Wide-Body: The Triumph of the 747

by Clive Irving

Chronicles and lauds the technological and business/financial achievements that put those auditoriums into the sky. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Nonfiction, Aviation, History, Business

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Sam Holdsworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but packed with lots of interesting and inspiring engineering achievements

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy read on the development of arguably the most monumental airplane of the last 50 years.

[Esteban Stipnieks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book when I was a teen and later entered a hangar with an airplane that might have been used in tests the book described.... a P-51 owned by NACA. The book does a good job of translating technical information into an understandable format.... it puts the technical aspects within reach of a reader. In doing so the reader appreciates how the development of the airplane occurred. Several of my most memorable journeys were on the 747 it was a magic carpet .... The book was written by 747 fan but it explains logically the fandom of the airplane in terms of the leaps the airplane made in safety and explains the teething issues that destroyed Pan Am and almost took Boeing with it.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an analogue of The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, except it is about the famous Boeing 747 airliner, not an obscure 1980s minicomputer. However, it starts out much earlier. When the Allies occupied Germany in the summer of 1945, they discovered a vast secret aerodynamic research center in a forest near Braunschweig. Its laboratories and wind tunnels gathered data that said that in order to fly near or above the speed of sound, a jet aircraft should have a swept-back wing. Boeing's chief aerodynamicist was so impressed by what he saw that he wrote a seven-page letter back to Seattle, putting "Censored" on the envelope to avoid the delay of censorship. This led to the design of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet bomber. A jet engine on a military airplane could be hit with a bullet, and the blowtorch coming from the bullet hole should not fry the crew or burn through a wing; so the jet engines were put in nacelles on struts underneath the wing, where the slipstream could carry the flames away. Serendipitously, this turned out to have good aerodynamic properties: the nacelles counteracted the tendency of the swept wing to pitch up during turns. The prototype XB-47 easily outran its chase plane, the straight-wing Republic F-84 Thunderjet, which was the fastest fighter plane in possession of by the US Air Force. However, the airplane had a tendency to "Dutch roll": alternate rolling and yawing. This was suppressed by a feedback mechanism connected to the rudder called the yaw damper. The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress was a bigger airplane with the same configuration as the B-47 but more engines. The company's first civilian jet airliner, the Boeing 707, also followed the same configuration, developed circa 1946, and so did all the subsequent Boeing 7x7 airliners, all the way to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which first flew in 2009, almost to the day 62 years later than the XB-47.

The second part of the book is specifically about the Boeing 747, which is essentially the Boeing 707 scaled three times bigger, which was enabled by the development of high-bypass turbofan engines; I already knew the story from the autobiography of Joe Sutter, the chief designer of the airplane. I found aerodynamics and control theory (or rather hints of them for someone who has never studied them in college) more interesting than business history: how the limitations imposed by the laws of physics dictated the form that was followed by the American Boeing 7x7, the European Airbus A3x0 and even the Soviet Ilyushin Il-86 and Il-96 (Sutter tells about a meeting with Soviet engineers in Paris where he explained to them his reasons for putting engines in nacelles underneath the wing, and they shared knowledge about working with titanium, a metal needed by the later-canceled Boeing 2707 supersonic transport). How little progress there has been in the last 50 years of civil aviation compared to the previous 50 years! At the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos CA there is a 20-foot oblique flying wing investigated by NASA and Stanford University circa 1990 as a prototype of a supersonic airliner that would change its sweep angle as it flew; if built, it would be a radically new aircraft configuration. However, in reality no one is going to build something so radically new, and telecommuting and teleconferencing are gradually obviating high-speed air travel anyway.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fascinating story of the development of the 747. After reading this book, you will never fail to notice one of these beautiful aircraft when one flies low overhead.