The “father of the 747” who shrank the world
Joe Sutter, who has died aged Joe Sutter
95, helped shrink the world by 1921-2016
extending long-haul travel to millions more people, said The Washington Post. The engineer – a lifelong employee of the Boeing company – played a part in the development of a number of major jet aircraft, but it was his work as the lead developer of the 747, or Jumbo Jet, that won him a place in history. Known as the Queen of the Skies, the aircraft has carried more than 3.5 billion passengers since taking off on its first commercial flight, in 1970, and wasn’t rivalled in the skies until the introduction of the Airbus A380 in 2005.
The son of a Slovenian gold prospector, Joe Sutter was born in Seattle in 1921, five years after Boeing was founded in the city. He grew up in a house that overlooked the airfield where early Boeing planes were tested; made models of Boeing craft in his spare time; and worked at the Boeing factory during his holidays from the University of Washington, where he studied aeronautical engineering. In 1946, after wartime service in the US navy, he was planning to work for Douglas Aircraft in California. But his wife, Nancy, was pregnant, and wanted to be in Seattle for the birth of their first child, so he took a temporary job at Boeing – and stayed for the next four decades.
From the 1950s, Sutter impressed the industry with his work on new jets including the bestselling 737; then, in the 1960s, Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan Am, challenged Boeing to build an even bigger airliner – one that could seat 400 passengers (twice as many as the 737). Trippe had envisaged a double-decker plane; Sutter told him this would be too heavy, and that it needed to be wider, with two aisles, and ten seats in each row. His designs for the 747 were terrifyingly ambitious, said The Daily Telegraph. “With a fuselage 225ft long and a tail as tall as a six-storey building, 747 dwarfed its rivals in both expanse and expense.” There was no production plant big enough to assemble it, so Boeing bought 750 acres of land in Everett, Washington, some 30 miles north of Seattle, and moved four million cubic yards of earth to build what is still the largest building in the world (by volume) – a structure so tall, clouds would form inside it. Meanwhile, Sutter battled executives to ensure he had 4,500 staff working on the project at all times: they were dubbed the Incredibles, for their ingenuity and drive. The cost of the project – $5m a day – almost bankrupted Boeing (and Seattle with it); but the Incredibles completed it in record time, just 28 months. When the vast plane finally rolled out of the hangar, in 1969, people wondered if it could really fly. Sutter was so confident it would get airborne, he made his wife stand at the point where it was due to lift off. He later confided that his fear was whether it could land. In fact, the test flight was a triumph.
Sutter stayed at Boeing until 1986, and even after his retirement, remained a consultant. “I have lots of ideas on how to develop good airplanes, and I will voice my comments to the fellas,” he told an interviewer in 2010. “They listen to me sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. But that’s the give and take of Boeing.”