I've been waiting for a slow day on this forum and since it is dark outside and there have only been four posts today, I am going to go ahead and post this.

It seems that there is a story behind the fact that a certain aircraft company designates their airplanes using lots of 7's. You are probably familiar with 737 and 747 aircraft. There is a whole series with numbers 0 - 7 between two sevens. There seems to be no logical order. A 757 is smaller than a 747, and a 737 is smaller than a 727. The 717 is so new you probably have not seen one yet, and it is newer than a 707 and newer than a 727. No logical order.

The story goes back to a company official who was hung up on sevens. He was born on July 7, 1907, which can be written 7-7-07, if you care to do it that way. He was married in 1927 and was the father of seven children.

In 1937, he bought a new Hudson motorcar and kept it all his life. He also owned lots of other cars, but only kept the ones from a model year that ended in 7. When he died, his estate included the 37 Hudson, a 47 Lincoln Continental, a 57 Ford Thunderbird, a 67 Ford Mustang, and a 77 Chevrolet Corvette. He died in 1986 just short of his 80th birthday, and was reportedly shopping for a 1987 model car when he suffered a heart attack on -- you guessed it -- 7th Avenue in New York.

Speaking of street addresses, he owned a house in San Diego with 777 as a house number, but his main residence was in Seattle, where he built a house with seven gables, on a seven acre plot.

The only serious inconsistancies in his story are these: He went into the aircraft manufacturing business in 1939. He rose to upper management in six years and stayed with the company until he retired in 1968. As you might guess, I made all of this up in about seven minutes flat, and posted it here just to show how easy it is to make up the stuff you see on the net. I still don't know where they got that crazy numbering system for all of those airliners.
Howard