WIX Archives

Boeing 307 Stratoliner expected to fly again in mid-June!

Posted by bdk on Thu Oct 31, 2002 12:31:10 PM

Printing Services helps prep Stratloliner to fly again
Structures engineer Michael Sievers of Commercial Airplanes is used to working on 737s and 757s that are out of commission. But his latest assignment is unique: help get a piece of Boeing history back into the air. To do it, he turned to what may seem like an unlikely source of help: Shared Services Printing Services.

The story begins last March when a vintage airliner, the last existing Boeing 307 Stratoliner, crashed off Seattle's Alki Beach on its first flight since volunteers had spent years restoring it to its former Art Deco glory. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but volunteers were dismayed to see that the airplane suffered structural damage.

The plane, first delivered in Pan American Airways in 1940, is the world's first pressured commercial airliner, and is part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It is destined for display at the museum's new facility at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C., when the complex opens next year.

Mike Sievers, BCA structures engineer, and Annetta Greer, Shared Services copy services operator, discuss options for copying old Stratoliner blueprints.

Sievers was called in as part of the airplane-on-ground team to get the historical Boeing airliner flyable again. He's leading the design engineering for the fuselage.

The first thing he and his team had to do was to find the old drawings and other information about the airplane. In the Boeing archives, they discovered some stress analysis notes, dated 1937, on blueprint pages.

They took the drawings to the Kent Copy Center, part of Shared Services Group's Printing Services. Manager Ed Hamm said the center staff doesn't often see blueprints, which require negative image processing to be readable. But they had the equipment to do it.

Because of the age and condition of the materials, the staff first processed the blueprints manually through electronic copiers. They then scanned the images and provided them to the customer on CD-ROM.

Sievers says his organization hopes to get the airliner back in the air by mid-June. He also said that each tool had to be remanufactured to make the replacement parts. That is why those blueprints were so important and why he appreciated the rapid turnaround by Shared Services Printing.

Workers prepare to lift the historic airliner, which belongs to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, from the waters off Seattle's Alki Point last March.

Besides doing its bit to get the 307 Stratoliner airworthy once more, Shared Services Printing Services provides reproduction of engineering documents in hardcopy or electronic form and all kinds of printing, including offset lithography and online printing.

Follow Ups: