Joe Sutter

The paper reported at his death that Allen told him, the next working day, never to do it again.

Joe Sutter, an engineer who would later lead the design of the 747, was at Boeing that summer.

When Johnston died in 1998, Sutter gave the Seattle Times an engineer's reading of the afternoon.

The crew had been checking how the airplane handled, and it handled well.

The largest single item in it was his.

The airplane Tripp had in mind had two full passenger decks, one on top of the other.

The man who had to build it was Joe Sutter, the 747's chief engineer.

He was a Seattle boy who had grown up on Beacon Hill, overlooking Boeing Field, and in 1946 he had taken what he called a temporary job at Boeing.

A normal rate is about 1,500, not 15,000, 1,500 feet per minute and held together.

That's robust aviation engineering that Joe Sutter would have been very proud of, and Boeing should be too.

Bravo to those off-duty pilots and apparently Plummer, who saved the day and landed the aircraft safely in Saudi Arabia.

So...