September 30, 1968.
Everett, Washington.
The giant doors of a brand-new aircraft factory began to open.
For the people standing outside, there was almost nothing to see at first. The hangar was so enormous that the opening seemed to reveal darkness rather than an airplane. Then, slowly, the nose of something enormous appeared.
A tractor took the strain.
The first Boeing 747 began moving into the daylight.
The crowd stared.
Then came the reaction Boeing had been hoping for: gasps, followed by applause.
The airplane was unlike anything most people had ever seen. It stretched 231 feet from nose to tail and carried a wingspan of about 196 feet. Its tail rose roughly six stories into the air. Its distinctive upper-deck hump made it immediately recognizable even before the public knew what the 747 would eventually become.
The aircraft was huge by the standards of 1968. It was not simply a bigger passenger plane. It represented a completely different idea of what commercial aviation could be.
The first 747 was designed to carry roughly 400 passengers in a typical configuration—more than twice the capacity of the 189-seat Boeing 707 that had helped usher in the Jet Age. The National Air and Space Museum describes the 747 as the first wide-body jetliner and credits it with helping transform long-distance travel by dramatically lowering seat-mile costs.
But there was a secret behind those photographs from September 30.
The airplane the world saw was not quite ready.
The Jumbo Jet That Wasn't Quite Finished
The photographs from the rollout ceremony show a magnificent airplane.
White fuselage.
Blue Boeing lettering.
Four engines hanging beneath its enormous wings.
Representatives of airlines from around the world standing nearby.
Everything appears finished.
Everything appears ready.
But appearances were deceiving.
Joe Sutter, the engineer who led the 747 design team and later became known as the “father of the 747,” described the extraordinary pressure surrounding the project in his memoir, 747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation.
The airplane had to be presented to the world even though work remained.
The engines were part of the presentation.
The goal was simple: make the airplane look complete.
It was an appropriate detail for a project that had been running on impossible deadlines almost from the beginning.
The 747 program had moved at a breathtaking speed. Boeing had to design a completely new airplane, build a new production facility and begin assembling the first aircraft virtually simultaneously.
HistoryLink's account of the rollout, drawing on Sutter's memoir and contemporary reporting, notes that construction of the factory and production of the aircraft proceeded at the same time. Workers were already building the first 747 while parts of the massive building were still being completed.
In other words, Boeing was building the airplane and the place where the airplane would be built at almost exactly the same time.
And on September 30, 1968, it had to make the whole thing look effortless.
The Factory Had Barely Existed
The scale of the 747 created an immediate problem.
Boeing did not have a building large enough to assemble it.
So the company went looking for land.
It eventually selected about 780 acres near Paine Field in Everett, north of Seattle. The property was heavily wooded and uneven. More than four million cubic yards of earth had to be moved to prepare the site for the enormous factory.
The scale of the construction was almost as extraordinary as the airplane itself.
The original building enclosed approximately 291 million cubic feet, according to HistoryLink.
It was an industrial structure so enormous that conventional comparisons struggled to convey its size.
And the modern Everett assembly building is even larger today. Boeing says the facility has expanded substantially over the decades and now encloses about 472 million cubic feet of space. Guinness World Records lists the Everett plant as the world's largest factory by volume.
But in the summer of 1967, all of that was still being created.
Joe Sutter later remembered the Everett site as wilderness, including forest and swamp. Accounts of the construction describe workers arriving at a site that could be muddy, cold and difficult to access.
One worker recalled being told to bring rubber boots, a hard hat and warm clothing because the site was essentially a sea of mud.
This was not a conventional aircraft factory being expanded for another model.
Boeing was creating an entirely new industrial environment because the airplane itself was forcing the company to rethink what aircraft manufacturing could look like.
The Incredibles
More than 50,000 people ultimately contributed to the first 747 program.
They became known as the “Incredibles.”
The nickname captured the extraordinary nature of what they were attempting.
Boeing's own historical records describe the first 747 as the culmination of the work of as many as 50,000 people who produced the aircraft in only 16 months.
Sixteen months.
That is the figure that makes the story difficult to comprehend.
The modern aerospace industry is accustomed to enormous development programs stretching over many years. The 747 was different.
The aircraft had to move from drawings and mockups toward a flyable machine while Boeing simultaneously created the physical infrastructure required to manufacture it.
The program was so ambitious that the factory itself became part of the engineering challenge.
Workers were effectively building a new world around the airplane.
And there was very little room for delay.
Why Boeing Needed the 747
The origins of the airplane go back to the early 1960s, when Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe wanted something dramatically larger than the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8.
The first generation of successful jetliners had transformed international travel, but their capacity was limited.
Airlines wanted to carry more people over longer distances at lower cost.
Pan Am became the crucial customer.
In April 1966, the airline signed a $550 million contract for 25 Boeing 747s, a massive commitment at the time.
Boeing therefore had a customer willing to make an enormous bet on an airplane that did not yet exist.
And Boeing itself had to make an even larger bet.
The company had to believe that passengers would want to fly in an airplane of unprecedented size.
Airlines had to believe they could fill it.
Airports had to accommodate it.
Pilots had to learn to operate it.
Maintenance crews had to service it.
Governments had to certify it.
And passengers had to accept the idea that an aircraft weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds could safely carry hundreds of people across oceans.
The 747 was therefore more than an airplane.
It was an entire aviation ecosystem waiting to be invented.
The Hump That Became an Icon
One of the most recognizable features of the 747 was the raised section behind the cockpit.
That hump would eventually become the airplane's visual signature.
But it had a practical origin.
Boeing was designing the airplane with cargo operations in mind, including the possibility of a forward-opening nose that would allow freight to be loaded directly into the aircraft.