Legends of Flight

It has the largest wingspan of any bird on earth.

Its thermal efficiency, its soaring efficiency is almost supernatural.

It can remain airborne for months at a time.

Quite simply, I think it's the most

perfect flying machine ever created.

Boeing's final assembly line at Everett, Washington.

He's flown gliders, fighters, biplanes, helicopters, airliners.

Eight thousand hours in more than 130 different aircraft types.

He's an aeronautical engineer, a flight instructor,

a navy test pilot with 300 plus carrier landings.

Mike Carriker is a legend in the industry

and a Boeing chief test pilot.

The best part of this job is that I have a voice in how

our airplanes are designed and operated.

For a pilot, it doesn't get much better than that.

It's a better place for the flight gear, to touch it if it's up there.

If you're willing to go back.

Here in the largest building on earth,

30,000 people work to assemble 10 new aircraft a month.

The newest in Boeing's family of airliners is the 777,

an aircraft designed over 20 years ago.

Hi there.

In the spring of 2001,

we had a very successful lineup of aircrafts still in production.

But we really needed a new generation to stay competitive.

We wanted to build something radical, something exciting.

Something that could bring back

some of the romance and the joy of flying.

Perhaps more money changes hands at the Paris Air Show

than any other place on earth.

Gambling in this market can make or break global corporations.

At every show, there is a central attraction.

This year, it's the first entirely new airliner of the 21st century.

The largest ever built, the Airbus A380.

With a maximum seating of 853,

the A380 will be the world's most

energy efficient airliner when it enters service.

So Airbus had played their hand

building an enormous but efficient airplane.

Frankly, we thought it was too big.

So we knew we would have to match or improve

on that energy efficiency in a smaller airplane.

But how?

All ideas start off as a scribble on a napkin, if you will.

Or on a blackboard.

Or nowadays, in thin air.

It's the most fun stage of an aircraft design, in my view,

and maybe the most important.

If you get the basic concept wrong,

then whatever follows could be a real dog.

I was chief test pilot on a scribble we called the Sonic Cruiser.

The concept was to build a very fast subsonic airliner,

and we all loved the idea.

But it needed enormously powerful

and thirsty engines that we didn't have,

and it's a good thing, because it might have ruined the company.

A very important lesson in what not to build.

By the way, some of the best flying requires no power at all.

You watch how the snow blows off the rocks.

You watch what the birds are doing, how they handle the updrafts.

You try to use every possible advantage.

But once you get the hang of it, it's magical.

It's as close as you can come to flying like a bird.

Gliders have much to teach us about efficiency.

Very lightweight composite materials, smooth, polished skins,

long, thin wings that bend upwards

that give them low drag and high lift.

In hindsight, a lot of the clues as to the airplane

we were about to build.

In December of 2002, Boeing held internal discussions around

the most critical decision the company would make in its entire history.

The creation of a radically new 21st century aircraft.

Just keep working on it all the time.

We spend a lot of time at meetings.

And we love to talk about airplanes.

To me, that's the issue that we got to work. We've got to understand that.

And if we're gonna be afraid of every little decision...

Who's gonna add this all up?

Who's gonna add up all these positives and all the negatives...

We were all over the place at first.

I get lost in all these conversations about

this little bit over here, and this little bit over here,

and this little bit over here, and then they add 'em all up

and it's like, how do we even add them up at the end of the day...

Do all that kind of thing.

You know, in retrospect, the clue we were missing

could be traced back to the first powered flight.

Early piston engines were a marvel of ingenuity and simplicity.

They made possible an enormous variety of flying machines.

A few of them, magnificent.

The power was limited, but multiple wings, good aerodynamics,

very lightweight fabric, wooden construction

enabled early aircraft to get airborne.

One of my all-time favorites is

the legendary Stearman biplane.

The carbon bonds in the cellulose of the wood make possible

very strong and fatigue resistant structures.

After all, a tree can stand blowing in the wind

for thousands of years without breaking.

Amazingly, here was another clue.

Carbon has been called the enchanted element.

The carbon atom, with four electrons in its outer shell,

forms a huge variety of chemicals,

including those that make possible all life on earth.

Under intense heat, carbon forms bonds only with itself,

creating crystalline chains of thin graphite sheets.

Twisted into threads and then woven together,

carbon fiber can be made into among the strongest,

lightest materials on earth,

stronger for its weight than any metal.

What started as a few squiggles

began slowly to evolve into the big idea we were all hoping for.

A radical new way to build airplanes.

It was one scary idea floating in that room.

Do you know any way to put the fault

in there to see if we can catch the fault?

Well, yeah. I can introduce the fault here all day long.

The problem is that it came in upstream of it, we don't know how.

But, you know, there was something even scarier,

and that was resting on our laurels just a bit too long.

So, second order impacts. I mean, think about it.

Okay. Brakes and hydraulic system.

Check.

Beacon lights. On.

Radios. They're on.

Transponder. Check.

I remember when I was a kid, the hot plane, (CHUCKLES)

Or should I say the cool plane,

was the Super Constellation, no question about it.

I never turn down an offer to fly one of these old airplanes,

because once you get up in the air, there's nothing to say

that you haven't gone back in time 40, 50, 60 years.

I've flown several of these piston airliners,

and the Super Connie would be my favorite.

There are no computers flying this plane.

You are connected by pulley and by cable to all the control surfaces.

So you can really feel the plane,

and it will do exactly what you tell it to do.

Good or bad, it doesn't care.

The Super Constellation

caught the imagination of the flying public

and became a big seller for Lockheed, but success didn't last.

Lockheed was not prepared for the coming revolution

in aviation technology.

It just had all these moving parts.

It had these pistons going this way,

and then pistons going that way,

and counterbalances and...

Piston engines with 18 cylinders and supercharges

had become extremely complex,

difficult to maintain, and neared the limits of their power output.

The new technology jet engines were dramatically simpler

with much greater power to weight output.

The amount of power the relatively simple turbine

can produce is almost unlimited,

and with enough power, you can fly a brick.

This pretty much describes another one of my favorites.

One of the most challenging and dangerous airplanes to fly.

The Harrier uses a great deal of

lightweight carbon fiber to accomplish

the opposite of what the glider does.

It can come off the ground on engine thrust alone,

without the help of its wing and aerodynamics.

No other plane could do that.

Oh, what a great day.

Sir, did we get the brake accumulator all pressurized?

The British designed Hawker Siddeley Harrier

manages something once thought impossible,

a fighter that can fly both fast and very slow.

Man, what a great day to go flying.

Hovering one moment, accelerating to 700 miles an hour the next.

Fighter jets are great flying machines,

but they use enormous amounts of fuel and make ear-splitting noise.

Not something you want in an airliner.

Engine builders Rolls-Royce, GE and Pratt-Whitney

were already at work on new engines for a future generation

of quieter and considerably more efficient aircraft.

In order to reduce stress on a much longer, thinner wing,

engineers envisioned something they called the "smart wing."

Sensors will read air currents,

sending data via a series of computers to wing surfaces

that will react continuously to dampen turbulence.

In effect, the wing would act as if alive.

It got more and more interesting.

With carbon fiber, the wing could be longer,

thinner, more efficient like a glider.

We also had a massive increase in computer power.

We were looking at something entirely new, an airplane with a huge brain.

With long, thin wings,

the new plane was starting to look like

one of the most intriguing birds on earth.

And it's no coincidence.

We are looking for some of the same things

the albatross does better than any other bird,

unbelievable range and extraordinary energy efficiency.

But we were also hoping to give it

just a bit of the genius of other living flyers.

Advanced navigation capability.

Collision avoidance. Improved aerodynamics.

All things that nature has been doing