Everybody on the plane dressed up in their Sunday best. Things have changed.

n case you don't recognize the type, those are Boeing executive secretary ladies, and the men of the marketing, sales, customer sustainment departments and other such non-engineering management staff. They are all wearing mid-century "Mad Men" fashions. Flying commercial was still glam in those days,

Forget the wearing of mid-century "Mad Men" fashions. I yearn for the days when people showered, shampooed and shaved before leaving the house in the morning!

How come there's 2 seats on the left and 3 on the right?

It's too bad that people with no imagination or wonder for the airship's magic determined to reduce being whisked from ground level to many miles in the air by treating air travel as though it were merely a trip down the hallway to the loo. No one I know got a free bag of peanuts for going to the bathroom.

I have been lucky enough to fly on 747's a few times and loved it. very stable airplanes and comfortable as well.
Are you sure that there is only 25,000 commercial planes out there ? i am sure 60 % of them are in the stack in front of us when we fly out of any large airport

I got to re-fuel a couple of PanAm 747s when I worked at Orlando. While it was the biggest aircraft I re-fueld, it's under-wing fuel panel was not nearly as high off the ground as my most-hated aircraft, the Airbus A300/310. I only pumped a modest couple thousand gallons, compared to the 2-3 times upload for the more common L-1011 and DC-10. That was a function of the destination, not aircraft capacity.

Holy cow, it was a very long walk to take the fuel ticket up to the cockpit from the pavement.

Check out this cool pic of a 747 ferrying an engine http://www.airliners.net/photo/635769/M/