747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation by Joe Sutter

Author:Joe Sutter [Sutter, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

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Willing to be Fired

In the late summer or early fall of 1967, I stood at the front of the BCA Management Control Center—a corporate war room—facing Boeing’s chairman, president, chief financial officer, the head of our commercial airplanes division, the 747 program chief, and two dozen other senior executives. I was alone, way out on a limb, and there was nobody to back me up or take my side.

Well, I thought, steeling myself to say what they didn’t want to hear, today’s as good a day as any to get fired!

This was absolutely my worst day as an airplane designer. As the room fell silent, I considered the events that had brought us to this juncture.

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My team’s job was a hell of a lot bigger than the resources we had to complete it. We were tremendously under the gun and behind schedule, with a lot of our drawing releases running a couple of months late. All of us were working massive amounts of overtime trying to meet the 747 program’s ever-expanding commitments.

At the same time, outside events were conspiring to make life more stressful. The world economy dipped into recession. Airline orders dried up, depriving Boeing of badly needed revenues for the 747 development and other programs. To make up this unexpected shortfall, the company had borrowed ever more heavily, until now the banks were worried. Some were so concerned that they were telling us no more money would be available.

An unprecedented reckoning loomed on the horizon. It looked like we were driving off a cliff. So bad did it get that as we left one meeting, Boeing Chief financial Officer Hal Haynes—usually the picture of calm—said, “Sutter, do you realize that your engineers are spending five million dollars a day?” Having your company’s CFO tell you something like that doesn’t exactly give you a warm feeling. There was no answer, of course, and none was expected; Haynes had already left the room. We’d be doing a better job, I thought, and maybe saving Boeing some money in the long run if we were spending six million dollars a day!

The financial situation actually became so dire that Bill Allen ordered Tex Boullioun and Mal Stamper to drastically cut company expenditures. George Snyder, the Everett Division’s vice president for engineering and my immediate boss, conveyed to me Stamper’s idea for fulfilling Allen’s desire: I was to drop 1,000 engineers from my program!

At that point I had 4,500 people reporting to me, some 2,700 of whom were actually engineers. The rest were managers, clerical and technical support people, and so on. We were now at our peak workload, churning out drawings for the 747. A lot of developmental testing was also in progress, identifying the need for running design changes, adding further to the load. My people were working extremely hard. I needed every single engineer.

I explained all this to Snyder, but he held fast and ordered me to show upper management a plan for dropping 1,000 engineers. At my request, he and I met to define the ground rules for these drastic cuts.

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