it would be one of the most complex machines ever built it would take 10,000 people in nearly five years to build it it would cost an estimated five billion dollars success was anything but certain the plane would contain more than four million parts supplied by contractors around the world but would they arrive on time miss your first commitment and then things start to go wrong and would they work from a technical point of view I would not put this back on the airplane if I had a choice nothing could be left a chance this would be the most tested airliner in aviation history eventually lives would be at stake there's a an apprehension any time to change technology to make it all work the company would reinvent itself from the inside out and all of this would have to happen at a time when the world's airline industry was in recession if the triple7 were to fail the company's future was at risk success would keep Boeing ahead of the competition for decades to come this plane would be built to set a new standard for commercial aviation this is the story of the building of a 21st century checked I'm sorry 300 people are boarding a flight from London to Washington DC it's actually an inaugural flight although most of these people didn't know it when they bought their tickets this just happened to be the name we need to go back to Washington and the secretary made the flight I don't think she knew it was the inaugural flight so just pure coincidence this is the first commercial flight by United Airlines of a brand-new airliner the Boeing 777 the chances are that anyone who travels to Europe or Asia will sooner or later fly in the triple 7 as this plane replaces the older 747s on many overseas flights its Boeing 7 through air liner and the company has staked its future on it in economic hard times for the airline industry Boeing hopes the triple 7 will keep the company prosperous well into the 21st century what is off flip it over your head but the investment and the risk are enormous for the last three years we've been following the process of designing manufacturing and testing the world's largest and newest - an engine airliner it's cost an estimated five billion dollars Boeing needs to sell 200 or so planes at roughly a hundred million dollars apiece before the company will consider the plane of success back in May of 1992 Boeing began assembling and training the 10,000 strong team whose excitement and disappointments would punctuate the complex process of plane making how are you the key figure in this drama was Alan Mulally the triple7 director of engineering he had a boyish charisma a fierce pride in his company and he was determined that the new plane would succeed best airplane company a world but in the time since Boeing had developed its last airliner the aviation industry had changed it had become harder to hold on to a share of the market what's different with the airlines they have choices they have choices they haven't had so many choices before all except the 747 Airbus has an airplane that can match every one of the Boeing airplanes so they have choices for the first time in history this new competition had come about because of a gap that opened up in the commercial aviation market the airline's wanted a long-range plane the smaller than Boeing 747 so Boeing's two rivals started manufacturing new planes to fill that gap Airbus with its a330 and 340 and McDonnell Douglas with the MD 11 and 12 the 777 comes somewhere between a 767-200 seater and a 747 which can carry up to 425 passengers when the company first decided to enter the race they hoped they could expand the 767 in ways that would satisfy their customers Boeing took these designs to various airlines no one was impressed British Airways for example dubbed this a chipolata sausage in October 1988 the design team met with Boeing senior executives we had at that time I think seven product scenarios all focused on a 767 derivative and at the end of that five-hour meeting the simple question was asked why haven't you looked at a new airplane and our answer was we really haven't done it yet I'll go do the homework and the next question was when can we look at some data and the answer was the last day before Christmas break had 1988 so we went back to our team which had about that this time was about 200 people and said let's start working on a new airplane Boeing had done all this before from its base in and around Seattle the company had designed and built six different airplanes for the world's airlines by the end of 1988 they had decided it was time for a seventh in spite of the huge financial risk this involved and the risk would increase over the following years as the world moved deeper into economic recession when President Clinton visited the Boeing plant early in 1993 he reminded the assembled workers of how bad things were for the airline industry and it is indeed ironic that the United States which for so long has led the world and the production of airplanes has had three years in which more money has been lost than was made in the previous history of the airline industry the economic situation would prove a constant source of anxiety for the plane makers as they got underway on the 777 particularly for the executive in charge I was a young engineer here in 1969 when two-thirds the blowing population left during the period where there was a big sign outside that said outside of Seattle they said last person out please turn out the lights that clearly has affected the way I think about organizations and stability of organizations be more careful when you're going up because on the other side of up is always down we went up way too fast we weren't efficient in the process and so when we got to the top we were way over man and that far side was very steep don't want to ever do that again to justify the huge investment in the new plane Boeing needed a launch customer an airline that would commit to buying a significant number of the new planes in advance they naturally turn to United Airlines the two companies had been partners in the early days of commercial aviation this is United's first Boeing airplane the earliest all-metal transcontinental passenger airliner the company has since bought more than a thousand Boeing airplanes but the historical relationship between the two companies counted for little when it came time to make the deal Gordon McKinsey have United so we went through a rather large evaluation process in 18 1989 and 1990 where we were looking at 33 combinations of airplanes and engines for our wide-body purchase and this was just one of the candidates the triple 7 was up against the Airbus and the McDonnell Douglas airplanes the sales campaign came to a head on the weekend of October 13 1990 when all three manufacturers Boeing Airbus and Douglas were summoned to United headquarters in Chicago to make their pitches Boeing was asked to sign this handwritten piece of paper it played a crucial role in the decision as Alan Mulally would later tell the triple 17 is a piece of paper that Jim Guyot his executive vice president of United Airlines wrote at 2:15 in the morning he woke up in a cold sweat he's gonna walk in and see mr. Wolff who's a chairman of board of United he had the chief financial officer that was voting for Airbus instead of Boeing and he had to walk in and make his vote what airplane should United airline go with for the next 30 years it was a hard-headed and unsentimental business but each of the three competitors in separate rooms running in and out of a roomful of senior United executives who were trying to make up their minds an executive named dick Albrecht led the Boeing sales force Phil Condit as leader of the 777 team wondered whether he should go to Chicago - I talked to dick Allbright said you know do you need me there and his answer and I believe correctly was no I think we've got our our pieces we'll go try to put the deal together so I said okay well here's my phone number I'm gonna I want to be at my daughter's my younger daughters parents weekend at Colgate University and I'm available by phone I'll check in what was emotional because when we went in there I think it was a Thursday morning we were told by the senior beefy VP of Finance that we weren't leaving that building until the deal was done so we'd all checked into local hotels and we were we were there watching the Sun rise over our corporate headquarters twice after a while I was reasonably certain that the phone was probably broken because it didn't ring sitting there watching it nothing happened so I called Chicago they said we're just sitting here but we expect something in the next couple hours you know we went into 70 hours of non-stop negotiations and it was very emotional because we could tell by the faces on the people coming out of the Inquisition chamber that things had not gone well you know what what was happening of course is you know somebody would go in there from from one manufacturer and the deal would be presented and then he would be dismissed and the next person would come in would try to better the deal so it was a ratcheting process through those 70 hours trying to get the best terms so finally at the end of the day things were still sort of about to happen as I can't stand the same longer I got an airplane went to Chicago and went and joined the wait SATA talk worked on a crossword puzzle technically we had made our decision we knew what we wanted to do so we had our technical recommendations already in place and the 70 hours were really just financial negotiations terms and conditions a lot of contract talk but it was a motion then they sort of finally came in and said well we need to see in Jack Pope's office so we went down there and they said you've got the deal I was glad I was there and it was exciting to be there my contribution probably can be measured in very small numbers at that point you know it was just just being there what clinched the deal was the agreement put in front of Boeing by Jim Guyot so he wrote a handwritten note at 2:15 the morning saying things like we agree to work together you know really complicated words to deliver a service ready airplane an airplane that works it has the functionality the passengers like it the attendants like it the maintenance people like it the flight crew likes it and we agree to work together to make that happen and then he dragged Phil Condit dick Albrecht into the room and he said will you sign this and they said and he took that too to mr. wolf and he said this is the new Boeing the new Boeing is going to treat us at a new level of respect as a customer the reason I wanted you to know this is that that meeting at 2:30 in the morning has changed my life and it's gonna change yours I've been waiting for four years for you to arrive because it's time to make an airplane United Airlines agreed to buy thirty four triple sevens for delivery in 1995 and to take an option on another thirty four for delivery three years later they had committed to spending three and a half billion dollars on a plane that didn't yet exist the plane United bought would have a number of important features it would be powered by just two large engines it would be guided by a state-of-the-art electronic control system and it would be built from the newest and most reliable materials it would also be a very big airplane not quite a jumbo but not far from it the diameter of the engine would be as wide as the whole fuselage of a 737 and the horizontal tail would be equal to the 737s wing but it was the interior of the plane that most interested the customer to show off the interior layout Boeing spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a life-sized mock-up it would be an essential sales tool early on lord King chairman of British Airways was given a guided tour Lord King has shown an important area at the back of the MA got called by salesmen the dirty pool with an emphasis on how the triple7 would compare with the competition so all the wide bodies flying today because what we were after was you said make it bigger and make it roomier well this is what people are used to flying here's the contour and here's the vans here the vans here's the 777 the five inches larger didn't see the contour and then the effect of the band okay look at them let's look at the back in previous Boeing planes full-scale mock-ups of the aircraft inside and out were not just marketing tools they performed an important role in the design process with the 747 for example Boeing built several life-sized mock-ups of the whole plane with every part modeled in detail before the design was finalized it was the only way the engineers could see whether or not the pieces fit together because of the three-dimensional complexity of the plane the component is first designed often got in the way of the structure or one of the other parts like these red pipes which are not meant to go through the yellow duct with the triple7 boeing wanted to find ways to catch these interferences as they're called before the assembly stage you have five thousand engineers designing the airplane that's very difficult for those engineers to coordinate with two-dimensional pieces of paper for a designer who's designing a air-conditioning duct to walk over to somebody's on Ian's structure and saying oh here's my duct how does it match up with your structure and they've got two dimensional pictures very difficult so we ended up using the mock-up and quite honestly the final assembly line to finish up the integration and it's very costly you end up with airplanes for a difficult build it all has to do with visualizing three dimensions on a two-dimensional drawing board one of the trickiest problems was working out the lengths and angles of tubes pipes and wires we would literally physically thread the systems through that mock-up and then in the wire bundle sense take it out of the mock-up flatten it on the board measure it and that's the way we decided how long the wire needed to be and then you would adjust as necessary because the airplane not made of plywood and aluminum differs from the mock-up so as you produce those first wire bundles then you make further adjustments to make them fit the real airplane hydraulic tube a very similar situation the solution was a secret weapon called epic a computerized design system that would require eight mainframe computers to run it Engineers would be able to roam the virtual interior of a plane that didn't yet exist as pieces were designed they appeared in the virtual airplane next to other components and the team could check to see that they all fit together before they were carved out of metal so for the first time the engineering creative process was enabled to think in terms of the way the world is in terms of three dimensions now computers don't design airplanes we don't have we have not put the knowledge that's in the airplane designers head into artificial intelligence that balances all these objectives someday I will continue to probably move to that in but right now the knowledge design airplanes as in the designers head there would be more than 2,000 computer terminals so that each group of designers could feed their drawings into the main computers in June 1992 the passenger doors team was checking for interferences in the components they had designed and interference showed up in red the designer was concerned about two crucial components in the door hinge this splined part right here is bolt passing through it's actually the connection of the door to the door frame the cutout and this bolt of effects that connection somewhere inside there we've broken some law now that that looks like a real interference this is what happens when you accommodate your stress man's desire that they be intimate ah they interfere for the entire head of that bolt but the actual amount it interferes we really tell by uh cutting through the two of them and looking at an accurate cut which doesn't take hardly any time at all now this yes the the second circle is just a little bit larger than the first circle I do indeed have a little problem here but it's a very small one we have released new drawings yet another innovation on the triple seven would be a new method of organizing the ten thousand or so people building the plane on past projects airplane design had been bedeviled by communication problems between the many different divisions in the company for the triple7 boeing would create new work groups called design-build teams or d BTS they would include people who had never before worked together I wish that I could say that design-build teams were so it was sort of one of his wonderful ideas it sort of lept forward he said aha in a lot of ways it is a return to some things that have worked in the past that were scale driven when if you go back to the early airplanes at Boeing build the factory was on the bottom floor engineering was on the upper floor both manufacturing and engineering went back and forth when there was a problem in the factory the engineer went down and looked at it said well you'd better do this the entire design department was within 50 feet of each other as the scale went up and that gets harder and harder and harder and if you're not careful organization just by the way they behave want to form little enclaves so structures goes off over here and air conditioning goes off over there manufacturing goes over here and planning goes over there and Finance goes over there and then one day you turn around he's you've discovered a there's an us-and-them attitude if only they would do this then our job would be easier and if only they would do this the passenger doors were designed by one of over 200 design-build teams each responsible for a major component making an airplane door that works involves the complex interaction of geometry materials manufacturing and in service maintenance at one point this team faced a problem that brought up all these factors that's a full-size drawing of the two cutouts in the door skin that are located very closely together and again our principal concern is making sure that with the all of the parts that have to be integrated into this area and the fasteners that have to be put in the skin do we have enough room to do all of that and will the assembly be durable and damage tolerant the problem involved a metal area of the door skin between the window and the door handle cut that was uncomfortably narrow the designers have two questions how strong a force would produce a crack in this area and if the metal did crack what force could enlarge it and lead to the door failing they get two different figures from the stress analysis engineers it would take a force of 27,000 pounds per square inch to crack the metal but once a crack had formed the force of 12,000 pounds would be enough to open it up that's the way we perceive the situation 12 is the upper limit at which the crack will not grow and in this area there's not much room for a crack to grow it's very tight I guess the problem because I still not clear in my mind is for the identical area under the identical consideration are you getting a recommendation of 12 from one guy in 27 from another yes for two different reasons right and if you follow the first guy you would in all cases restrict the stress to 12 yes and the second guy says as far as he's concerned you could go to 27 but he's not considering the other requirement that's right okay that's correct we could work it to 27 but if a crack should start it's gonna grow right across right the area okay if we hold it to 12 that immediately satisfies the other one that's all we're saying there were four possible fixes involving thickening the existing metal or adding an extra layer called the doubler however since any cracks would be easily visible perhaps they could just ask the airline to keep a lookout just call for a special inspection in that area that's an alternative true not pleasant when I read right so we've ever basically since we already told United we won't have any of those that's right but this happens to be on a door that gets frequently used the number four door is supposed to be one of the most frequently accessed for loading the Afghans and so forth it wouldn't it may not be much to have an experienced person show up there every so often and just take a close look instead of having to have something leap out at you and say by the crack I'm a crack so Stan it took another four months to solve the problem entirely by designing an extra layer called a doubler to go behind the outer skin we just left it a skin without this doubler here it may be strong enough for static strength meaning it can take the pressure of the airplane but over repeated pressurization eventually it would get tired it would fatigue it would crack and the crack would then go across here the airlines would catch the crack and then they'd have a very difficult maintenance job to go in and repair it perhaps putting the doubler maybe one like this on the outside which then is drag and cetera so it pays us to figure this all out ahead of time and put it in behind in mid 1992 while the team was still designing the door they built a prototype for a very important cold-weather safety test the engineers wanted to see if the door could be opened in the worst imaginable conditions of icing on the outside of the fuselage the first stage of the test involved spraying the door with water all night in a low temperature chamber until there was a thick layer of ice but how could a plane ever get into such a state if the plane lands from a cold flight minus 65 and comes into an airport where let's say it's about 28 degrees or freezing rain and it pulls up to the gate and this freezing rain is then adhere to the outside of the airplane we need to make sure that we can open the doors our criteria is a quarter-inch thick of ice all over the whole airplane and yet at the same time someone with nominal handle force on the inside can indeed open the door we consider the ice to be as strong as a hundred pounds per square inch to break it it's a quarter-inch thick and there's about 200 or so inches of ice around there so when you factor all that in with safety factors it's about 6,000 pounds of lift that has to be put on the door to make sure we break all the ice and that has to be put in with about 50 pounds of handle force on the inside they set up as quick as we the following morning the door had acquired a thick enough layer of ice to test the mechanism it's minus 20 in there right now it was - 55 in there yesterday when we sprayed the water to make sure it iced up considerably colder yesterday - 20 is not so bad this test had never been done before on dis door design if it didn't work the engineers would have to redesign the complicated opening mechanism inside the door oh wait cross here better come up the fan you yeah the Gert bar was right against here right it's all soft that's great it'll show up on a man boy it's nice this is a big key test that's work great you're real good about it another part of the plane that was being tested long before the triple7 existed was the flight control system Boeing equipped one of its smaller planes this 757 with a prototype of a brand-new system that would be used in the 777 they had to test it in flight right now I'm holding a lot of pollen for these tests came after many months of testing and simulators on the ground the new system was called fly-by-wire I go to 10,000 feet in about 250 knots and we'll stop there induce fly-by-wire is an unfortunate term probably electronic flight control system as it's closest you can come to the real definition it's simply the idea that we use electrical wires rather than mechanical cables to transfer signals from the front end to the back end of the airplane boeing's chief test pilot for the 777 was John Cashman he would be the first to fly the plane once it was built he quickly understood the advance that fly-by-wire represented over the more cumbersome system than in use airplane particularly a large airplane has large cables that run from the cockpit controls to the actuators that move the surfaces and almost all big airplanes are hydraulically moving the controls those large cable runs are very difficult to read and very time-consuming to maintain them in rate so from a maintenance side it's a fairly big improvement in terms of time to maintain the the changes that one can make and improvements that you can add to an airplane are much easily done if it's a computer card change versus a mechanical redesign there's a pilots joke about fly-by-wire systems that says that modern planes could be flown by a pilot and a dog the dog to bite the pilot if he touches the controls and the pilot to feed the dog in fact a computer systems that would be installed in the triple7 were so intelligent that engineers believed they could make decisions that would be as good as those made by the pilot but Boeing stopped short of letting computers fly the plane it was a question of safety the biggest disadvantage from a safety point of view is the potential that you haven't thought clearly through all of the events of may occur and untaken enough precaution there's a an apprehension anytime you change technology and particularly when you switch from mechanical which is visible to electrical which is not and so to some extent we've taken a conservative approach to make the airplane fly like a conventional airplane from a pilot's one of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control there's no computer on the airplane that he cannot override or turn off if ultimate comes but in terms of any of our features even those that are built to prevent the airplane from stalling which is the lowest speed you could fly and beyond what you would lose control we don't inhibit that totally we make it difficult but if something in the Box should inappropriately think it it's stalling when it isn't the pilot can say this is wrong and he can override it that's a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition the triple sevens computers which were being tested on the 757 would translate the pilots instructions into commands to move what are called the control surfaces moveable pieces of the wing and tail that allow the plane to change direction or altitude this flight was one of a series to test how the fly-by-wire system felt to a pilot when he the plane like all testing on this new plane every aspect of the test would be analyzed and discussed to see what lessons could be learned before the design was finalized the process began with the post flight briefing the two pilots reported on how the plane felt as they landed it with the fly-by-wire controls an experience like that not unique to see Staryu landings but simply on various landings reporting that you're your initial where input regenerated a result greater than you anticipated do you actually do that do you think oops you back off and you almost back off too much yeah in the end up where they may be landing uh-huh that's a good layer Frank Stefan is an excellent land meeting in early 1992 the team was under tremendous pressure as weight cost and design targets had all been exceeded they scrutinized every aspect of the project including travel costs for engineers who were flying from Seattle to meetings with subcontractors in other parts of the world uh we looked at the cost to travel right now we travel business class and for my group the difference between travel and business class and coach with what we project our tests are gonna be testing support and meetings is something the order of $700,000 now we're at a stage of the game where I'm not going to piss my guys off and say you travel coach and everyone else travels business class so I what I'd like to propose is that the 777 program proposes that when we go to UK we fire coach I think we could save a tremendous amount of money I have a guy who's fairly big well I think so do I have and I think that's we can make an accelerated oh how to get comfortable you know for that length of flight of the KLM meaningful next day but we we did this for years and years it's only in the last five years or so that we've started the fly business class why don't you what's to do a party site called let's do what hardy said and pass on and see what kind of reaction you get and then let's bring it up next time it would probably have been unfair to ask if the economy seats in existing planes were too narrow who designed them since it was the airlines and not these engineers who decided how many seats to put in a plane the next item dealt with another thorny subject office space with a move to new offices coming up there was some contention on how the new offices had been assigned some of my supervisors have come in to me about the move to Everett said they thought it all first line supervisor ring cubes but they hear that some first line supervisors are in offices not an engineering yes yeah engineering Oh coming through there because we we working so that was supposed upon the floor that I'm on there are first-line supervisors in offices and they're not payloads do you tell me who they are I'll write I'll write it down for you because sign me they tell me that we fix it Alan decreed we stole my new technology came thick and fast at this stage of the project too fast for some members of the team we get C's all right okay requirements for SDS items in APL ROG next week I forgot what is DSA too busy shop Stan you some cinnamon okay I will also show you the PR our process delivery schedule is becoming critical tempers began to flare when one engineer felt he was being delayed by another I've got taken a lot of flack over that item aid was the wrong one to put in the thing that we agreed to put in Israel structures returns to dataset oh my man told me no we all agreed we all agreed even showed him the chart I showed you the chart but I showed it that's useless data most of its obsolete because we used to state it is I'm missing releases because you did not you did not transfer on the date degree to it because you didn't transfer to me anyways that's the wrong date well it's not I did it oh okay five minutes two weeks ago has explained it I showed you an example everybody jumped on why are you talking to me I agree guys greed yeah it's done it's done in spite of mounting pressures there was the occasional good news one of the team reported on a foreign airline whose government was deciding on the purchase of six 777s the triple seven had been up against its main competitor the Airbus a330 in the cabinet approved the six and then they said well we think that that may not be right and what we think is we probably ought to add two more so instead of approving six they approved eight and then they also did not approve the eight eight 330s are sorry seven a330s that they were asked nothing like Winnie but there was no disguising concerns about the task that lay ahead they were just nine months away from assembling the first piece of the first plane uh yeah I have something say oh I'm worried about us I'm worried about that recovery we're behind schedule and what I see is it's going to take a long time to recover and I think we really need a recovery plan I think we have one okay and I'm Roger is reflecting that we we keep telling each other what we really need and we keep trying to help each other because in the heat of getting your own stuff out again the first thing that you let go is coordinating with your you know with your colleagues and Roger is just trying to remind everybody you can't worry by yourself underlying the building of the 777 was a new kind of organizational philosophy Boeing had dubbed working together this easily dismissed slogan masked what amounted for Boeing to an internal revolution for the first time though would be guided by principles that encourage the enforced cooperation first and foremost there would be no secrets information would be shared openly even things where we had to make some cultural changes I guess that's the best way to put it we had to open communications we had to break down traditional barriers between organizations we had to come up with forums where the people could speak up and more open communications and more frank frankness coming from all levels to management or vice versa it was a point of conflict to begin with you know an engineer with pride wants to be find the solution to his problems and it's not a natural thing to go out and explore publicly the particular problems you have you'd like to do it and be able to handle those yourself so I I'd say yeah there was resistance at first and but but it's interesting what attention can be given to a particular problem like that communication problem if you will in that regard by just making it okay to do that sort of thing the thing to do is to to express your problems get all the help you can if you're working together you're going to find that a great assistance in finding the solution because none of us singularly can do nearly as well as we can as a group and so I think over the years that's going away I think we we kind of shout it from the rooftops in our program reviews with large audiences in our in our all team meetings it's been said the same words have been used it's okay it's almost like celebrate our problems get them out in the open so and go work them one of the areas of the plane getting a lot of early attention was the interior the part that would sell tickets less visible to the passenger but equally important was the design of the cockpit the color scheme we kept basic the same as the 747 and the reason why is because there was a group of people who did a study on color and they found that warm colors like brown were more inviting to a pilot and also it kept them more alert and also we found that Brown hid more of dirt than any other color but the pride of the 777 cockpit would be the cup holder the coffee cup holder we come up with concepts first and the drawing in them we make them out of cardboard and after we finish our design that we think we like the best we start casting them and these are the two that we casted and so we refine them so what you have in the flight deck right now is the refined version and what's also nice we came up with the idea that it could be removable because we know that over time that the beverages would spill and stay sticking you want something that's easily cleanable and these are some of the samples Popkin styrofoam cuts airline cut and they all fit and we also have to take consideration of the hype of the handles just to make sure that it does fit into the holder itself boeing was also proud of its new overhead bins which seemed to demand a technology and a jargon all their own their three sizes of bins and those bins can be shuffled to any Arrangements to sneak up to outboard monuments we call - last closets galleys etc but more importantly in the past each one of those monuments was very static and had to be tied straight back to structure in this design this foreign asked member allows that unit to be translated fore and aft in the cabin on one inch centers anywhere in the airplane in prescribed Flecktones that allow a load path capability in the overhead rail the Japanese were expected to be one of the largest purchasers of the triple7 but would be among the shortest in stature Nichols finds a diplomatic way to refer to this fact in describing the design process this is an issue with our customers more so with our Pacific Rim customers than then for instance European customers the American carriers in us it's flat the height it's the ergonomics of the latch and some of them feel that it's a bit too high now in a pivot bin it must be this high - to reach the latch but once it opens then the access to the bin is more than acceptable and more than appropriate in terms of a shelf bin with a shelf bin remain static you hit a latch that's quite low and the door swings up now I'm reaching up here to grab the door so the latch handle of our customers have expressed some concern they've all been through the mock-up and they understand our design and to physically move that that's something that would be demand a lot of effort and believe me we can do anything but we've if you will upon our stake in the ground and believe organ ama Klee and demographically this is the right latch a part of the plane least likely to be the site of technological innovation where the lavatory seats but Alan Mulally liked to tell the story of the airline that came to him with the problem in the laboratories when a toilet lid or a toilet seat falls down toilet bowl it makes what they called the big hit sound the big bang sound and they found that that was very distressing to the traveling public so we went to work we got the mechanical designers the electrical designers and the toilet suppliers and makers of toilets and toilet lids we got together and we started to work on a small device that we could put on the back of the toilet lid you can see this device right here and this little device could go on the toilet lid and we could put another piece out the other side that could have gone to the toilet seat and we could absorb the energy of the toilet lid in the toilet seat before hit the toilet bowl so we could slow the lid down slow the seat down so that the big bang sound went away think how people are going to feel that when they put the toilet seat lid down it goes like that they're going to feel like they're in a quality airplane now this is a customer in toilet seat lid the first years work on the triple 7 involved designing the new plane now manufacturing would get underway it would begin as the first component of Boeing's brand-new aircraft a wing spar began assembly on a giant automated riveting tool this piece was a long thin metal spar that would run the full length of the wing over the next few months the rest of the wing would be built up around it Silvia leper had the informal honor of initiating the process as she began her job of sealing the edges of the hundred foot long piece before it was fastened to other components it was a simple process involving an injection gun and compressed air Sartain drop at least it was supposed to be without a problem we got no air right now so we got to try to get that hook back up well it did for a minute maybe it just bled out once the air started flowing she smeared a layer of gray sealant along the piece after years of doing this on other planes she could produce a layer of constant thickness the entire length of the piece the work had to be checked by a quality control inspector too thick a layer would add weight to the plane too thin and it wouldn't seal properly or prevent corrosion Silvia's work passed inspection and the pieces were moved into contact with another component ready for fastening then there was another small problem the upper piece of the spar was out of position by a fiftieth of an inch the lower chords out it's located the upper chords 20,000 you mean we just want to index up right there yes correct couldn't we just take a big c-clamp and tap today miles will use the provision of the tool yeah what it was built to do let's go ahead to move this way yeah okay I'm gonna see I've seen it that's what this ratchet handle does here till you clamp this here and then just hopefully move this up record in bored ready ready ready okay over on the triple seven teams brand new office building Alan Mulally arrived for work it was just a few days after Christmas Mullaly hadn't had much of a holiday that I came in on all but two days but it was kind of a nice time is almost like a time to kind of reflect on the past year and and think about the priorities for 93 we had quite a few people working especially in engineering and in operations and planning and tooling where they were supporting the first parts of assembly so I talked to quite a few the structures engineers and the planners and tools associated with structure just get a feeling for how how they saw it what their problems were and challenges is there although the team had started assembling the wing the design of the plane was not finished but really the way we layout the program is that we stretch that process over nearly two years so what drug what determines what parts are going to be designed is the sequence of when it's going to be assembled so the actual design of all these parts has spread over two years so even though we're seeing parts being assembled for like the front spar those are the parts that were designed first because those the parts that need to be built first but right now all the payloads area like all of the bins and the seat tracks and stuff they're just being designed now because they'll go into the airplane later in the sequence the beginning of assembly was a significant milestone in the life of the triple 7 but now there were only 18 months till a piece of metal and this tool would fly along with 4 million other components on the airplanes first flight and as Mullaly looked ahead he and his team faced an ongoing recession in the aviation industry how would this affect the fortunes of Boeing's of the three it's so important for us that we absolutely will not let the current events affect our intensity on getting this program done because it's such a long term business and these projects are are big and they're made for the future that we just can't let the anxiousness and the ambiguity of today's environment in any way slow us down and so we talk about it we talk about it openly we talk about every cancellation we talk about every airline that gets in trouble every airline that has to go into chapter 11 bankruptcy and what it means to Boeing and we talk about what's happening to Airbus the same way and what it means to us and it's okay it's really important that we talk about it and then we move on to what our real job is and that is stay focused on on developing the airplane for the future and that's our strength to to keep going but it is it says worrisome the team's morale was at a low point but there was no stopping the plane making machine that had lumbered into action they were committed to building the 777 whatever the challenges and there were certain to be more of those in the months ahead you
One of the most amazing parts about this show is watching Alan Mulally, who was then the project manager for the 777. He later became the CEO of Ford and managed to right one hell of a sinking ship.
Ten minutes of watching him in this series and you get the sense that you'd follow him anywhere.
Even for being filmed in the early 90's it's still a very well done series giving an inside look at how Boeing processes (at least) used to be.
I loved this series, time to watch it again.
The triple seven is one stunning airliner.
Now that thing is killing 747s, it's amazing how far they managed to push that design.
I remember watching this on PBS when I was a kid in 1995! Two years ago I visited the assembly line and became a kid again!