In the mid-1960s, the engineers and aerodynamicists at Boeing faced a momentous task. Their assignment: to build the largest commercial jetliner ever conceived — one that would feature twice the tonnage and capacity of any existing plane — and make it pretty. Where to begin?
Well, specifically, you begin in the front, and in the back. “Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems,” explains the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a recent issue of The New Yorker. “How to meet the ground and how to meet the sky — the top and the bottom, in other words.” By thinking of a jetliner as a horizontal skyscraper, we understand that its beauty is gained or lost chiefly through the sculpting of the nose and tail.
The plane eventually fashioned by Boeing was the iconic 747. It’s perhaps telling that today, strictly from memory, with the aid only of a pencil and a lifetime of watching airplanes, I am able to sketch both the fore and aft sections of the 747 with a startling degree of accuracy. Even for a talentless illustrator like myself, the sweeps and angles of the nose and empennage are drawn almost effortlessly. Looking at the finished product — or at a real 747 out on the tarmac — one notices an organic flow to the jet’s silhouette. For all its square-footage and power, it maintains a graceful, understated elegance.
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