Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747

For the 50th anniversary of the Boeing 747’s first commercial flight, a picture book about the development of the iconic passenger plane and how it changed the history of air travel.

In 1968, the biggest passenger jet the world had ever seen premiered in Everett, Washington. The giant plane was called the Boeing 747, but reporters named it “the Jumbo jet.”

There was only one problem. It couldn’t fly. Yet.

Jumbo details the story of the world’s first wide body passenger jet, which could hold more people than any other plane at the time and played a pivotal role in allowing middle class families to afford overseas travel. Author and illustrator Chris Gall, himself a licensed pilot, shows how an innovative design, hard work by countless people, and ground-breaking engineering put the Jumbo jet in the air.

On January 22, 1970, the Boeing 747 made it's first transatlantic flight, taking passengers from New York to Paris in seven hours.

Chris Gall has been drawing pictures for as long as he can remember. When he was caught doodling on his desk in second grade, his teacher suggested that he might become an artist some day, then made him clean all the desks in the classroom. In seventh grade, Chris won a Read Magazine Young Writers Award, and that inspired him to create stories to go with his art. After graduating from the University of Arizona, Chris became an award-winning, internationally recognized illustrator, and his artwork has been shown in almost every publication in America, including Time, Newsweek, People, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

In 2004, his first picture book, America the Beautiful, became a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book of the Year, and his career in children’s publishing began. Since then he has authored and illustrated more than a dozen books, including the acclaimed Dinotrux, a 2009 Publishers Weekly Best Children’s book, Dog Vs. Cat, Awesome Dawson, Substitute Creacher, Nanobots, The Littlest Train, and Go For the Moon. In 2015 Dreamworks Animation adapted Dinotrux into a television series for Netflix. Chris lives in Tucson, Arizona.