Flying into history: How other maiden flights are remembered

Published 6:52 pm Friday, June 19, 2009

New Boeing airplanes are a little like high school reunions and the U.S. Census. They only happen once every decade — maybe longer.

But when they do come along, people notice.

When the Boeing Co. flies its 787 Dreamliner for the first time during the next few days, eyes from around the world will be looking to Everett’s Paine Field. Blogs will be updated in real time. Journalists and aerospace fans will blast sporadic updates out into the Twitter-sphere. News stories will passed around on Facebook, Reddit and Delicious.

The media frenzy, the clicking lenses and videographers jockeying for prime positions — that will still be there. But Boeing’s first flight of the 21st century will be recorded through different eyes, eyes with long black cords that connect to USB ports, instantly transporting information to the masses.

That wasn’t always the way things worked.

When Boeing rolled out its 747 in 1969, aviation history was recorded on pressed pulp — good old-fashioned newspaper. The Daily Herald’s front-page headline for Feb. 10 of that year gave an unintended nod to a Muppet television show that would launch later that year: “Big Bird Flies Into Aviation History.”

The Herald story started this way: “Boeing’s first 747 model moved quietly down the Snohomish County Airport runway at 11:34 a.m. Sunday, turned its nose skyward and took to the air as though it had been doing this for years.”

A moment in aviation history was captured in that sentence, the maiden flight of the world’s first “superjet.” The first flight was characterized as “one of the most suspenseful events in aviation history.”

Despite steep expectations, the takeoff was described as smooth and effortless, save a minor glitch in the plane’s inboard flaps.

Even so, test pilot Jack Waddell told The Herald the jumbo jet was “a ridiculously easy plane to fly.”

Massive crowds of spectators turned out for the maiden flight, though Boeing asked people to stay away. Between 3,000 and 4,000 swarmed the exterior of the airport that Sunday, according to the Herald report.

For the 747’s chief engineer Joe Sutter, takeoff wasn’t the proudest moment. That came when the jet touched back down on the runway, defying critics who said the plane was too big to get safely back on the ground.

“Before my eyes, it descended to the runway with the stately majesty of an ocean liner,” Sutter remembered in his memoirs, aptly titled “747.” “It flared gently and touched down very, very smoothly. That moment was my biggest thrill of the day.”

The first 747 delivery was made later that year to Pan American World Airways. The airline bought a double-page ad in the Herald for its first-flight issue.

“The world’s first 747 is just one beautiful thing after another,” the ad copy read, displayed above the heads of several attractive female flight attendants. “Here is the plane that’s a ship, the ship that’s a plane. Here is all the comfort of home, plus the feeling that home was never like this. Served up on the proudest ship that ever sailed the skies. By some of the prettiest girls in all the world. Pan Am makes the going great.”

The 747’s launch would bolster the Puget Sound region’s economy as inflation soared in the 1970s, with hundreds of deliveries over the next few decades.

Boeing’s 767 took off to slightly less fanfare in 1981.

A story in the Herald announced the plane’s Sept. 26 first flight next to headlines declaring that Reagan wanted to cut Medicare and that the Rolling Stone’s American tour had kicked off in Philadelphia.

The maiden voyage of the 767 was documented the next day with a photo of the plane in flight over Puget Sound. But the lead story in the Sunday paper was about how Snohomish County’s growth was stalled and unemployment was skyrocketing.

That story detailed how employment in the aircraft industry had increased since 1978 in Snohomish County, even as employment in other industries such as construction and wood production declined.

More than a decade later, the 777 got its due from local media.

A Herald reporter put it this way: “A dramatic takeoff. A picture-perfect landing. The first flight of Boeing’s airplane for the 21st century received rave reviews on the ground and in the air.”

That was 1994, and technology was just starting to revise the way the world communicates.

“We both have cellular phones,” the Herald reporter wrote about herself and a photographer in a real-time published account of the day’s media frenzy.