My first professional job that didn’t involve cleaning restrooms was at Boeing Commercial Airplane Company. I started in June of 1980, at the tail end of the 757/767 programs. I worked in Everett, Washington initially, and got to participate in the rollout of the very first 767, as well as first flight. Those two events in particular were very memorable.

At the time, for safety reasons there were strict rules about the routes that twin-engine aircraft could fly over.  The 767, being a twin engine aircraft, was not certified to fly to Hawaii for example. The 747 could because it has 4 engines. The 747 can actually lose 3 engines and still takeoff, land, and fly thousands of miles just fine.

I’ve been out of the game for over 2 decades so I’m not current on avionics capability, but I do know that each ‘system’ on commercial aircraft is either dual or triple redundant, meaning, if a system fails, there’s one right behind it to take over including full hydraulics.

Critical systems like the avionics that control the flap/slat electronic unit (FSEU) are triple redundant because the airplane cannot takeoff or land without it.  Less critical systems like the stabilizer/trim unit are dual redundant because a total failure of both systems, while inconvenient for the pilot, would not necessarily translate into a catastrophic event.

A recent trip to Hawaii on a twin-engine 737 is what brought me down this memory lane.  I have to admit feeling a little uneasy about a 6 hour flight, mostly across the Pacific Ocean on a twin engine aircraft.

Before I left Boeing in 1992, they had certified several twin-engine aircraft for trips over ocean waters to places like Europe and Hawaii via a program called Extended Operations, or ETOPS.   If you read the article, ETOPS has to do with extreme safety around the all aspects of the engine.

Internally, Boeing employees referred to ETOPS as “Engines Turn or Passengers Swim.”  Apparently the acronym caught on because I saw reference to it in the Wikipedia article.

I’ve been inside many 747’s but never gotten to take a flight on one and was hoping that maybe the trip to Hawaii would afford me my first exposure to that.  No such luck.  Instead, they created the 737-800 with ETOPS certified engines.  The 737 is not my favorite aircraft to take a trip on.  The seats are tightly spaced, there’s only one aisle and one lav for a large coach section.   I guess I’ll have to book a flight to Singapore or something to get that privilege.