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TWO YEARS AGO, Museum of Flight curator Dan Hagedorn walked through the decaying fuselage of RA-001, the first Boeing 747, frowned and offered a frank assessment: “No museum, anywhere, has ever faced a restoration project of this magnitude,” he said, predicting a long, piecemeal rehab of the once-proud symbol of Seattle-area big thinking.
A couple months later, retired Boeing quality-assurance manager Dennis Dhein gave the musty bird a similar walk-through, shrugged, banged out a to-do list, recruited some buddies, and got to work.
Today, the historic plane looks a lot closer to the gleaming beast that rolled from a hangar in Everett on Sept. 10, 1968, than a plane one step away from a desert bone yard.
Leaky seams have been sealed, carpeting replaced, lighting installed and equipment restored to return the plane to its unique test-flight configuration. Even more significantly, the hulking aircraft, which sits among other historic jetliners outside the museum near Boeing Field, now gleams in its original white, red and silver test-plane livery, thanks to its first paint job in decades.
“We have brought that beautiful airplane back from the brink,” Hagedorn says.
He offers full credit to Dhein and a crew of mostly retired restorers who have thrown their collective hearts, as well as dogged, seat-of-the-pants ingenuity, into restoring the machine that put the Puget Sound region on the map as a center of innovation — and whose progeny have kept it there for more than four decades.
The remarkable transformation of RA-001 from rust bucket to near-showpiece is a testament to the Puget Sound region’s vast reserve of accumulated aeronautical-engineering know-how. It also points to the equally vast pride of ownership of classic jetliners by former employees of the “old Boeing,” which built planes essentially from scratch, right here.
In the late 1960s, the team of original 747 engineers, commanded by Seattle native and University of Washington grad Joe Sutter, became so legendary for the innovative design of the then-unthinkably huge plane they were nicknamed “The Incredibles.” Some of that same can-do spirit has been summoned to put the remarkable plane they built back together.
This good news for the plane is about to get better: “Number One,” as it’s known to generations of locals, is finally about to come in out of the rain once and for all. The Museum of Flight is poised to break ground on a massive roof to cover the 747 and other classic planes, including B-17 and B-29 bombers, the first jet-powered Air Force One, the first 787 and a Concorde supersonic jet.
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