My dad’s favorite line about it: If you put all the blueprints produced during the design of the 747, in the 747, it wouldn’t be able to take off.

The whole thing was designed on paper, with hordes of draftsmen drawing every single section, detail, etc.

I’m always impressed at how complex things could be with no CAD

Your comment reminded me of an article about another massive manual-engineering feat: the F1 engines powering the Saturn V rocket. Just the amount of hand-welding alone is phenomenal.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

That article has such Asimov's Foundation vibes. Maybe it's just me. The amount of effort going into refurbishing old technology instead of designing something new reminds me of that decrepit old Empire that's reliant on technology designed and built thousands of years ago and all the knowledge being lost.

It’s weird for sure. The number of important things that people don’t understand is always surprising although it’s very common.

Early in my career I had an “Asimov moment” firsthand - I was an intern working on a project to instrument an industrial facility with better sensors, etc. The whole place was dependent on a 100 year old machine that just did its thing every day with only minor maintenance and repairs. (I think the power source has been swapped out a few times) The manufacturer was long defunct and the plan was to keep the thing running indefinitely. Pretty sure it’s still there!

That also reminds me of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky

There is a great chapter on the F1's engineering and development in 'Apollo: Race To The Moon', Murray and Cox. The whole book focuses on the engineering and management challenges involved in putting a man on the moon and returning him safely in one decade.

Amazing article - I don't know why but I just gulp everything I can about Apollo and related programmes, and that article was fascinating :-)

The 757 was the last Boeing airplane drawn by hand. CAD systems were there, but they were terrible.

One of the consequences of this was that there were many parts on the 747 that were fundamentally the same part but had different part numbers (think physical copy/paste). Boeing had a huge effort turn of the century to rationalize those types of situations.

And that it was economically feasible to do so.

i love engineering drawings. would be so cool if they could scan them all and put it up online at internet archive or similar.

There is likely OPSEC issues with making that intellectual property public. The government and military use a lot of 747.

My son is interning with an aviation parts supplier. He's had to deal with a few of those older drawings while developing custom jigs. They are amazing pieces of skill and fine detail.

That's what engineering management is all about, taming and controlling complexity in such mega engineering projects.

That’s the dream, but need and incentive must meet for it to be the reality.

Agreed. I kind of envy those guys working on these projects. I hope I was the one there.

Drawn on paper, and calculations done with slide rules. They were still widely used in engineering.