What was the Boeing 747 originally designed for?

It was originally designed for carrying a large number of people over great distances. Large meaning more than 2 times that of a Boeing 707, the largest plane in service at the time. During this time, the Concorde and supersonic flight was just beginning to rise, and people thought that supersonic flights would make the subsonic jets obsolete.

In this case, Boeing designed the 747 to be easily convertible for cargo, hence putting the flight deck on the upper deck, allowing the lower deck to carry large cargo. This gave the 747 its hump, and enabled the nose to be swung open to load cargo. The Boeing 747 was also the first widebody jet, and the most successful from that era. Engineers realized that to build a plane twice as large as the 707, they would either have to make it much longer, give it two decks, or make it wider. They chose to make the plane wider, thus giving it two aisles.

The 747 made air travel possible for the masses. Without the 747, we wouldn’t be able to travel across the globe in the frequency that we do today. We owe a great deal to the 747. She was a true game changer. As time went on, newer and better jets made the 747 obsolete, but almost every pilot or aviation geek will continue to idolize the 747. The 747 is the queen of the skies, and no matter how old she is, she will always be the queen.

I believe at the time PanAm wanted a bigger plane that could carry more passengers than the existing 707 and asked Boeing to design one. At the time Boeing (and nearly everyone else) thought that supersonic transport was soon going to be around so they designed the 747 to be easily convertible to carry freight if sales of passenger models dropped.