Thinking really big: 50 years of Boeing 747

On this very day, 50 years ago, a huge airplane, the largest ever, took off and roared into the skies of Seattle. It was the maiden flight of the jumbo jet, the famous Boeing 747. The story of this plane, its variants still in operation by several airlines, is an amazing story of bright engineers and bold business decisions. The engineering team was led by late Joseph (Joe) Sutter, whose parents were born in Slovenia, just two miles away from where I live.

What I want to focus on in this article is the inventive, creative spirit of Joe Sutter and his design team. Today we would say they were thinking out-of-the-box, that they applied design thinking, that they used lateral thinking … Simply, I would say: they were thinking! Thinking smart and visionary.

The largest planes at the time were Boeing 707 and Douglas DC 8 - and were no longer able to serve the increasing demand for long haul travel or high-capacity routes. There was also a market that a new airplane may create – a market of mass air travel. Numerous dilemmas had to be addressed in designing something larger, in designing the “jumbo jet”. To build a double-decker? To build two separate models – one for freighter (cargo) and one for passenger airliner?

The team worked closely with Pan Am as the launch customer, so some decisions were influenced by the future customer as well. Joe Sutter soon ruled out the double-decker and decided for something extremely wide, for a plane with the width that was almost twice the size of the existing Boeing 707. The story about this enormous size (explained in the book 747: Creating the World`s First Jumbo jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation) goes that when the Boeing team presented the plane designs to Pan Am, Joe brought the tape and threw it on the floor in the meeting room, saying: “This wide …”. The two-aisle wide-body aircraft was born! Now, the plane enthusiasts would say: but why that hump with partial “upper deck”. The designers decided to have the same fuselage for the cargo as well as for the passenger plane. As they wanted a large cargo door at the front of the plane, they had to move the cockpit to the “upper deck”. (Note: This upper deck has been extended through subsequent models of passenger variants almost to the middle of the plane in the last model Boeing 747-8.)     

At the 50th anniversary of the Boeing 747 maiden flight I would like to stress the importance of (sometimes) unexpected and bold decisions which are needed when creating something very different or new. When the Joe Sutter`s project was close to bankruptcy, the Boeing leadership requested from him to lay off 1000 engineers. He refused and requested to hire additional 800. He succeeded. All these stories about creating the jumbo jet are a clear sign how we should think – no matter how we name this thinking. If the created results are great, so great that that the “product” still flies, even after 50 years, then we can only say – the team was really thinking. Thinking really big*.

 * These are the words Mr. Joe Sutter used in his speech in the Wings Club. He kindly sent the speech to me at the occasion of our conversation back in 2008 - soon after his book was published.