৺ And it seems to many others aswell, which can easily be verified by searching online about it (and by noting the size of the crowd in that video of a live performance of the song!) … if it's not already known through direct interaction with rock-heads. For-instance, the following is a wwweb-article about it.

Louder — Metal Hammer — Dom Lawson — The story behind Saxon's 747 (Strangers In The Night)

The very beginning of the backstory is a colossal electricity outage , @ 1965-November-9^th, that extinguished mains electricity across a vast tract of North-Eastern USA + somewhat of South-Eastern Canada. See the following wwweb-article about it.

Fishwrap — Jenny Ashcraft — November 9, 1965: The Great Northeastern Blackout .

The song became one of their very-most renownedest ones - ie 747 - Strangers in the Night - & is about a passeger-aeroplane, which was low on fuel & therefore unable to divert elsewhere, just managing to land, during that blackout, @ John F Kennedy Airport, New York , even though all electric lights on the ground were utterly extinguished … for which landing the pilot received much praise. He did land by the light of the Moon! The incident was the prompt for introduction of new aviation regulations that stipulate that every flight must be planned such that an amount of fuel shall remain aboard @ arrival @ the planned destination sufficient for a diversion to another airport.

Some details were changed - likely simply to facilitate the singing of the lines of the song : the flight was not Scandinavian Airlines Flight 101 , but rather Scandinavian Airlines Flight 911; & the aeroplane was not a Boeing 747, but rather a

M_ͨDonnell-Douglas 11 .

Boeing 747s did not infact exist (welllllllll - prototypes did) @ that time.

So I'd venture, then, that doing a song premised on all that sortof thing, which is a substantial departure from what rock music had thitherto typically been about, *is an instance of 'prog-rock'* … all-be-it maybe an isolated instance for the band that performed it.

Some exerpts from the above-lunken-to article.

❝

“The first album was an amalgamation of our earlier bands joining together and everyone writing songs as a team,” says Biff. “Things like Stallions Of The Highway and Backs To The Wall, the more frantic things, they were written together as a band. There were a few that me and Paul [Quinn, Saxon guitarist] had that were a little more proggy and lyrically a bit deeper, and a couple that the other guys had that were more bluesy, a more 70s vibe.”

❞

❝

[…] 747 (Strangers In The Night) stood out as an unexpectedly subtle and affecting piece of songcraft, one that offered something distinctly different from the burgeoning metal scene’s usual lyrical preoccupations of fantasy, horror and partying. “I must admit there was a lot of street fighting and girls in our lyrics, for sure,” Biff chuckles. “But 747 was always a melancholy song. It had to be. I just had this image of the power cut as you’re coming in to land, and the airport lights blink out. These planes were being diverted elsewhere and the city’s in darkness. I thought that was a powerful idea. I also thought it was quite cool that strangers were meeting in the blackout. They say that there was a baby boom nine months later. A lot of people became friends through it, shall we say! Ha ha ha!”

❞

The song was actually inspired by

the first installment of

British Broadcasting Corporation's serial documentary Connections, presented by the goodly James Burke , whose speciality @ the BBC was scientific & technological matters, which was broadcast in Britain by that network in 1979. The goodly Biff Byford of the band was watching the installment - @ exactly the same time as I myself also was, as it happens, which I find a tad eldritch, considering it! - & it sparked the flash of inspiration that was the very inception of the song.

So … I've tried this again, then. Although I know from personal experience - and it's extremely plainly evident by the briefest perusal of online sources about the matter - that this backstory of the song is the occasion of considerable curiosity amongst rock-heads, when I first posted about it all trace of that curiosity seemed utterly to have vanished !!

🤔

Although, @ that previous posting, I mentioned the television documentary before mentioning the song … which might have confounded some somewhat.

And it might also help, posting this, to dispel a certain misconception about the song that is out-there to be encountered in folk whom the backstory has reached only partially , & who are under the misprision to-the-effect that the song is about an aeroplane crash , which it is not , & which it would be somewhat unfitting, ImO, for a rock-band to do a song about.