It was the challenge of a lifetime, a high-profile rush job that taxed their abilities through grinding 80-hour workweeks and occupied their minds during the few hours they spent at home.
“I’d be sitting there pouring my Oatie-Os, thinking about it,” said John Dovey.
But ultimately, designing reinforced cockpit doors for 1,700 Boeing Co. wide-body jets was the most rewarding thing they’d ever done, said members of the Everett engineering team that pulled it off.
“It’s one of the most important things I’ve ever worked on,” said Michael Cloud, who headed the ballistics testing.
Boeing recently honored Cloud, Dovey and colleagues Scott Kube, Jim Kunda and Rollie Taguinod for their work in 2003 on the cockpit door project. The company picked their project, which received a government patent, as one of 37 award-winning efforts to receive Special Invention Awards.
Theirs was among seven patent-winning projects performed in Everett in 2003 to receive the honor.
Preliminary work on the cockpit doors actually began within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Tony Autrey, who supervised the team. Groups of engineers began brainstorming ways Boeing could respond to hijacking threats. There was no shortage of volunteers.
“I was just emotionally struck by the drama of that day and the intensity,” Dovey said. “It didn’t make any sense to be designing world-class aircraft if passengers didn’t want to step on board.”
Reinforced cockpit doors seemed a natural solution. Before Sept. 11, the doors had been intended merely as a barrier that would provide a more officelike working environment for the pilots. They were engineered to make it easy for the crew to get out in an emergency, not to make it hard for armed intruders to get in.
But nothing is simple in airplane design.
The doors had to be strong enough to withstand bullets but remain light. The doors had to keep intruders out but allow the crew to kick open the door to get out in a crash. They had to be affordable, and something that could be manufactured quickly to get them out to the airlines, which were under federal mandate to install new doors.
“There were times we wished it was a battleship,” Dovey said.
If that were the case, Autrey said, nodding, “you could machine a solid sheet of steel or something.”
What they settled on was Kevlar, the composite material used in bulletproof vests. But that solved only one problem. There was still the issue of how much Kevlar was enough – plus figuring out the best ways to test it. They had to design 11 different doors for the different wide-body model 747s, 767s and 777s now flying – and work out the best way to manufacture them.
They fired a lot of bullets into material samples, Cloud said.
“We broke a lot of doors,” Dovey added.
The engineers said they got outstanding cooperation from everyone in Boeing.
“I sketched something on a stinking napkin,” Kunda said. An assistant faxed the drawing to Boeing’s Auburn fabrication plant. “They had the part on my desk the next morning.”
The designers constantly asked the fabrication workers to build a handful of parts for testing, then would come back days later with requests for changes, Autrey said. “They’d bend over backward, (saying) ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll make it work.’ “
Everyone pulled together because everyone felt the urgency, Kube said. “This is a significant thing we’re working on. It’s something that can contribute to stopping terrorism.”
That made it easier to come to work on weekends, he added.
They worked a lot of weekends, and a lot of nights, and while the engineering team got the awards, they hinted that their families probably should have gotten medals.
Cloud said his wife took care of the house and their four kids while he poured all his energy into the door project over an 18-month period.
Dovey, who sent e-mails to his colleagues on his honeymoon, said he joked about it with his fiance before the wedding: “Do you take this company to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
For the engineers, working on the project wasn’t a sacrifice.
“You were always looking forward, anxious to be getting back to it the next day,” Autrey said. “I was always champing at the bit to come back to work.”
The Federal Aviation Administration issued the standards the doors had to meet in October 2001. The engineers had until August 2002 to win FAA certification. All the doors had to be installed, in every passenger jet in the nation, by April 9, 2003.
Projects like this usually take years, Kube said. “It’s definitely the most fast-paced project I’ve ever been on.”
In the end, airlines ordered more than 1,700 of the doors, which represented more than 55 percent of all those installed, Boeing spokesman Jim Proulxsaid.
After the certification was complete, the team moved on to other jobs. Boeing still has customer support teams working on the doors, helping answer airline questions. Others are working to improve the design.
It’s been a bit of a letdown, the engineers acknowledged.
“It was like postpartum for me,” Autrey said. “After operating at that high professional level … for over a year for some of us, it was very, very difficult to transition to more mainstream work.”
But all said, it’s something they’ll always remember with pride.
“I can look at an airplane from now till the day I die and see something I did,” Kunda said. “I’ve affected everybody in the world’s life.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss:
425-339-3454 or
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