Joe Sutter, father of the 747

Joe Sutter (1921–2016) was chief engineer for the Boeing 747, and is universally called its father.

The career

Born in Seattle on 21 March 1921, within sight of the industry he would spend his life in. He took a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Washington in 1943, and joined Boeing in 1945.

He never worked anywhere else. He retired in 1986 as executive vice president for commercial aeroplane engineering and product development, having been vice president and general manager of the 747 programme. Forty years, one company, one aircraft that defined it.

He died in 2016, aged 95.

The Incredibles

Sutter led a team of about 4,500 engineers, who took the 747 from launch to first flight in roughly 29 months — a schedule that would be considered impossible today for an aircraft of that size and novelty.

They became known inside Boeing as “the Incredibles”, and the name stuck because it was not really an exaggeration. They were designing the first wide-body airliner, in a factory being built around them, for a company betting its existence on the outcome.

The decision that mattered most

The 747 could easily have been a double-decker. Two narrow decks was the obvious way to get the passenger numbers Pan Am wanted from a fuselage of manageable width, and it was seriously considered.

Sutter’s team rejected it, and the reasoning was mostly about evacuation and freight.

Evacuating an upper deck in the required time is very hard — the escape slides are long and the geometry unforgiving. And a double-decker’s cross-section is poorly suited to standard cargo containers, which mattered enormously given that the 747 was designed to become a freighter once supersonic airliners took over passenger flying.

So they went wide instead of tall: a single main deck broad enough for two aisles and, below it, a hold that could take containers side by side. That created the wide-body category, which every long-haul airliner since has belonged to.

The upper deck exists only because the flight deck had to be lifted clear of the nose cargo door. It was a consequence, not a goal — which is why it started life as a lounge rather than a cabin.

The other decision

Four engines rather than two was not really a choice at the time: engines of the necessary thrust did not exist, and twins were barred from long overwater routes anyway. It took another twenty years of engine development and ETOPS relaxation before Sutter’s aircraft could be replaced by a twin — which, in the end, it was, by Boeing’s own 777.

What he got right

The proof is in how little the aircraft’s basic architecture changed. The 747-8 delivered in 2023 has the same fuselage cross-section, the same general layout and the same nose door as the 747-100 that first flew in 1969.

1,574 aircraft over 54 years were built on decisions made by a team working to a 29-month schedule in the mid-1960s.

Related

• Background — the story of the 747
• The Everett factory
• The 747 nearly killed Boeing