Originally Posted by
SMT Member
The 747 will live on for many, many years still. In the role she was originally designed for to boot, rather than the degrading existence of shovelling ungrateful punters between continents.
If you mean as a freighter, that is not what it was originally designed for. Juan Trippe of Pan Am wanted a large capacity passenger airliner and Boeing built it for him. True that they used a lot of the work originally put in to Boeing's failed bid for the USAF C5 competition - but the 747 was significantly different from that.