In the mid-1960s, Boeing was about to make the biggest bet in its history. Pan Am, led by the forceful Juan Trippe, wanted an airliner far larger than anything flying, and Boeing wanted to build it. In 1966 Pan Am ordered 25 of the new airplanes for more than half a billion dollars, then among the largest orders an airline had ever placed. There was no factory big enough to build the plane, no engine yet proven for it, and no design anyone had agreed on. The schedule was brutal, and the company was spending money it did not have on several programs at once.
The man Boeing put in charge of the engineering was Joe Sutter. He was the son of a Slovenian immigrant who worked as a meatcutter in Seattle, and he had studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Washington, paying his way partly with summer work on a Boeing assembly line. He served as a Navy officer in World War II and worked on Boeing's 707, 727 and 737 before the big jet. Some colleagues had underestimated him because he did not come from a prestigious East Coast school. Now he had to tell the most powerful customer in the airline business that his favorite idea was wrong.
Trippe wanted a double-decker, essentially two narrow airliners stacked on top of each other. Sutter and his team studied it and concluded it was a mistake. An upper deck sitting that high off the ground made emergency evacuation a serious problem, since regulators required that a full airplane be emptied within 90 seconds. The stacked design also cramped the space for freight. Sutter's team proposed something nobody had flown: a single main deck so wide it needed two aisles, the first twin-aisle jetliner.
He did not win the argument by insisting. He won it by showing. A Boeing systems engineer, Milt Heinemann, helped make the case to Trippe by stretching a 20-foot clothesline across Pan Am's boardroom so the executives could feel how wide the cabin would be. Weeks later Trippe walked through plywood mockups of both designs at Boeing. Seeing how high the double-decker would put passengers, he agreed to the wide single deck. Sutter also shaped the cross-section so two 8-foot-by-8-foot cargo containers could sit side by side on the main deck. That one decision helped make the 747 the most successful freighter of its era long after passenger airlines moved on.
Then the real pressure arrived, from inside his own company. Boeing was in financial strain, and senior leadership wanted Sutter to cut his engineering staff of about 4,500 by roughly 1,000 people. Sutter refused. He told the company's top executives that cutting that many engineers would put the program at risk. By his own later account, he walked out of that meeting fully expecting to be fired. He was not, and he kept his team.
He also fought to keep his engineers close to the work. When there was talk of locating engineering away from the new plant, he pushed back. "The engineers have to be with the production people," he said. That plant was itself being built at the same time as the airplane. Construction of the enormous factory in Everett, Washington, began in the summer of 1966, while the design was still being drawn. Engineers moved there by the summer of 1967 in the middle of construction, through a long stretch of rain and mudslides.
The people who did the work became known as "the Incredibles." The name covered a workforce in the tens of thousands, including construction workers, mechanics, engineers, secretaries and administrators. The first 747 rolled out of the Everett factory on September 30, 1968, roughly 29 months after the program began. It first flew on February 9, 1969, with Jack Waddell at the controls, and it entered service with Pan Am between New York and London in January 1970. The 747 went on to be built for more than half a century.
The cost was real and it should not be skipped. Overruns on the 747 and other programs left Boeing deeply in debt. Layoffs began, and the company's employment fell from a 1967 peak of about 100,800 to about 38,690. Seattle's unemployment rate climbed to 13.8 percent while the national rate stood at 4.5 percent. The airplane succeeded, but many of the people who built it lost their jobs in the downturn that followed. Sutter's stand saved the program. It could not save everyone.
Sutter later became an executive vice president at Boeing and retired in 1986. He was honored with the National Medal of Technology, and Boeing named a building at Everett after him on his 90th birthday. He died in 2016 at 95. People called him the father of the 747, but the record shows something more useful than a title. He disagreed with a powerful customer and with his own bosses, and both times he brought evidence instead of temper.
Most managers will never face a Juan Trippe, but you will face a boss or a client who is sure about the wrong answer. Do what Sutter did. Study the problem until you can explain exactly why it fails. Then find a way to let the other person see it for themselves, whether that is a mockup, a test or a one-page comparison. People argue with opinions. They rarely argue with a clothesline across the boardroom.
And when someone above you wants to cut the team that is carrying the work, speak up with numbers before the decision is made, not after. Tell them plainly what will break. You may lose that argument, and you may pay a price for making it. But a team that has watched its leader stand in the doorway for them will give that leader everything they have. Joe Sutter walked out of that meeting expecting to lose his job. He walked back into a factory full of people who knew he had kept theirs.