AIRWAYS INTERVIEW
‘ THE MOST TRANSFORMATIVE
AIRCRAFT IN AVIATION HISTORY ’
RON MARASCO HELPED PUT THE BOEING 747 INTO SERVICE
Interview by ANDREAS SPAETH Photos AS NOTED
Ron Marasco , born 1931 , joined Pan Am in 1956 as Flight Engineer and became General Manager of Boeing 747 maintenance in 1969 . He left Pan Am in 1984 as Vice-
President for Maintenance and Engineering and joined cargo carrier Atlas Air . He was one of very few people attending both the first and the last delivery of the 747 , and he was in Everett when the final aircraft was handed over to Atlas Air in February 2023 .
How did your career at Pan Am start , and how did you get involved with the Boeing 747 ? Ron Marasco : I started as a flight engineer in 1956 with Pan Am on DC-6s and Stratocruisers . I was quite involved with the technical aspects of operations . When the Boeing 707 came , in 1956 , I was too junior to fly it , but I became a 707 flightengineer instructor , and , in fact , I flew quite a bit on the first six 707s in the world in this role .
I became an expert on the aircraft , and that ’ s how I got involved in maintenance . I led a lot of maintenance departments in Pan Am after the beginning of the 707 and on through a couple of years before the 747 . Because I had management experience and I was a technician , I was made General Manager of 747 maintenance even before the aircraft was certified .
And then I ended up being deeply involved with the 747 from the very beginning .
That job was a great boon to me because we were the leading 747 operator in the world for many years . Without Juan Trippe utilizing the company he really dominated , producing the most transformative aircraft in aviation history , without him and Pan Am , the 747 would never have been the same aircraft we know today . There are a lot of reasons for which this statement is absolutely true .
Did you have any reckoning of the sheer scale of this wide-body early on ?
When I first started to become involved with the 747 , all we had was a planning book . And we knew the dimension , and it was , of course , very impressive how the large the 747 was going to be . Everybody was looking at the size , how we were going to climb up and down the airplane . But the technology of all of the systems — and , most importantly , the engines — was just over the top . I spent the year prior to the first delivery in Seattle — most of 1969 — so I was really digging deep into the 747 .
When did you get your first reality check on the 747 ’ s actual dimensions ?
The first time I ever had a glimpse of the airplane was when I saw the mockup , which got a lot of
54 AIRWAYS MAGAZINE AUGUST 2024 www . airwaysmag . com