engineer and increasing the use of high technology instrumentation. They were also designed to be lighter, and more fuel-efficient: The new 767s used newer, fuel-efficient engines with computerized fuel management systems and incorporated lightweight composite materials in many parts of the wing, tail surface and fuselage. Collectively, improvements on the new 767 and 757 were intended to reduce the seat-mile cost by as much as 20 percent in comparison to other transports in service, like the 747 (Bilstein, 1984, pp. 289-290). The 747 is much different than the 767 in design and purpose. The 747 was designed to carry many more passengers, it was the first commercial airliner with a double-deck since the 1940s and it combines size, range and modern technology to provide more economical operation. The giant has a 16-w

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