Originally Posted by
ATNotts
Wasn't the reason the 747 was designed with nose loading capability that at the time Boeing were pitching for a large military transport, which was actually awarded to Lockheed for the C-5A? As an aside I recall that when Seaboard World operated the 747-200F the idea was to be able to load 2 x 20ft ISO size containers side by side through the nose, don't know if that ever happened though.
That story is basically a popular myth - about the only part of the Boeing C-5 proposal that made it into the 747 design was the JT9D engines. The rest of the 747 was basically a clean sheet - in fact what Juan Trip wanted wasn't a huge widebody, it was a double decker - basically two 707 fuselages stacked one on top of the other. It was Joe Sutter - as the 747 chief engineer - that came up with the idea making it a really wide single deck and managed to sell the concept to Trip.
At the time of the 747 development, Boeing was hot and heavy into the SST development (and in fact Sutter had to fight dearly for resources since most of the money and manpower was devoted to the SST )(same thing happened during the 747-8 program - most of resources went to the 787 - there was great satisfaction among the 747-8 team when we certified
before the 787 despite the 787 getting most of the resources and a several year head-start). Further, as
Asturias notes, it was believed the 747 would have a relatively short shelf life as a passenger aircraft as future long range travel would be by SST. Hence the 747 was provisioned to make a good freighter from day one (something Airbus failed to do with the A380).