The context for the 747 had been established by Juan Trippe, the charismatic CEO of Pan American, the airline then favoured by the jet set. Trippe was lobbying Boeing for something twice the size of the 707 and an engineer called Joe Sutter was assigned to the project in 1965. By April 1966, Pan Am had ordered 25 of the new Boeing 747-100s. Trippe said the new plane would be 'a great weapon for peace, competing with intercontinental ballistic missiles for mankind's destiny'. Using fault tree analysis, a powerful debugging process, the team designed the 747 in just 28 months.
