1 jumbo jet languishes,
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My brain was grasping this, but my gut was having none of it. Just seconds before, taking the last few steps to one of the world's most famous jetliners,
michael kors selma orange, a flutter had gone through me, and I had to catch my breath.
It
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It is a local treasure. Aside from the Space Needle, this jet, which revolutionized modern, long distance air travel, is the most iconic thing ever created in Seattle (yes, Everett and Renton, too), by Seattleites. Nothing says Seattle like a 747. Especially this big, once beautiful, red, white and silver one.
This jumbo jet and its "second generation" of commercial flight dragged Seattle out from beneath the old growth and into the spotlight, leaving a
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And it really is "us," I thought, scanning the fuselage and wincing at the sight of paint worn to bare aluminum. Or at least was us. While driving Interstate 5 above Boeing Field, many locals who crane to catch a glimpse of the plane aren't just looking at some relic.
They're remembering life as we once knew it in a company town brought to you by the "old Boeing." Long hours and short vacations. Hard times and good times. All reflected in a massive machine which, at the time, seemed unthinkably complex yet was designed and assembled, piece by a million pieces, by blue collar people like my dad, your dad and someone else's mom.
To outsiders, this probably sounds like goopy nostalgia, and it is. It's very possible that if you never ripped through the front door of
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That's OK. Take our word for it: Of all the gleaming creations to roll off the assembly lines at the Lazy B, this airplane, for anyone with a familial connection to Boeing from the early 1960s through today, took plenty of hearts up with it every time it left the ground. It meant something profound, and still does.
All of which made it that much more painful as I stepped onboard, drank in some of the musty air and realized, in an instant, that No. 1 is dying.
THE FAINT LIGHT filtering through the long rows of little windows does not reveal a glorious picture. Plane double ought one was built as a test machine a sacrificial lamb, if you will, for a coming fleet of birds now numbering more than 1,400. This plane made 12,000 test flight cycles, and it shows.
Save for a klatch of ballast barrels in the aft section, No. 1 is an empty shell. The industrial look is accentuated by the lack of a plane's normal false ceiling or side panels. Walking its full, 231 feet gives you an X ray view into the immensity of its structure and engineering history.
"It's mostly intact," says tour guide Dan Hagedorn, the Museum of Flight's senior curator, over the hum of a large dehumidifier.
The floor, simple plywood in sections, is worn and creaky. An aluminum air duct runs along the plane's spine. Seemingly everywhere overhead, an array of steel flight control cables winds through mazes of pulleys. Some parts bear numbers on old fashioned black and white label maker tape.
We climb the narrow, trademark spiral staircase and in "the hump" find
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The instruments bear the same settings as the last time the plane landed at Boeing Field in 1993, when No. 1 finished serving as a test bed for a new 777 engine. With pilot headsets slung casually aside next to tattered sheepskin covered seats, it looks like the original flight crew might have just walked off the bridge for a smoke.
The rest of the interior is what the museum hopes will make a nice "before" picture. Blankets of fiberglass batting throughout the fuselage bear streaky signs of moisture damage.
"This is what keeps me awake
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The dehumidifier keeps things fairly dry. But it's sort of a losing battle, and much damage was done during the decade or more the plane sat, unused, across Marginal Way at Boeing Field.
An aluminum aircraft like this one is basically a 77 yard long metal shed with tens of thousands of rivets and small openings for rain, birds, insects and other invaders. Including humans. Some Boeing employees sheepishly report that as the plane languished, a homeless person or persons broke into it for shelter, designating the tail section as a latrine.
Nobody at the museum is happy about this; restoring
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"No museum, anywhere, has ever faced a restoration project of this magnitude," says Hagedorn, whose r includes two decades at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
After that comes the really hard and costly part: To prevent No. 1 and other historic planes here from reverting to leaky metal shed status, all of them need to come in from the incessant Seattle rain.
RIGHT
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The plane has a purely Puget Sound pedigree. Its distinctive humpback design was sketched out (on paper) in 75,000 drawings by a team of engineers led by Seattle native Joe Sutter, who grew up daydreaming about the magic of flight, and earned a University of Washington engineering degree to put some of that imagination to use.
The mammoth project Sutter, then a 737 engineer, was handed in 1965 had begun as a pipe dream of Pan American Airlines magnate Juan Trippe, who famously told Boeing Chairman William Allen that if the company could build the world's largest jetliner, Pan Am would buy it.
The plane went from handshake to first flight in only four years unthinkable even by today's computer design standards. It's impossible not to admire the sheer audacity of that.
The plane was a monster leap into the future, not so much for its technology, but scale. In a world of 200 passenger long range jets, Trippe wanted room for 400, plus cargo. Boeing committed, even though it was pouring much of its efforts into a Supersonic Transport prototype widely seen as the future of the company. Because of this, the 747 was designed for a short life as an intercontinental passenger carrier and then cargo hauler.
Sutter and fellow design engineer Rowland Brown quickly rejected what everyone expected they would build: a plane somewhat wider than current models, with a full length, double deck interior. Instead, they conceived a super wide, single level fuselage broad enough to hold rows of 8 by 8 foot shipping containers or spacious rows of seats separated by twin aisles. To make all this fit, the cockpit was kicked up into the rafters. Hence the now famous hump.
