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Wide-Body: The Making of the 747 by Clive Irving, Hodder & Stoughton,
pp 384, £18

It is fascinating to reflect now that the programme to develop the Boeing
747 seemed as risky at the outset as that for Concorde. Both were natural
extrapolations of clear trends in aviation – towards greater speed and greater
capacity – but to critics each aircraft seemed a step too far. Concorde
threatened to be too small and far too expensive. The 747 would also cost
a lot and might have a disastrous impact on airline profitability and on
long-term orders for new aircraft, by soaking up passenger demand.

Of course, civil airliner development is inevitably risky, requiring
enormous development programmes that cost more than the entire net worth
of the companies that undertake them. But an unwillingness to gamble is
risky too; James Smith McDonnell, who for many years directed the fortunes
of the McDonnell Douglas company, had been disillusioned by the fate of
his own company’s Jumbo, the DC-10, and stalled development of the DC-11
with the wry pronouncement: ‘There may be a hole in the market. But why
should I fall into it?’ McDonnell Douglas has now slipped from the front
rank of the airliner builders of the world.

Boeing’s 747 was the gamble that paid off. The definitive wide-body
helped to grow the market for international air travel as no other aircraft
has ever done. It is good that the story has at last been told in a full
and most readable way by Clive Irving, a founding member of the Sunday Times
Insight team.

Irving has immersed himself in the curious and particular culture of
Boeing, has talked to many of the protagonists and offers a revealing glimpse
of the ethos of the world’s most successful civil aeroplane maker. He has
understood the achievement of Boeing structural engineers and aerodynamicists
in exploiting the swept wing to allow high flight speeds with the new jets
in the postwar era, leading to the epochal 707 and extending this expertise
to new generations of airliners. He also shows the power politics and rivalries
that are the natural result when talented and justifiably self-confident
engineers clash in the design and production of a new machine.

Boeing’s first investigation of super-sized aircraft came from its bid
for the giant C-5A military transport intended for the rapid deployment
of US troops and equipment. That contract went to Lockheed, because, some
thought, political interests manoeuvred to bring the work to its plant in
Georgia. (Lockheed had bid about $300 million less than Boeing for the
contract to build 80 aircraft. The programme cost about $3 billion more
in overruns and rectification work.)

Out of the frustration at losing that contract came the desire at Boeing
to pitch for the new big airliner that the legendary autocrat of Pan Am,
Juan Trippe, wanted, though the hoped for spin-off from the C-5A design
study proved illusory. Trippe’s desire was for a twin-decked craft with
resonances of the stately postwar piston-engined Stratocruiser using a fuselage
with a ‘double bubble’ cross section. At Boeing some engineers did not believe
that passengers on the upper deck could be evacuated quickly or safely enough.
Furthermore this fuselage design would require a heavy ‘crease beam’ between
the decks.

The issue was resolved in a piece of theatre when Trippe and Pan Am
big shots were led up rickety stepladders to the top deck of a mock-up in
the Boeing plant, partly to reflect on the scary prospect of an evacuation
by escape chutes from the upper deck, 8 metres above the tarmac. Then the
team were led into the alternative single-deck concept, the wide-body, with
a cabin that no longer felt like a tube, but a room. The pitch succeeded.

But this cavernous and now familiar monolithic 747 fuselage came about
partly from the realisation that freight was to be as important as passenger
traffic to the economics of the new airliner – indeed Trippe believed that
this large subsonic would become a ‘tramp steamer of the air’, relegated
to hauling cargo around when his other dream, the supersonic transport (SST),
entered service. For a while the SST engineers at Boeing believed it too,
nursing giant egos, and proclaiming that theirs was the ‘glory machine’.
‘How ya doin’, Joe?’ a bunch of them called out one night from a Washington
hotel bar as Joe Sutter, the chief engineer for the 747 passed. ‘Sure hope
you’re making that 747 a good cargo airplane. You hang in there, Joe . .
. then we’ll get you a job on the SST.’

By February 1969 the test crew of test pilot, copilot and flight engineers
(curiously named Waddell, Wygle and Wallick) were ready for the first flight
of the prototype. Development money of $900 million was riding on the plane.
Boeing was enmeshed in a network of claims from Pan Am as the aircraft promised
to be over contract weight and consequently down on payload, while Boeing
in turn was pursuing Pratt & Whitney for failing to meet the performance
targets on the new JT-9D high bypass engines. Indeed, so sensitive were
the early engines to flaming out in a crosswind that Waddell feared that
simply rotating the aircraft on takeoff might stall all four. He insisted,
as an alarming piece of bootstrapping for the first flight, that an improvised
rack of heavy-duty batteries be installed for backup electrical power to
maintain control functions and give him a chance to put the thing back on
the ground in such an event.

Pratt & Whitney was finally induced to cure the engine stalls when
Waddell took its president, the engineer Art Smith, on a flight to show
him that the problem did not arise from unsympathetic engine handling. At
31 000 feet Waddell pulled the throttle on an engine back steadily, commenting
‘I want you to watch my hand movements; you’ll notice they’re very normal.’
A sheet of flame shot from the engine exhaust and the shock of the stalled
flow rattled the cockpit and shook the aircraft. ‘To show you that’s not
an unusual engine, I’m going to try number two,’ Waddell said, but when
he reached for the number three throttle Smith shouted ‘Stop! I get the
point. We’re going to fix that. We’ll worry about how the hell it gets fixed
from a business standpoint, but we’re gonna fix that.’

In fact the business side of the enterprise seemed startingly flaky
and went far beyond any rational financial analysis. It came about because
Bill Allen, head of Boeing, was prepared to gamble that the aircraft would
define its own market and because Trippe at Pan Am saw no need for market
analysis but sat in his corner office, made plans and made them come true.
And it came about because of the vein of poetry in engineers and their love
of creating some new thing. On the day the 747 first flew, Trippe was cut
off in New York by a blizzard and couldn’t ride with Allen in the 727 chase
plane. Allen wrote to him ‘It was a beautiful sight . . . it is truly majestic
. . . I wished for (you) many times’.

No aircraft will ever be born again in such an atmosphere of financial
danger. With the 777 the partners are spread around the world, from Italy
to Japan. Indeed, the whole balance of power in world airliner development
is changing. When Boeing engineers went to Japan to see the facilities established
by the Kawasaki-Mitsubishi-Fuji alliance for subcontract work (on the flaps)
they realised that the plant they had built could handle much more – and
came away wondering about its eventual purpose.

Andrew Nahum is Senior Curator, Aircraft Collection, at the Science
Museum.