Boeing 747
widebody airliner family (1968–2023)
The Boeing 747 is a long-range wide-body airliner designed and manufactured by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in the United States between 1968 and 2023.
It was conceived in response to the demand of Pan Am for a jet 2+1⁄2 times the size of the 707, which had been introduced in October 1958, to reduce the airline's seat cost by 30%. The design team was led by Joe Sutter, who left the 737 development program in 1965 to design the 747. In April 1966, Pan Am ordered 25 Boeing 747-100 aircraft, and in late 1966, Pratt & Whitney agreed to develop the JT9D engine, a high-bypass turbofan. On September 30, 1968, the first 747 was rolled out of the purpose-built Everett Plant, the world's largest building by volume. The 747's first flight took place on February 9, 1969, and the 747 was certified in December 1969. It entered service with Pan Am on January 22, 1970. The 747 was the first airplane called a "Jumbo Jet" as the first wide-body airliner.
The 747 is a four-engined jet aircraft, initially powered by Pratt & Whitney JT9D turbofan engines, then General Electric CF6 and Rolls-Royce RB211 engines for the original variants. With a ten-abreast economy seating, it typically accommodates 366 passengers in three travel classes.
“Boeing 747” enters the record as widebody airliner family (1968–2023). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Boeing, widebody and airliner can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q179. The Library of Congress control number is sh85015275. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968, 2023, 1958 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boeing 747” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.