Why does the Boeing 747 have a nickname but other aircraft do not?
How Boeing 747 is called Jumbo Jet?


The Boeing 747 is the world's first wide-body aircraft. For a long time, it was the world's largest passenger aircraft1. When Boeing was designing the 747 in mid-1960s, it expected that in the near future supersonic travel would become the norm. Hence, there would not be a need for the passenger version of 747. Because of this, 747s were designed in a way that they can be easily converted into freighters.

Pan Am, being one of the first customers of 747, wanted to fit two rows of cargo containers2, instead of one. This meant that the fuselage had to be at least 16 feet wide, wider than any airliner at that time. This would have worked fine for cargo, but it would make loading and unloading passengers very time-consuming. To accommodate this, Boeing engineers designed two aisles, which ran parallel through the length of the aircraft, hence the term wide-body was coined.

When the press noticed the huge size, they described it with the catchy term Jumbo Jet. It is also known as Queen of the Skies but that is not common.


  Do other airplanes have nicknames?


Airbus A380 dubbed as superjumbo by media. The only A380 sold as a business jet is called Flying Palace.

Although there aren't official nicknames of airplanes, almost all airplanes earned some nick names. This list contains nicknames for mostly military aircraft.



1 Airbus 380 took over as world's largest passenger airplane in 2007.
2 At that time, cargo containers were cubes that measured 8 feet (2.44 m) per side.