Boeing launched the 737 with an order from Lufthansa in February 1965 and delivered the first aircraft to Lufthansa 43 years ago, almost to the day, in December 1967. Right, that’s less than 3 years. After more than 6,000 orders, the aircraft is still in production. To put this in perspective, forty-three years before that first delivery, that would have been December 1924, Luck Lindy had soloed the previous year and was still more than 2 1/2 years from his epochal flight. Think Jennies and barn stormers.
As my good friend, George Hamlin put it, that’s amazing! In his column for Air Transport World, he mentions that the 737’s record is matched on the civilian side by one other airplane, also a Boeing product.
As you’re reading George’s article, ask yourself why this happened: Do OODA loops not apply to the realm of commercial aviation?
Slightly East of New 
Recent post with reference to plant 2 being torn down …
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#60
where first 737 was built
http://www.rbogash.com/Plant%202/2Plant2.html
and
http://www.rbogash.com/Plant%202/Plant2Pix.html
and
http://www.rbogash.com/Plant%202/Plant%202%20Kuller.html
comment was I had done stint with BCS (next door) in ’69 … and drawing parallel with renton datacenter being $300M some in IBM equipment and Boyd biography mentioning NKP was a $2.5B “windfall” for IBM. Old description of NKP (since gone 404 … but lives on at the wayback machine)
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212092342/http://home.att.net/~c.jeppeson/igloo_white.html
oops that should be
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010q.html#59
747 trivia … the cockpit was above to allow for nose door opening & loading/unloading for freight. also the tour of the passenger version mockup … part of the presentation was that there was so many passengers that 747 would always be serviced by at least four jetways (when was the last time you saw four jetways for a plane?)
post from earlier this year on 747 freight version
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#55
including this reference:
http://www.airways.ch/files/2005/0805/001/boeing-airbus-freighter.htm
from above:
The 747 was originally conceived as a freighter for the USAF and that when Boeing lost, to the Lockheed C-5A Galaxy, it took the losing design and turned it into a passenger airliner – which is why the 747 has a nose-door, and why the cockpit is perched on the top of the fuselage, where drag, cockpit-noise and visibility are at their worst
[Thanks! When I showed up at Lockheed Georgia in 1983, the joke was that the 747 was the real winner of the CX competition. As I recall, the freighter version of the 747-400 still has the nose door.]