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There is no doubt that the Boeing 747 in its various configurations has been one of the most successful and well-known aircraft designs in commercial aviation, used by both passenger and cargo airlines the world over.

It’s such an iconic plane that even the President of the United States flies around in a heavily customized version of one.

There’s a reason why the Boeing 747 was called ‘the Queen of the Skies’ soon after it first entered service in the colors of Pan Am on January 22nd, 1970.

But Boeing is not just a commercial aircraft manufacturer - it’s long been in the business of military aircraft too.

One example of a Boeing military aircraft is the legendary B-52 bomber, first introduced in 1955.

And so it was back in the late 1970s that Boeing actively lobbied the military and politicians in order to push its militarized version of the 747.

It would be called the Cruise Missile Carrier Aircraft, or CMCA for short.

Why Boeing chose to push its 747 CMCA at that time is central to understanding the project and to also wonder: why did the military decide not to take up Boeing on its offer of a missile-bearing 747?

By the late 1970s, the economy of the United States was stagnant due to the global oil crisis earlier in the decade and the huge rise in inflation.

That’s why the administration of President Jimmy Carter
felt compelled to cancel the B-1A program due to fiscal concerns.

And so the corporation put forward its low-risk and relatively cheap cruise missile delivery project based on its 747.

The Boeing project was in fact punted by the Carter administration during 1979 as a viable, cheaper option for the country’s military.

Boeing’s proposal was very simple: turn its world-famous long-haul commercial aircraft into a flying arsenal delivery system capable of carrying between 50 and 100 air-launched cruise missiles, or ALCMs.

The AGM-86 winged cruise missile, which was 21 feet or 6.4 metres in length, was the popular choice of the U.S. military at the time. In fact, it remains in use today.

And it was that missile around which the 747 CMCA concept was developed by Boeing.

Context was everything: the United States was enjoying a significant advantage over the Soviet Union in the development of cruise missiles by this time.

Not surprisingly, the 1970s was marked by the U.S. military trying to find every way in which this advantage over the Soviets could be exploited for both air- and sea-launched cruise missiles.

The AGM-86 ALCM was also built by Boeing, by the way, so it made sense that Boeing would be confident of its aircraft’s ability to house the very missiles it also designed and manufactured.

It should be noted that the United States Air Force or USAF had contracts with several different aircraft companies at the time to investigate the feasibility of modifying so-called off-the-shelf aircraft for use as cruise missile carriers.

Besides the Boeing 747, the USAF was also considering Lockheed’s C-5, L-1011, C-141 and McDonnell Douglas’ DC-10.

There were also plans for a Lockheed super carrier that would have been a nuclear powered arsenal bird, but thats a video for another time

The CMCA was immensely simple as a concept, of course. What made the Boeing CMCA an appealing option was its configuration for the purpose of deploying missiles and, importantly, its potential payload.

After all, a single 747 CMCA could launch 72 AGM-86 cruise missiles in a single mission,
.
compared to the famous B-52 bomber which could only carry up to 20 missiles for a single sortie.

So how would it work? Well lucky for us, the patents are available online for free...





The configuration inside the 747 would be as straightforward as the overall design concept. It would be based on the 747-200C, which was a nose-loading cargo derivative of the famous airline.

The cargo hold would house nine rotary launchers mounted on tracks in the interior of the stripped-out cabin.

Each rotary launcher would contain eight missiles, with each missile sliding back into a launch position at the rear right of the aircraft.

This would be achieved with the aid of an overhead handling system.

As for how the missiles would launch, this would be via a bay door at the right of the 747's tail cone.

When needed, this bay door would open and an ejector system would punch the missiles out into the air stream. Missiles could be ejected either one at a time in either direction or they could be ejected out in rapid-fire succession.

Flight International has stated that Boeing also proposed both the 747-200F and the 747SP as potential cruise-missile carriers.

The 747-200F would have had a maximum missile capacity of 72 missiles, whilst the smaller 747SP could have carried 48 missiles.