Book Review: Creating the 747 Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation

It is surprising to find insight into the mind set of the space program from a book seemingly devoted to the nuts and bolts of airplane engineering. It is even more surprising to find an endorsement blurb from Neil Armstrong on the book jacket of a Boeing employee's memoir. But Joe Sutter's book iconically titled 747 delivers both due to his rarified position of being hand selected by the Reagan Administration in 1986 to serve, along with Armstrong, Chuck Yeager, Richard Feynman, Sally Ride and nine other heavyweights, to serve on the presidential commission to investigate the Challenger explosion.

Sutter has been dubbed the Father of the 747. As chief engineer of that unique airplane project, he deserves the title, even if the corporate visionaries of Boeing and Pan Am should share adoption rights for their diligent support. Sutter designed the 747 from the ground up, as the first major aircraft without a military progenitor. His monumental struggles were not limited to unprecedented engineering quandaries. He fought politics, such as the Pan Am insistence upon the inadequately powered GE engines as components for the plane, only to find out later that "Pan Am had on its board of directors a fellow who was also on GE's board. In a conflict of interest, this individual got Pan Am's board to push Boeing hard to adopt the GE engine for the 747." He competed for funding with the darling of Boeing's projects, the SST. Sutter emphasizes, "For all its later success and impact, the 747 was not considered the next big thing at Boeing or even an area where technology was at the forefront. Instead, people viewed it as an interim conventional airliner, useful only until SSTs took over long-haul air travel." Boeing was so certain of super sonic transport that a colleague said "You know, Joe, you do a good job on this big airplane of yours, and we'll save you a place on the SST program."

747 reads like a series of memos dictated by a reflective executive for transcription. Although co-author Jay Spenser has apparently smoothed out the rough spots, it still seems that Sutter had mood swings throughout his recollections. For example, in one passage he says the following with an utter lack of irony: "Jack Steiner and I share the patent on the 737, he for its wider cabin and I for the placement of the engines. Both were novel concepts for a short-haul twinjet. We each received the then-standard payment of $50 from Boeing for that patent. It was a satisfying moment. While aerospace isn't a field where people make a lot of money, I still felt I was working for a company that valued initiative and independent thinking." Then at a later passage, his attitude isn't so sanguine: "In looking back over the 747 program, … it seems to me that what my design group actually achieved has never been fully understood or appreciated within Boeing. My hope is that this book will redress this oversight."

Sutter is a life-long employee of Boeing, a corporation with an ingrained culture of safe-design philosophy. A primary tenet of this foundation includes the idea of "no single failure modes." Sutter says this means "that airplanes shall be designed in such a way that no singly system failure or structural failure can ever result in catastrophic consequences." Another underlying tenet is the idea of "no uninspectable limited-life parts." According to Sutter's definition, "If a part isn't where an airline can get to it in order to check it, then it must be designed to last the entire life of the airplane." The safe-design philosophy resulted in redundancy. For example, the 747 was designed with four separate and independent hydraulic systems when airliners generally had only two such systems. The 747 was given four separate main landing gear posts when previous jetliners had two main gear posts. The 747 was built with inboard as well as outboard ailerons, upper in addition to lower rudders and three-part flaps, all to increase safety through redundancy.

"I'd spent my entire professional life in a world that lives and breathes safety," says Sutter. "That's why it came as such a shock to me to find the same wasn't true of NASA. It's also why my point of departure was so markedly different from that of many of the other [Challenger investigation] commission members." Sutter reveals that in particular, he butted heads with Dr. Sally Ride. "It's not that they weren't equally focused on safety but simply that it was difficult for them to hear how bad things were from my perspective."

"Of course NASA had safety processes and procedures," Sutter explains, "but these were ad hoc and disjointed. There was no top-level safety leadership position to remind people that it must always come first. This is no way to run an airline, I remember thinking in dismay. I was very vocal in my criticisms of the failings that denied NASA's engineers and technical experts the ear of management and set the stage for disaster." Specifically, he is alarmed by the Solid Rocket Boosters. "Once they're ignited, they can't be throttled or shut down because they're actually a controlled explosion. It's absolutely amazing to me that the space program has accepted and lives with this risk." Dies with it, too.

In one of the oddest passages of his book, Sutter characterizes Boeing as the sole savior of NASA and the moon project. According to Sutter, after the launch pad fire of 1967, "a desperate NASA turned quietly to Boeing for help. Like someone trying to juggle too many balls, the U.S. space agency had lost control of managing America's race to the Moon. Bill Allen [Boeing president] agreed to step in even though the timing could not have been worse," because Boeing had significant expenditure outlays for the 737, 747 and SST programs. "[Allen] appreciated Apollo's huge significance to the nation and the world, so he bit the bullet and sent NASA several thousand of our finest engineering managers. Most of these Boeing rescuers came from the military side of Boeing, but a good many were pulled off the SST. Those Boeing professionals got the Apollo program straightened out. Without their efforts, President John F. Kennedy's vision of human beings walking on the Moon before the end of the 1960s would not have been realized. Called the Boeing Technical Integration and Evaluation (TIE) program, this unsung Boeing contribution was kept quiet for decades to spare NASA embarrassment. Enough time has now passed, though, that it can be talked about." However, that is the extent of Sutter's talking about it. Whether this assessment can be attributed to corporate chauvinism, hyperbole or wishful thinking is difficult to say.

While serving on the Challenger investigation commission, it was necessary for Sutter to travel extensively to conduct inspections and attend meetings. Most of these meetings were conducted on the east coast and were scheduled on short notice, requiring Sutter to fly from his Seattle home on commercial red-eye flights a dozen times in four months. He remarks that these flights "were all the more uncomfortable and tiring because the government did not see fit to provide anything more than economy-class tickets." Sutter doesn't say if he was suffering from his own 10-across coach compartment seating design onboard 747s.