Found out the original 747 had over 5 miles of wiring in it

I was flipping through an old maintenance manual from the 70s at a hangar sale in Tucson last weekend, just killing time. The thing was a beast, like three inches thick and smelled like old coffee. In the back, there was this random fact sheet about the first 747-100. It said the plane had more than 28,000 feet of electrical wiring. I had to read it twice. That's over five miles of wire, just in one plane. I tried to picture running all that through the frames and conduits without modern CAD, just blueprints and a lot of coffee. It makes the headaches we have with a few bad pins in a modern avionics bay seem pretty small. Has anyone else stumbled on a crazy old-school stat that makes you appreciate the guys who came before us?

2 comments

2 Comments

holly_green827d ago

That manual being three inches thick is what gets me. They had to fit all those diagrams for five miles of wire in there, plus everything else. Just the thought of tracing a single fault through that much hand drawn spaghetti without a computer makes my head hurt. Those guys must have had the patience of saints and probably drank their body weight in coffee every shift. It really puts our digital trouble shooting into perspective, lmao.

wright.luna6d ago

Hand drawn spaghetti" is right, @holly_green82, my brain would just give up.