Ex-Flight Engineer Recalls `Giant' 747

Not long ago I went to a picnic at Lake Sammamish State Park, where the company was pleasant, the food terrific and a big surprise lay in store.

Out of a crowd came this tall, erect, gray-haired fellow with a genial manner. He said his name was Don Birdsall.

We talked for a while, then out of one of his sentences floated these throwaway words: "I used to be a flight engineer on the original Boeing 747."

"What did you say?" I demanded.

He said yes, he was. I felt like I'd encountered a rare California condor.

The flight engineer, like the condor, is not around as much as he used to be.

Technology is killing him off. As high-tech navigational systems came in, out went the navigator.

Now, with sophisticated computer systems, the big, modern jets can be flown by two men, a pilot and a co-pilot.

The flight engineer is being phased out; only the older planes need a flight engineer, the man who operates the engines, manages the fuel system, monitors the hydraulic system, does the pre-flight and so forth. He's a gone goose.

Fortunately, Don Birdsall retired from Boeing in 1982. His obsolescence was self-imposed.

But there was a day. When the original 747 came off the line, our economy did a half-gainer into the tank - 60,000 jobs lost for lack of sales.

But the 747 did sell, eventually, and today many hundreds are in the air - passenger, freighters or "combis," both passenger and freight.

For many years, Don Birdsall traveled the world for Boeing. He trained flight engineers for dozens of airlines. He was the flight engineer when the original 747 flew to New York amid great VIP cheers.

My new acquaintanceship with Don grew into two three-hour lunches. I went into the Boeing Web site and came out with tons of material on the 747. As Barry Lopez has written in Harper's magazine, "The Boeing 747 is the one airplane every national airline strives to include in its fleet . . . the ultimate embodiment of what our age stands for."

It is so perfectly flyable. Some have called it "the gentle giant of the air," and Don remembers how Jack Waddell, the famed test pilot, demonstrating the 747 for other crews, put the plane into steep banks, wind-up turns, flying it "dirty" with flaps and gears down until it wouldn't fly anymore.

Then Waddell took his hands off the yoke, threw his arms up in the air like a football referee signaling a touchdown, and the great plane righted itself.

"Kind of a dangerous airplane, isn't it?" he said, laconically.

He devoted much of his life to the company, but there is more to Don Birdsall than Boeing.

He was a kid from a small high school in Unadilla, N.Y. Other of his brethren went to such exotic brain refineries as MIT and Cal Tech.

"I was just a country kid, born and raised on a farm," he said, "but I loved engines all my life."

He went to flight engineer school and not much else. He had an almost supernatural knack for complicated systems and machinery.

He was flight engineer on 30 B-24 bombing missions over Germany in World War II. He spent 10 years at Edwards Air Force Base in California, testing a flock of super airplanes.

Don spent two years penetrating the core of typhoons in B-29s and B-30s off Guam, tracking their deadly paths. When he came to Boeing in 1966, he worked cargo C-133s for six years.

He has a lot to say about almost anything but his fondest memories are of "the gentle giant," an airplane that has truly changed the world.

Emmett Watson's column appears Tuesdays in the Local section of The Times.