Originally Posted by
DuncanDoenitz
Not sure of relevance to the HF thing, but don't lose sight of the fact that a KC-135 is not a Boeing 707 with a boom and a paint job. It's a Boeing 717, with a separate development line from Boeing's original Dash-80 demonstrator. As the company's "717" designation did not feature prominently in marketing, Boeing decades later felt able to re-use the number for its legacy Douglas/MD DC-9 offspring.
Sorry for the thread tangent, but the general belief among Boeing employees at the time was that the idiots running Boeing at the time (specifically Condit and Stonecipher) didn't know Boeing history - and hence didn't
know that the official Boeing designation for the KC-135 was the Boeing 717.
There was considerable outrage among the employees that the leaders (who most of us already thought of as idiots in suits) didn't know their own company's history and so re-used a previously used aircraft designation for what had been the MD-95 pre-merger.