Wide-Body: The 747 Majestic On Paper, Bout Could It Fly?

PAINE FIELD - The first engine was started at 11:07 on Feb. 9, 1969; all four were running within four minutes. Jack Waddell, 44, senior experimental test pilot for The Boeing Co., set the stabilizer at an angle of 5 degrees, the first preparation of the controls for a takeoff.

At 11:18 he called for the chase plane, an F-86 Sabre flown by Paul Bennett, to go, and the fighter took off a few minutes later. The 747 was then ready to roll.

The 747 taxied out from its stall, heading for the northern end of the runway. There was still a thick cloud cover at 1,500 feet and the tower was making sure that the private planes cruising above were well out of the 747's flight path. The wind had dropped a little.

At the end of the runway, Waddell held the brakes on while the engines reached takeoff thrust and until flight engineer Jess Wallick called that he had "four stable engines." The brakes came off at 11:35.

Co-pilot Brien Wygle called out the speeds, by the second, as the 747 accelerated. At 150 mph, Waddell felt the nose coming up. This was as far as they had gone on the taxi tests, but now he called, "Rotation," and committed to takeoff.

As the weight lifted from the 16 wheels, relieving tire drag and friction, they passed 160 mph, and for a second, with the nose rearing up, the tail swung down toward the concrete. But lift supplanted gravity. The landing gear finally unstuck, and the tail lifted clear. Engine power remained stable.

Air immediately transformed the nature of the beast: Like a beached whale released back into its natural element, the 747 was no longer ponderous but felt astonishingly nimble. She had left the ground after 4,300 feet.

William Allen, Boeing chairman, gripped the plane's program manager Mal Stamper and yelled against the blast into his ear: "She looks like the Powder River. A mile wide and a foot deep . . . too damned wet to plow and too dry to drink."

Waddell, the other Montanan, would have recognized the reference instantly, but Stamper didn't need Western roots to share the feeling. All around Allen and Stamper there were shrieks, screams, gasps. Some people were in tears. Many just could not believe anything so big could get off the ground; it seemed an awesome defiance of gravity. One young amateur movie photographer who had been too close to the backblast of the engines was blown onto his back and lay saturated in dirt-encrusted slush, his lens pointing uselessly into empty sky.

They climbed on through the clouds at 400 feet a minute, and just after 11:42 they broke into clear, brilliant skies and smooth air, the world where the spirit rose with the sight of sun and where the peaks of Mount Rainier and Mount Baker were salient among a granite assembly anchored in layers of mist like those in a Japanese painting.

Waddell now had the visibility he needed to begin moving the airplane around, flexing its muscles, extending his sense of its feel. Airspeed was 160 knots. He tried some gentle roller coasters, moving the wheel backward and forward to see how the 747 pitched up and down. In the Sabre, Bennett was taking pictures. "Looks good," he told Waddell. It was good: it was uncanny how much like the simulator it was.

Many hours in the simulator had been spent fine-tuning the controls - the 747's elevators alone were as large as the wing of the 737. It was not just a question of finding the power to move these huge control surfaces. Waddell wanted an airline pilot to sit on top of the great ship and find her responses to be no different from those of a 707, or any smaller jet. That meant hydraulic power systems so that in the pilot's hands they were neither too light or too heavy. To achieve this kind of sensitivity had brought penalties in weight, particularly in actuators powerful enough to move the massive elevators through 52 degrees in as little as a second.

And now, as they were still climbing west through 12,000 feet to 15,000 feet over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Waddell was ready for the first test of how good those controls would be in circumstances of serious failure. First flights were not limited to assumptions that all the systems would behave. Chief engineer Joe Sutter's belt-and-suspenders fail-safe doctrine had put four independent hydraulic systems into the 747. (The Douglas DC-10, designed later, had only three and was to pay the price.) Waddell's flight-test plan called for him to shut down two of them to see how he could handle the ship on the remaining backups.

During a first flight there was always a moment when - if it went well - the preoccupation with getting the airplane off the ground and then monitoring every second of its progress became corrupted by the commercial imperatives.

As Waddell flew into high noon, the Boeing bandwagon had to roll. The 747 had taken life. The journalists admitted to the airfield would never confess it, of course, but their motives were mixed. Would it crash on takeoff? Would something go wrong in the air? Such things had happened.

But the new age in air travel had materialized, and the celebratory circus now began - and somewhere some bankers were waiting for news that their money had issue.

At 12:08 they were ready for the next test, to lower the flaps from 25 degrees to 30 degrees. Cameras had been rigged in the belly of the airplane to record this, and they were turned on. The triple-slotted flaps were the largest control surfaces on the 747 and a tour de force of mechanical ingenuity. At this speed the aerodynamic forces on them were intense, and would increase with the additional 5 degrees of movement.

Waddell felt the drag on the airplane increase as the flaps pulled down into the airstream. Then there was a jarring and alarming clunk, heard even in the radio room. It was followed by vibration.

Wygle called out calmly, "OK. When we hit the stops on the 30 there was a sort of bump."

Bennett was underneath the 747, looking up right into the flaps. He called to Waddell, "I saw the right-hand inboard flap move a little bit, shake a little bit. What's normal?"

Waddell called out, "Sharp bump in cockpit. We're going back to 25 degrees."

Bennett stayed in position. "Everything still looks normal as far as I can tell, Jack. The only thing I've seen abnormal during the whole flight is just that inboard flap."

At 12:10 Waddell called, "We're coming back in, because of the flap. No problem. Just being prudent."

The radio crosstalk had been on an open line relayed into Allen's 727, just preparing to take off, as well as to the radio room and tower. Allen called Waddell, reminding him that there was a party of people still hoping to fly alongside, and that Boeing photographer Vern Manion wanted to get air-to-air pictures. By now many of the reporters on the ground knew about Waddell's decision to terminate the flight, because they had been using shortwave radios tuned to the tower's channel. (The tower had been asked beforehand by the press office, anticipating the eavesdroppers, to switch to a secure channel, but had not honored the request.)

Waddell told Allen that there was enough time for the press plane to intercept him on his final leg into Everett, and the 727 took off, with Allen sitting on a jump seat in the cockpit. Then, to ease other minds, Waddell called Bennett. "What kind of a lookin' ship is this from out there, Paul?"

"It's very good-looking, Jack. Fantastic!"

"Rather majestic, you might say?"

"Roger. That's the word, Jack. Majestic."

Bennett had checked his fuel. He had just enough left to shadow Waddell back to Paine Field.

Waddell was flying east, over land and toward Lake Roesiger, where they would turn south for the final approach. By the time the 727 caught up with them, Waddell was relaxed enough to fly in formation with the Sabre off his port wing so that the photographers could get both airplanes in the shot, set against the sharp winter blue and the stubborn cloud cover below. At 12:46 the 747 was a mile north of the field's outer marker, once more reporting a light chop in the air.

From Paine Field the first sight of the 747's return was of the landing lights breaking from under cloud cover, disembodied like brilliant stars. A true sense of the airplane's size did not register until she was close to touchdown. A group in Boston had campaigned against the 747 on the basis that it would blot out the sky as it landed. This hysteria, as well as more sober doubt that the 747 would be manageable when pilots tried to place it safely in the center of the runway, evaporated in the final seconds of Waddell's approach.

Wygle was calling out airspeed and altitude. With 200 feet to go, Waddell let her land herself: even without the full extension of the flaps that would normally have been used to help slow the landing, and coming in at a correspondingly higher speed of 150 mph, she was rock-steady. For the first time, the people watching near the runway saw the eccentric staggered landing gear, with the forward wheels tilted like the claws of a bird looking for grip.

At 12:51:55 the right-hand gear hit first, the left-hand gear hit and rebounded, and the nosewheel came down last and lightly, bearing very little load. When Waddell deployed the thrust reversers they threw up a wake of atomized slush from the melting snow alongside the runway. A light touch of the brakes, and N7470 rolled to a stop halfway down the runway. Wallick noted that the tires felt rough.

In an hour and 16 minutes, a piece of machinery nominally costing $22 million but with a financial commitment of some 40 times that behind it had, within a limited test, proved itself. What registered in Sutter's mind, though, was that the 747 had gone from the original configuration drawings to its first flight in barely three years. Three years that had consumed a large slice of his life. (At one point Stamper had had to insist that Sutter take a vacation in Hawaii, he was so burned out.) He knew he could never do it again, and he doubted if anyone else would. Or would want to.

Sixteen days later, after Waddell had flown two more tests with the flaps repaired, and successfully raised and lowered the landing gear, the 747 was ready to move to the flight test center at Boeing Field - and to give Allen his first ride. Sutter joined him. Waddell was impressed by Allen's fervor for the airplane, and by his curiosity. He wanted a running commentary on every detail.

Seattle had so far not seen the 747. It was the first Boeing airplane not to have emerged from either Boeing Field or Renton; in flying across Puget Sound into Boeing Field, Waddell followed the coordinates called out from the tower to so many of his predecessors. Few could be blase about such a moment. In World War II, the swarms of B-17s had tied the city's morale to the company's inventiveness. In 1955, test pilot Tex Johnston had claimed the company's dominance of the jet age with two delinquent rolls over Lake Washington. And now, to remove any doubt that Boeing lacked balls, here was the ship of ships. The big one.

As testing continued, Allen wanted to find a way of countering the more doleful strains of jumbo journalism.

Allen called Executive Vice President Thornton Arnold Wilson - always known as "T" - into his office. "T, I'm going to the Paris Air Show. I've lost my perspective. You're in charge of deciding whether the 747 goes to Paris. If you err, I recommend you err on the conservative side."

It was a typical Allen proposition: outline the gravity of a decision, delegate it, watch what happens.

Wilson, in turn, summoned Dix Loesch, the head of flight test. Better than Allen, they both knew the high risk involved. They had confidence in the airplane, but not in the engines. The power plant shop at Everett was like a field hospital, with sick engines wheeled in every day and new or repaired engines taking their place. With Waddell still progressing cautiously through the flutter testing, restrictions on the 747's airspeed and loading meant that a nonstop flight to Paris from Seattle - 5,160 miles - would take more than nine hours. Four engines for nine hours! Could they do it?

The ignominy of failing would be a public relations fiasco; the reward of success a public relations coup de theatre.

On the surface, it looked as though Boeing already had enough confidence in the 747 to assign it like any normal airliner on a scheduled flight. Boeing announced that rather than leave from Everett to Boeing Field, the Paris flight would leave from the Seattle-Tacoma commercial airport. In truth, it was a flagrantly false display of confidence. The airport departure was chosen because it offered the longest runway, 12,000 feet, to give the fuel-heavy airplane a safe margin.

The flight was scheduled for early in the evening of June 2. Allen and his wife, Mef, had already gone ahead to Paris, a hint that Allen didn't want his schedule to depend on the gamble. T Wilson delegated Stamper and Tex Boullioun as the senior Boeing men on the flight, choosing to remain in Seattle himself, but going to the airport to see them off.

The 28th Paris Air Show was at Le Bourget, in the suburbs. Of all the international shows, Paris was the one most steeped in the continuing adventure of aviation. France maintained a sense of its own illustrious place in the history of flight.

When Allen proposed the 747 audition, he knew that Lockheed, severely tempted to fly the C5a prototype to Paris but confronted with problems similar to those plaguing the 747, had lost its nerve and canceled.

On the morning of June 3, there was a low and thick cloud cover over Le Bourget. Word had spread through the exhibitors' tents that the 747 had made it across the Atlantic and was on the last short leg between London and Paris.

But where was the airplane?

They looked out into the clouds beyond the runway. No sound, nothing.

Then the 747 was there: still silent, floating down with flaps and landing gear fully extended, nose slightly up. Again, there was the trick of scale - at a distance she was similar in outline to a 707, and the eye could not frame her accurately against fixed objects to get a sense of proportion. Test pilot Don Knutson kept her off the tarmac and did one slow fly-by.

Peering out the windows, Sutter, Boullioun and their companions could see that the crowds were waving - it was a wonderful sight. No American airplane had landed at Le Bourget with an impact like this since Lindbergh. In the Boeing "chalet," where the heroic fliers would fall into the arms of waiting colleagues, Pan Am's brass and selected VIPs, the champagne fusillade began even before the airplane had landed.

The wide-body had arrived.