Jumbo: The Plane that Changed the World

The Boeing 747,

the world's first wide-bodied jet, so wide

the Wright brothers' historic flight was shorter than its wingspan.

The quantum leap in technology

of that aeroplane was just extraordinary.

And it was much more than just a big aircraft.

This aeroplane allowed every person on earth

the opportunity to get in an aeroplane and fly anywhere else.

But there's a hidden story to the jumbo.

It was a fight all the way.

It was a billion-dollar gamble that stretched technology to the limits.

The whole engine would move, and the structure was obviously shaken,

and you'd hear a very loud bang.

Pushing the Boeing Company close to financial meltdown.

Boeing gambled the company... millions of dollars on this project.

But when it did fly, it soared off into the history books.

The vision of that aeroplane, as big as it was,

lifting off for the first time was just magic.

It became an icon, the most recognised aircraft in the world.

When a 747 pulls up to the gate, people take pictures of it.

Little kids point at it.

The jumbo has transported the equivalent of 80%of the human race.

The 747, rated on a 1-to-10 scale, has to be a 10.

It's solid-state, if you will. It's majestic.

The plane that created a revolution and changed the world.

ENGINE ROARS

This is the latest generation jumbo,

the 747-8.

One of the world's largest and most advanced jet airliners.

Its massive engines can take it close to the speed of sound.

-RADIO:

-'Cleared for takeoff.'

Lufthansa 796 cleared for takeoff. Runway 18.

-Ready?

-Yes.

-Go.

ENGINES WHINE

The 747 rapidly accelerates to the speed of a Formula One racing car...

..effortlessly lifting over 400 tonnes into the night sky.

But the story of how this iconic aircraft became such a success

was far from trouble-free.

BIRDS CALL

The 747 story started on a quiet fishing trip in Alaska

with two giants of the aviation world.

Juan Trippe, the powerful yet suave owner of Pan Am,

told Bill Allen, the no-frills boss of Boeing,

of his vision for a super-plane.

Trippe wanted an aircraft two and a half times larger

than anything that had gone before.

This was the early days of commercial jet travel.

Juan Trippe at Pan American Airways saw an opportunity here

for a bigger aeroplane to take advantage of this growth,

an aeroplane with 400 seats that could carry more people

and make more revenue.

Both men were reaching retirement

and they wanted to go out with a bang.

Gentlemen.

Trippe signed for 25 of the super-jets, to be called the 747.

It was the largest commercial aircraft order in history.

APPLAUSE

A deal worth a staggering 3.7 billion in today's money.

And Bill Allen agreed Trippe could have them in just 28 months.

It set an almost impossible challenge for Boeing's engineers.

This was all new technology.

Remember, this aeroplane was going

to be twice the size of any commercial aeroplane in existence.

And the time constraints,

the schedule that they put on themselves, was incredibly tight.

Nobody had any idea of what it should look like,

so the first stage was to draw preliminary designs.

Heading the new 747 division was a young engineer, Joe Sutter.

It was his first big break.

They gave me 20 people to do preliminary studies

and we were on our own. All we knew, it was bigger.

They wanted the aeroplane to have good range

and they wanted the aeroplane to go as fast as it could.

Joe Sutter, now in his 90s,

has returned to the original 747 prototype.

Back then, as a junior engineer,

he sometimes faced a hostile reception from those more senior.

I had to do a little bit of education that I was the boss,

and I'd kiddingly tell them

if they didn't want to go along with my orders,

I had a good assignment in Bangladesh I could send them to.

From the start, Sutter's team worked around the clock.

But despite the size of their challenge,

they were not Boeing's number-one priority.

Most of the company's resources and best talent were being diverted

into another aircraft.

We were certainly not the only kids on the block

as far as the 747 programme was concerned.

The real hot-button item around Seattle was

the supersonic transport aeroplane.

This is what Boeing believed was the future,

a supersonic transporter to travel three times the speed of sound.

It was designed to outfly its European supersonic rival, Concorde,

also in its design phase.

And when Boeing's SST came into service,

the 747 was to be relegated to shipping freight.

Now, the SST was the future of flight.

Nobody was going to want to fly on a subsonic plane

when you can get on a supersonic transport

and fly two and a half times the speed of sound

and get to your destination in a fraction of the time.

And the 747 was just almost an afterthought.

They didn't expect to build more than 50 of these aeroplanes

and they expected most of them to be transports, sort of like a stopgap

until they got this aeroplane running,

so obviously the 747 was playing second fiddle the whole time.

Sutter's team were shoved into old premises and starved of resources.

The engineers who were working the supersonic transport

felt, I think, that they were

a little bit superior to some of the other folks around the place.

Everybody now thinks that the 747 was the queen of the skies

and everything was very in good shape.

Well, that wasn't the case at all. It was a fight all of the way.

A 747 is the most distinctive airliner in the skies.

Most of us, when we fly, we don't know what aeroplane we're on.

A lot of people don't know what type of plane they're flying,

but when you fly a 747, you know you're flying a 747

because of that distinctive hum.

But the shape might have ended up very different from the one

we know today.

Pan Am boss Juan Trippe demanded an ocean liner of a design,

with two narrow decks, one on top of the other.

The first idea that came about was taking

a conventional 707-sized aeroplane

and taking two of those single-aisle fuselages and putting them together.

And that's the aeroplane you see here.

And, from what I know from Joe,

is that they didn't like this idea very well.

Juan Trippe, you know, he was sort of a Navy man.

He wanted an aeroplane with round windows, like portholes.

Sutter's gut feeling was it looked like a turkey.

We sat and looked at the requirements for an aeroplane

like that and decided there are so many problems

with a double-decker, there's got to be a different solution.

Sutter worried that, in an emergency,

passengers would not jump off a top deck 25 feet above the ground.

Then his team had a "eureka" moment.

Then my people came up with the idea, well,

why not go to a wide single-deck aeroplane?

Rather than put two decks on top of each other, Sutter's team

put them side by side.

And what would be the world's first wide-bodied aircraft was created.

But there was a problem for the freighter version.

Opening the nose was the best solution for loading.

But where to put the cockpit?

Then, in a stroke of genius, Sutter decided it should go on top.

And so the distinctive hump was born.

To think outside the box to something larger took several leaps of faith.

Today, it seems commonplace, but 40 years ago, it was not.

We had a hell of a time convincing our own management, first,

that that was the way to go.

Boeing management agonised that Trippe, who was paying,

would go ballistic if he didn't get his double-decker.

They decided to tell him the bad news but banned Sutter from going.

We had this presentation in New York.

I didn't go to it because my management felt I'd pushed

too hard and would maybe get Juan Trippe upset,

so I sent a fella named Milt Heinemann,

who did our interior design, who was a lot more...amiable guy than me.

Heinemann set off to the Pan Am offices,

armed with a secret weapon in his briefcase.

He had to convince Trippe that his passengers wouldn't be

squashed in a single deck.

He had just one shot and it was time for his secret weapon.

Can you help me, please?

Heinemann showed with a 20-foot clothes line just how wide

the 747 would be.

It was a startling piece of theatre.

No-one had imagined such a cathedral of the air.

Almost double the width of any airliner built before.

It didn't convince Juan Trippe right away, but his people were astounded.

And all of a sudden, this opened up all these possibilities.

It was a moment of discovery.

Trippe eventually bought the idea

when he saw a mock-up of what his plane would look like.

Sutter got the go-ahead for the first wide-bodied jet in history.

But now, they had to turn a wooden mock-up into a real flying machine.

The race was on. In wind tunnels, they evaluated the aircraft.

Only the first flight would tell if it would really fly,

but these tests were critical.

Get the design wrong now and the consequences could be disastrous.

The aeroplane business is completely different to any other business.

You're committing 10 million to just throw it in...

You're stuck with it, so you better do it right or forget it.

75,000 drawings detailed how every last part fitted into the prototype.

I think one of the first impressions one had

of the real size of the aeroplane

was when we first put a cross-sectional drawing of the engine

up on the office wall.

Then we realised the office wall wasn't quite big enough.

-NEWS BROADCAST:

-'Inside, the 747 programme becomes a reality.'

Soon, Sutter and his team were running out of space.

Boeing had to take drastic action.

Today, at Boeing's massive Everett Plant in Washington State,

747s are still rolling off the production line.

This is the largest building on earth,

equivalent in area to over 50 football fields.

So high, clouds can form in the ceiling.

It was built specially for the 747.

At huge expense, Boeing flattened the wilderness north of Seattle.

They even built a railroad to bring materials to the site.

This was one of the largest construction sites in the world.

In just six months, Sutter was able to start moving in.

Soon, it wasn't only the Everett Plant

that was entering the record books.

The prototype was made up of 4.5 million parts,

100 miles of wiring and nearly 75 tonnes of aluminium.

But it wasn't just the parts that were mounting up.

The amount of money that was being spent,

on all aspects of this programme, was pretty astronomic.

Boeing faced even more expense when new orders from 25 airlines

meant production models had to be started.

The 747 was now costing over £20 million a day.

But there was no real money coming in. Airlines only pay on delivery.

Boeing faced a cash crisis. The banks threatened to pull out.

Boeing gambled the company, millions of dollars, on this project.

They took a big risk on it.

To help deal with the crisis,

Sutter was summoned to a high-level meeting.

My boss, who was one of these people that decided, well, you can

do anything by just saying you're going to do it,

so he's told Bill Allen I could drop a lot of engineers.

His job was on the line, unless he cut 1,000 engineers.

Almost a quarter of his workforce.

So here I am in front of Bill Allen and all my management people,

telling them, "Hey, this is the real facts of life.

"We can't give up any engineers."

-ACTOR:

-I'll leave it with you guys.

Sutter refused to back down.

I figured that was my last day at Boeing.

But he won the stand-off.

Boeing had little option but to continue with the project.

If we had dumped the 1,000 engineers,

the programme would have collapsed. Then what would you do?

Throw it out the window and declare bankruptcy?

Now it was touch and go

if Boeing would go bust before the 747 was ready.

And the big press-launch date was fast approaching.

Today, the first 747 prototype sits at the Seattle Museum of Flight.

With peeling paint, RA001 is a shadow of its former self,

as the museum struggles to raise funds to restore it.

This is the number-one aeroplane

that was designed never to go into airline service.

It was designed as sort of a development aeroplane.

We did a lot of interesting engineering work on this thing

to get the aeroplane tuned up.

The prototype still has some of the water barrels

used to simulate payloads during tests.

Banks of equipment that could measure

how the airframe and engines would perform under the stress of flight.

But 45 years ago, this museum exhibit was a hive of activity.

Sutter and his team raced to get the prototype ready

to show to the world's press.

The media were all excited,

because here was a new aeroplane, which hadn't happened for a while,

but there were more parts on the floor than in the aeroplane.

We were still designing and testing the aeroplane

and we didn't get an aeroplane put together

until two days before we rolled it out.

With paint still wet and parts missing,

the prototype was rolled out to an expectant press and public.

But for Bill Allen, it was a relief

just to have something to show PanAm and the nervous bankers.

It was also time to reassure the 25 other airlines who'd placed orders

that this was the aircraft sensation of the decade.

APPLAUSE

Roll-out day came to us as a...

real excitement.

It was pure adrenaline as far as I was concerned.

TV cameras were there, everything was rolling.

We were all invited along to stand outside

and watch this magnificent thing

come out of the hangar, and I think...

It gave everybody a thrill.

I can't imagine anybody who didn't feel, you know,

pretty proud of that day.

APPLAUSE

26 air hostesses prepared for the christening.

It didn't quite go to plan.

Let's not break it yet.

It's going to be one, two,

-three. Got it?

-CLUNK!

-WOMAN SHRIEKS

-OK, wait, wait!

Wait!

All right. We'll do it again.

One...

..two, three.

But behind the excitement,

there was one thing that Boeing didn't shout about...

the aircraft couldn't fly -

the engines were purely decorative.

Yeah, when they rolled it out, very dramatically,

a gargantuan aeroplane, with this great promise

of hauling so many people so far,

and a great promise of changing aviation.

The question was, was that promise going to be realised or not?

So while we enjoyed the day,

I think we realised that it was eyes down and start working

as soon as all of the publicity had gone away.

Sutter and his team had just 54 days

before the prototype was scheduled for its first flight.

And they had a major crisis on their hands with the engines.

Up to now, no commercial engine had sufficient power

to lift even half the weight of a 747.

But manufacturers Pratt & Whitney

had developed a new, untested engine that could.

A JT9D was a high-bypass turbofan -

an entirely new concept.

It promised good fuel efficiency,

low noise and, above all, phenomenal thrust.

It's fundamentally like a jet engine

that drives a big fan at the front.

The secret of its design was a massive eight-foot fan on the front.

This drew air not only into the central turbine,

but also bypassed more than five times as much around the outside.

The bypassing air added an incredible 70% extra thrust.

And there was another bonus -

at the back, the roar from the exhaust of the inner turbine

was enveloped and softened by the bypassing air.

Pratt & Whitney promised to make the 747

quieter than jets half the size,

yet two and a half times as powerful.

Everything depended on its success.

But in tests, it seemed they had promised too much.

What you'd see first of all was the whole thing shake.

At the same time, you'd hear a very big bang.

Sometimes the flames were longer than the aeroplane

and, of course, when that happens,

you burn up things like turbine blades.

No-one could work out what the fault was.

During the 747's development,

a total of 16 multi-million-dollar engines were written off.

But Boeing couldn't wait any longer -

they had to prove to the world that the 747 could fly.

Two months behind schedule,

test pilot Jack Waddell and his crew walked down to the prototype.

It was time for the 747's first flight.

Waddell's co-pilot was Brien Wygle.

It was an incredible day.

You have to realise there was this enormous pressure

from all over the world,

this thing had drawn the attention

of the aviation industry over the globe,

and there was a huge mob watching it.

Bill Allan was a risk-taker.

He was literally betting Boeing on this aeroplane.

And there was a lot of nervousness about this.

There were a lot of people saying that it wasn't going to fly.

So there was a lot of pressure to make this happen.

Test pilot Jack Waddell

and his crew deliberately wore their everyday clothes

as they entered the flight deck.

There was so much scepticism about the 747.

Would this thing really work?

Is it way too big? You know...

Will it even fly? And so on.

So I think Jack's concept was to make it a...

..an everyday occurrence, kind of thing.

Yes, this aeroplane's safe, look at us,

we're just dressed here in our normal suits and ties.

But despite outward appearances,

Jack Waddell was worried about the engines.

On the first flight, Jack Waddell was concerned enough

that we actually put in about 40 automobile batteries...

hooked them up to hydraulic pumps so,

in the case he lost all four engines,

he'd have flight controls.

At around 11.20am, RA-001 headed off for the runway.

It was time.

RA-001, ready for takeoff.

TANNOY: 'RA-001, Roger that.'

All the lights were green,

so we taxied out to the runway,

and, of course, checked all the engines.

The aircraft was empty, except for the two pilots and flight engineer.

It was too dangerous to risk more lives.

In that period of history, you didn't have simulators

to prepare you for the aeroplane flying.

Nobody knew for sure how the 747 would behave.

Now was the moment of truth.

001, Roger that.

Jack pulled back, the nose came up,

wheels left the ground...

The engines were all running!

At that moment we had a great feeling of relief

that now we can go about our work, you know.

It was a glorious feeling.

The only thing I can compare it to is the birth of your first child.

I mean, it is cool. It's great stuff.

The vision of that aeroplane, as big as it was,

lifting off for the first time

was just magic.

And away it went.

And it overflew the airfield,

and I think the hair on the back of everybody's neck

was standing up. It certainly was on mine!

You also knew the press was listening to everything we said, as well, so...

we weren't going to say anything bad, in any case, but it was...

It was a great feeling.

All went well until Waddell tried out the flaps on the wings.

We were retracting the flaps...

SUDDEN CLUNK

..and there was a distinctive clunk sound when it happened.

One of the flaps that slows the aircraft for landing

had come loose.

There was a danger it might had come off.

Jack decided that we shouldn't venture any further.

And we didn't want something more serious to happen.

Now, at greater speed than planned, came the dangerous part -

landing 300 tonnes of aircraft.

Many, many people again said, "OK, she'll take off and fly,

"but how do you get that big thing down onto the ground?"

Especially with the pilot sitting 35 feet in the air at touchdown.

Of course, I was waiting for that landing

to get rid of the last concern.

Then when it came on the landing,

and you're looking down the runway at it, it REALLY looks slow.

I kept thinking to myself -

you're too slow, you're too slow, you're too slow.

He made a nice approach,

and he looked pretty confident,

and, of course, I'm sitting there relaxed

and Jack has to make a good landing in front of all those people.

When Waddell landed the first time, he had no problem at all.

The aeroplane proved that it was a good flying machine

on that first flight.

The feeling of completion, actually,

once you've slowed down and start to taxi,

you feel you're pretty well completed,

and that huge mob are waiting,

but the fact that this had come off after all this time,

was a great feeling of superb satisfaction.

CHEERING

The Boeing team had worked miracles,

turning sketches on paper

into the largest commercial airliner ever built,

and all in record time.

I guess this sounds complacent, or something,

but that thing is just ridiculously easy to fly.

It's just a pilot's dream.

The 747 could fly,

and the engines did not explode.

At least, this time.

But now they had to prove to the aviation authorities

that the plane was safe enough for passengers.

No matter how bad the weather, the tests began.

They had just 11 months left.

Taking the aircraft to the maximum speed before it took off,

the brakes were slammed on...

The wheels caught fire,

but the crew had to wait an anxious five minutes

before putting them out.

Waddell deliberately put the 747 into death-defying stalls...

And he scraped its tail along the runway

to simulate too steep a takeoff.

Above all, the authorities wanted to check

the plane could be evacuated in just 90 seconds.

The 747 would be carrying more passengers than ever before.

A single accident could kill over 400 people.

But soon the 747 was passing with flying colours.

Not least

because Sutter had installed unparalleled safety features.

Three backup systems that would keep the aircraft flying,

even if only one was working.

This was his most important value in designing the 747.

It was the thing that kept him awake at night.

What would happen if it crashed on its first flight?

It would have... It would have been the end of the Boeing company.

We did I think establish a new standard for aeroplane design,

and later on, I think, most people tend to follow that now.

Maybe not as well as a 747,

but you'll see that safety going into all

of the other more modern aeroplanes.

But it wasn't long before the tests hit what every aircraft designer

considers their worst nightmare -

the seven letter F-word, flutter.

Increasing speed to Mach 0.7.

At certain speeds, as wind tunnel tests show,

flutter causes violent vibrations

that can shake an aeroplane apart.

Pan Am and others wanted us to design an aeroplane

as fast as we could, which meant that we had

to thin the wing and sweep the wing.

And that can cause a condition called flutter.

And if you tame flutter, that's fine,

but if you don't, you can lose a wing.

The wing was a miracle of engineering,

based on Nazi swept-wing designs of the Second World War.

It could change its shape to suit every flying condition.

Massive triple-slotted flaps

unwound to give 90% extra lift at slow speeds.

The wing did all this,

yet could be bent at the tip 20 feet before breaking.

But the dangerous flutter threatened the entire project.

Jack Waddell deliberately pushed the aircraft into the danger zone.

To explore the flutter area,

which came, normally, with a certain airspeed and altitude,

you would approach it very cautiously

by only advancing your speed a little bit at a time.

'Mach 0.8.'

The flutter started.

We knew we were in dangerous territory.

It's a very dangerous phenomenon

and has to be carefully controlled.

'OK, decreasing speed.'

But, normally, that meant right away, you backed off.

You pulled the throttles back and you slowed down.

As soon as he slowed down,

then you left the danger area with some more information.

After a month of hard flying, they worked out a fix -

small heavy weights at the tip of the wings dampened the vibrations.

We did control it. We found the answers, we got it done.

But it took a lot of time.

Time that Boeing didn't have.

While the tests raced ahead, anticipation of the new jumbo

was building on this side of the Atlantic.

-NEWS BROADCAST:

-'They said the jumbo couldn't be built,

'that no factory could hold it, but Boeing levelled a mountain

'and built the biggest factory in the world,

'and the revolution in our travel habits begins in only four months.'

'The catering vehicle at door one starboard is elevated.'

Investing millions in new facilities,

airlines rehearsed arrival day of the new giant.

'The starboard air-conditioning vehicle is positioned and started.

'The cleaning vehicle at door five starboard is elevated,

'and cleaning of the rear toilets starts.'

International airports were expanded

to create massive hubs

ready for the passenger explosion that was to come.

But all the preparations would be for nothing

if the engine faults could not be fixed.

With only months before the first 747s were due to go into service,

production models started piling up outside the Everett factory.

Very few of the aeroplanes ever had engines on them.

They usually had a concrete block

hanging off of the pylon

where the engine's supposed to mount.

The concrete blocks

stopped the aircraft from tipping up on their tails.

With all these grounded aircraft,

the company was closer than ever to bankruptcy.

I think everybody at Boeing felt

that we had a very serious engine problem,

and Pratt & Whitney just wasn't taking it seriously enough.

They may have been working on it,

but we didn't feel like they were working hard enough.

Test pilot Jack Waddell decided it was time to give

the engine manufacturers a wake-up call.

He took the president of Pratt & Whitney for a ride

and showed him the problem.

It was a very dramatic demonstration,

because those surges always created a loud boom.

To prove it wasn't just one rogue engine,

Waddell throttled up number two.

BOOM!

He was about to do it again, and the Pratt guy said,

"I got it! I got it. I understand, yeah, OK."

And, erm...that test was over.

Jack was merciless, he had no sympathy for him!

The showdown paid off.

The cause of the flame-outs was found.

Under certain conditions,

the large fan distorted the inner engine casing,

so that it no longer made a snug fit around the spinning turbine blades.

This caused the air and fuel mixture to break up and explode.

EXPLOSIVE BOOM

But by simply stiffening the casing,

they hoped that they had solved the problem.

Engineers raced to fit the engines.

A jumbo at last could go into service.

For Joe Sutter, it had been a long hard battle.

The fact that we got the aeroplane done in time,

and it was a good aeroplane,

is attesting how well the people that worked with me

did their job, but it was a fight all the way.

At 7pm, the first fee-paying passengers

took their seats for the inaugural flight

from New York's JFK to London Heathrow.

It was quite a media event, as you might imagine, with celebrities...

The aeroplane taxied out, and all of a sudden,

we see the rotating beacon coming back toward the terminal.

And it was reported that they had an engine problem.

The passengers were brought back to the terminal.

I'd rather be off than on.

Any sense of fear?

No, they said something was burning, and we got off.

Something was burning -

it was an engine.

We saw molten metal in the tailpipe of the engine,

which meant that the engine had to be replaced.

There was no time.

Pan Am switched to a stand-by aircraft

hoping no-one would notice.

I do remember

that we re-stencilled the name of the aeroplane

to the inaugural name.

After a six-hour delay,

a 747 eventually took off.

While, in London, everybody waited.

I think the man who wrote this on the top of a press hand-out from Boeing

will have a very, very red face indeed this morning.

He's right, we haven't.

It had not been the launch Pan Am or Boeing had hoped for.

But when the tired passengers did eventually land at Heathrow,

the 747 was met by excited crowds.

No-one had ever seen a plane this size before.

Soon jumbos started crisscrossing the globe.

With its spacious twin aisles,

the 747 quickly became a success with the public.

What do you think, George?

Harriet, don't rush me!

TV ads sung its praise.

George? The kitchens are just perfect!

And all this room, George!

-Very nice, dear.

-Wow!

Even engine manufacturers Pratt & Whitney

were eager to announce the age of the wide-bodied jet.

-Harriet, we'll take it!

-Oh!

'The 747.

'The '70s way to fly.

'Beautiful!'

The 747 became the must-have aeroplane.

It was the plane to have in your fleet.

It was the flagship of any airline fleet.

And you just didn't HAVE an airline unless you had a 747.

Well, the 747 was an immediate hit.

It was the epitome of the jet age,

and luxury air travel.

Look at that!

For the first time in history, people could travel cheaply

yet quickly from continent to continent.

'The world has shrunk, they say.

'It's true.

'In the sense that air travel has brought places closer in time,

'the world is smaller.'

In the first six months,

the 747 had taken a staggering million passengers.

Return transatlantic flights,

dropped by almost a half to just over £100,

and for airlines, the jumbo was a cash cow.

Oh, I think they're marvellous. Wonderful machines.

They're more like a flying town hall, I should think!

But it wasn't just cheap seats -

the jumbo introduced a new age of luxurious air travel.

The company responsible for the new interior design -

and the world's first overhead locker -

was Walter Dorwin Teague Associates.

We did actually go through a period

where Day-Glo colours and upholstery were actually very, very popular,

and we did some things there that I think probably today,

-we'd look back and kind of...

-HE CHUCKLES

..not be so happy with, but they were really beautiful at the time.

The jumbo was transforming the aviation industry.

With up to 16 cabin crew to each 747,

airlines recruited more staff.

Pan Am stewardess Emilia De Geer

started working on 747s when they first entered service.

Pan Am was the iconic airline.

I would not have flown with any other airline.

They were very strict about weight.

We were not required to wear girdles,

but we had to be slim.

Emilia soon developed a love affair with the aircraft.

Not just with any 747,

but one of the first that Pan Am ever bought.

Clipper America - registration N747PA.

It was love at first sight.

She was an amazing vision.

It was a relationship that would last 40 years,

but it started badly with the first serious accident to involve a jumbo.

I was on Clipper America,

and we were fully loaded fuel-wise

to go from San Francisco to Tokyo

when we hit a big problem.

Miscalculating his takeoff speed,

the pilot hit the runway lights.

SCREAMING AND SHOUTING

We took one beam with us.

It came with us, right through the belly,

and it went through four rows of seats.

Those four seats miraculously were not occupied.

Otherwise, it would have been human shish kebab.

There was one person not so luckily located

where the beam came up from the floor,

and it amputated his foot.

The accident had severed three of the four hydraulic systems

and damaged the landing gear.

The situation was critical.

They had no alternative but to attempt a landing.

We start to make our descent...

..and it was the loudest landing.

And then...everything was quiet.

SIRENS

It was a miracle.

It could've been possibly the worst crash,

but in my mind, the 747 saved our lives.

Incredibly, Emilia's 747 was repaired

and went back into service.

My love affair continued

and I did enjoy flying her from time to time,

then all of a sudden she disappeared.

Emilia learned of the fate of her jumbo, now 40 years old,

and renamed after Pan Am's founder, Juane T Trippe.

She ended up, apparently, in South Korea as some kind of restaurant?

How demeaning!

Then I heard they finally dismantled her and she doesn't exist any more.

Why couldn't they have kept an aeroplane like her? You know?

For all posterity.

The jumbo revolution was now in full swing,

but Boeing had not recovered financially

from the massive investment it had made.

And it was about to be dealt another blow.

Everybody, I think, was concerned.

Nobody took it for granted that they would have a job tomorrow morning.

It was that palpable.

In May 1971, the project that was supposed to make the 747 obsolete

was scrapped.

On grounds of noise and pollution,

environmentalists persuaded Congress to cut funding

for the ambitious supersonic airliner.

Boeing cut its workforce by nearly two-thirds -

60,000 jobs were lost.

Somebody who thankfully had a sense of humour when he left

put up a big board down by the airport...

..and you know, it wasn't funny.

That was a bittersweet piece of humour.

It was a close call,

but as more orders rolled in,

the plane that was supposed to be the underdog saved Boeing.

TANNOY: 'British Airways regret to announce the delay

'to the departure of this flight

'due to late servicing of the aircraft.'

Soon it had become part of our everyday life.

Yeah, I live at Reading,

but the old M4 was a bit crowded this morning, I can tell you that.

Through the '80s, airlines like British Airways

encouraged passengers to travel

to ever more exotic locations,

with the promise of cheap fares.

# Fly... #

And by the early '90s, the numbers of passengers carried by jumbos

was no longer in the millions but the billions.

The 747 had shrunk the world

in a way that no-one could ever have imagined.

But by now, this child of the '70s

was in need of a face-lift.

Boeing completely overhauled the jumbo,

with the introduction of the new 747-400.

Advanced computer systems eliminated the flight engineer.

Little winglets smoothed turbulence at the tip of the wings,

saving fuel.

With extra tanks, the 747 could now travel

a third of the way around the planet without stopping.

The improvements made the jumbo the all-time favourite of crews,

among them celebrity pilot John Travolta.

The 747, rated on a 1 to 10 scale, has to be a 10.

As a QANTAS ambassador,

Travolta was able to realise a lifelong ambition

to learn to fly a 747,

but his instructor didn't make it easy.

He threw a doozy at me -

he killed two engines,

I had hydraulic problems,

I had electrical problems,

I had about five major failures,

plus...others.

Instrument failure, what-have-you.

Travolta landed safely,

and the experience didn't dent his love for the 747.

In fact, quite the reverse.

You are dealing with a pedigree aircraft,

and you feel that when you're flying it.

You know you have that aeroplane beneath you.

It's solid-state, if you will.

It's majestic.

There's a saying... If it's not Boeing, I ain't goin'.

QANTAS offered Travolta his own 747,

but he reluctantly had to turn it down.

I loved it, I was so impressed that I was being offered it,

but I'm not a shaker,

you know, I don't have this kind of money to support that kind of plane.

At half a billion dollars plus,

a personal 747 may be too expensive for John Travolta,

but there are mega-rich who can afford

their own jumbo flying palace.

Greenpoint Technologies

offers the Aerolift, which takes you

directly from your car into the aircraft,

and eight private suites in the loft area.

To date, 12 of these pimped aircraft have been sold.

The names of those who can afford

the half-billion-dollar-plus price tag

are kept strictly confidential.

With its wide body and massive capacity,

the 747 has proved endlessly adaptable.

For nearly 35 years,

jumbo has piggybacked the space shuttles,

returning them to Kennedy Space Center.

The Evergreen tanker is the world's largest fire extinguisher.

This jumbo can drop 20,000 gallons of fire retardant

over a swathe of land four miles long.

And this 747 has on board

the world's largest airborne astronomical observatory,

NASA's SOFIA.

At 45,000 feet, the thin atmosphere offers views of the universe

not possible from ground-based telescopes.

Jumbos have also been adapted to become warplanes.

This is the experimental YAL-1 Airborne Laser,

designed to fry enemy missiles at a distance of several hundred miles.

But there is one 747

that is the most recognised aircraft in the world, Air Force One.

Wherever this plane goes around the world,

when it carries our President,

it's a visible symbol of the United States.

It shows what we can do as Americans.

Inside, is a mix of secret communication systems,

offices and suites for the President and his staff.

It can carry a full press corps

and even has its own fully equipped hospital.

All of us that flew 747 in the military were...

we developed a love for the aircraft.

It was just the perfect machine.

This is not only a flying White House,

it's also a military aircraft.

The self-defence on the aircraft I can't really talk about,

but there are other classified modifications for the aircraft,

to allow the President to survive in a nuclear environment.

Air Force One costs nearly 180,000 an hour to fly

and is lovingly looked after by a team of 100.

It had to be hand polished every time it came in after a mission.

Because it had to be perfect -

you represent the United States of America.

But the other part is that you're representing the Boeing 747,

and it was just an immaculate aircraft.

Air Force One is now over 20 years old,

and the US Government is searching for a replacement.

Boeing may just have the perfect plane for the job -

a new 747.

In February, 2011,

Boeing rolled out the 747-8 Intercontinental.

There to see this latest incarnation

was the father of the 747, Joe Sutter.

747-8 shows how the basic architecture of the initial aeroplane

was right, because it looks just like the original aeroplane.

But the thing that annoys me a little bit,

is that I talk to the pilots that fly it,

and they used to tell me that the 747-400

was their favourite aeroplane.

Now they're saying that the 747-8's the favourite aeroplane.

Boeing is eager to boast about the -8's latest advances.

The 747-8 is really an entirely new aircraft.

By far the most fuel-efficient aircraft in aviation today.

This wing is completely new,

and it is a wing that results

in very minimum drag,

even flying at very high speeds.

While Boeing can't claim it is the largest,

it is still the longest... and the fastest.

In test flights, it came within 8mph of going supersonic.

It is also ultra quiet.

We've had control towers not realise the aircraft has taken off

because they didn't hear it.

When you get on the aeroplane, I think it's absolutely stunning.

You know that this is a 747,

but it's not like any 747 you've ever seen.

But for all their boasts,

the order books for the -8 are pretty near empty.

Airlines have been looking elsewhere to replace

their now ageing fleet of 747s.

Is this the beginning of the end for the jumbo?

A serious rival has been Airbus's super-jumbo, the A380 -

with two decks and a wider body,

it can carry another 150 passengers.

But the real threat comes from a whole new generation of aircraft

with only two engines,

aeroplanes like Boeing's own 787 Dreamliner.

These can fly as far as the 747,

but because they take smaller numbers,

they don't need to use big airport hubs.

Instead, they can take you direct to your international destination.

Less hassle, and cheaper all round.

How did the original creators of the 747

view this threat to their baby?

Two engines have done so well

and have turned out to be such a success,

that they are very serious competition

for any four-engined aeroplane.

To me, it will still be around for a long time,

but two-engined aeroplanes are more efficient

than four-engined aeroplanes,

and when we were putting this aeroplane together,

four-engines were flown because we didn't have the levels

of engine reliability that we have today.

Whatever happens, it's likely that

we are going to be flying 747s

for many years to come.

Meanwhile, it's estimated that, at any single moment,

around 100,000 people are seated high in the skies in a jumbo.

Until you're in the ground, they will be flying, certainly.

I don't see an end to when the 747 flies.

I don't think the 747 is going anywhere,

because there are too many of them

and there's too much investment in its future.

So I think we're going to see them probably through my lifetime.

It will go out of service maybe 50 years from now?

Who knows?

When the time does come, when they're no longer flying,

I think we'll all miss them very greatly.

747 was built in just 28 months

and against all the odds.

Its engineers take pride that their creation

will be looked at with wonder well into the future.

I've always felt that the 747 was my aeroplane.

It's part of me, and I'm part of it. That's the way I feel about it.

The proud feeling I have is that we did a hell of a good job.

We designed a safe aeroplane

that the pilots love to fly,

and little old ladies like to fly on it.

So it's turned out to be quite a success.