RIP Joe Sutter
 

I just heard, Joe Sutter - considered to be the father of the 747 - passed away this morning. He was 95. :(
Although long retired, he'd continued to serve as a consultant to Boeing Commercial. I had the privilege of meeting him about six years ago - he participated in the briefing where it was decided that first 747-8F was ready for first flight - and I sat right behind him. It was like meeting a legend, no, it was meeting a legend.
RIP Joe, everyone who's ever flown on a 747 owes you a fond 'Thank You'.

We were lucky to have had guys like him in the industry. Nowadays, we could use a few more.

Joe Sutter passing
 

Mr. Sutter, for very good reasons, became a legend in his own time. He played such a pivotal role in development of landmark Boeing products. Love the B747 development documentaries, heavily featuring Joe, broadcast on Smithsonian channel many times. May he rest in peace. His legacy will live forever.

Joe was one of a kind
 

What few outside Boeing and the Industry realize about Joe and Boeing

Joe Sutter led ?the Incredibles? who pioneered Boeing?s 747 jumbo jet | The Seattle Times

From design to first flight- 4 plus years
Including building from scratch the Everett assembly building
and during the same time - Boeing was working on SST and 737 programs.

And Joe made significant inputs on 767,777, and 787 programs.

First flew in a 747 in 1972. The red eye from Honolulu to Japan. (For some reason, my memory has it that we stopped somewhere like Guam(?) along the way). I was 13.

Thanks Joe.

Also a fine tribute from Flightglobal, recognising his and his team's efforts on the 727 and 737 designs.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/art...-at-95-428910/

Watch this.
Joe Sutter and Brien Wygle talking about the birth of the 747:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCSyIXq46gg

Thanks Joe! :D

OAP

Daily Telegraph obituary.

Wonder if he imagined in 1968 that it would still be in production nearly 50 years later...

BBC tribute.
 

BBC World Service running brief tribute to Joe Sutter at end of newscasts.

Joe was a legend that designed legendary aircraft - not with a bank of computers and room full of Catia robot-geeks, but the way 'real men' used to do it - with slide rules and drafting paper.

Sutter also stood his ground when it came to safety and design. Of course, back in his day, Boeing and the other aerospace giants were run with engineering types in leadership roles, as opposed to the lawyered-up, corporate MBA abiding entities that build aircraft today.

Sad news indeed. I joined Sutter’s team as a junior engineer in September 1966, exactly 50 years ago. If interested, my recollections are at Boeing 747 50th anniversary: The plane that shrank the world

Thank you, Oz for that recollection. :ok:

It has always been my understanding that the ubiquitous slide rule was used for more than just a little of the Queen of the Skies' design work, but your link suggests mainframe computers were also in use. Care to help a fellow out with your perspective?

I'LL jump in a bit here. I was at boeing on the SST program in the 60's as an Engineer. Boeing had been using mainframe computers since the late 50's, and the structural analyis was largely done via fortran programming on both the 747 and 2707 ( SST ). At that time mainframes were fed by punchcards. Yes sliderules were common for preliminary calculations which were then translated into fortran coding, punch cards typed in, and then fed into the mainframes. the mainframes did mostly an iteration of various values and then data was sent live/ or spooled via tape to printers which printed out bucu reams of paper for examination, and then corrections, changes made, etc - rinse and repeat

Some machinde tools of that era used mylar tape programming to control certainb cutting and machining operations.

Apollo- saturn program used similar techniques.

Most of the detail stress analysis of the 747 was done with slide rules and hand cranked calculators. Electronic calculators (with glowing filaments) were just coming into use and a little later we had a few HP and TI desk top calculators like the HP 9100 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A). It was generally quicker and easier to use your own slide rule than fight for a calculator.
We had access to a CDC 6600 "supercomputer" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600) for (early versions of) finite element analysis of interaction between main structural elements The CDC 6600 had to be booked overnight and was too slow in that it took 24 hours to discovered you'd stuffed up the input data! Or someone dropped the deck of cards!
BTW Sutter wrote in his 747 book that there were no fax machines; whereas I clearly remember liaising with Northrop using a Xerox device which was like a photo copier with scan and print functions hundreds of miles apart.

Thank you CONSO and Ozaub for that short but to the point history lesson. Joe's passing makes a person wish to bring together gents like yourselves in a thread like "Concorde Question" in Tech Log (nearly 2,000 replies) encouraging a sharing of local knowledge and personal 'oral' history that would enrich those so interested in another iconic aircraft.