Renton Boeing 727 flight line in summer 1966

Thanks for the comment Ben. I guess it was like the gold rush! My wife and I also had fun discussing some of these airlines of the past.

I enjoyed working on certification of extended twin-engine operating (ETOPS). I worked this on 757s, 737s, and assisted with 767s. Thanks to the incredible turbine engine reliability and the ETOPS upgrades we made to add additional redundancy to key systems, these airplane missions really are incredibly safe.

The 727s engines were many times more reliable than the earlier 707 engines, and they set the stage for switching from a three-person to two-person crews. In the 707 days the flight-engineer had a full time job of just keeping all three (or four in the case of 747) engines running on any given flight, but after an initial learning curve in the 1960’s, the industry learned to make jet engines that can now each go 375,000 hours or more (43 years of service) without an inflight shut-down. Since the airplane can safely complete a flight with just one engine, the odds are 1/ (375,000 X 375,000) x 8 hours = 1 in 17 billion of losing both engines on an 8-hour ETOPS mission. Commercial jet engines have amazing reliability, largely because they have so few moving parts and they typically maintain very steady speeds. They of course are also engineered very well.

The industry has only vary rarely seen multi-engine failure in modern jets, like US Airways Flight 1549 landing on the Hudson; these have sometimes been related to a common issue that affected both engines at lower altitudes like bird strikes or heavy precipitation, that typically would not occur at a high altitude ETOPS cruise phase of flight. Human errors, like miscommunication or ground-servicing mistakes are another risk category (like when Canada Air 143 had to glide to a landing after running out of fuel), and they can impact any flight whether it’s ETOPS or a quick 30-minute hop. Many of us in the industry focussed a lot of energy on minimizing these risks.

FAA requires that airliners be designed to have a lower than one-in-a-billion chance of a failure serious enough to force a landing outside of an approved airport. And we also design aircraft to be safely ditched on water, including life rafts, life jackets, beacons, floating cushions, and other safety measures, that form an additional layer of safety (that we hope is never needed) on top of everything else.

I should remind anyone reading this comment that flying on a commercial jet is about 50 times safer than driving, and creates about the same amount of carbon as driving a car with two people in it, so I recommend it as the best option to everyone when they can afford it. I discussed the high level of safety on commercial airplanes, and the little-known safety reason why the FAA allows lap children, in a blog entry here.

Renton was flourishing commercially at this time, with a six-year-old Sears and JC Penneys building in an open-air mall a half mile south of the Airport on Rainier Avenue. (Two decades later, the new Southcenter Mall would steal these businesses away, and Fred Meyer rebuilt the site and replaced them.)

Across the street from Sears was the first Valley Medical Center, an asterisk shaped building that was later leveled to build K-Mart, and then remodeled into the current McLendon’s Hardware.