21st Century Jet - Building the Boeing 777 - Full Episode 1

PBS did an interesting, long documentary filming the build and certification process for the 777. It's broken into 5 different, hour long parts that can be found on Youtube ( [VIDEO] - First part). The last part goes into detail about what they did to meet FAA regulations in a short amount of time.

The PBS documentary is linked in the above article: [VIDEO] with this quote: "There is a scene in the first episode of a five-part 1996 PBS series on the making of the 777, Boeing’s first plane to employ “fly-by-wire” technology, in which an engineer discusses the company’s philosophy of computer-assisted aviation: One of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control. There’s no computer on the airplane that he cannot override, or turn off if the ultimate comes, but, in terms of any of our features, even those that are built to prevent the airplane from stalling, which is the lowest speed you can fly and beyond which you would lose the control. We don’t inhibit that totally; we make it difficult, but if something in the box should inappropriately think that it’s stalling when it isn’t, the pilot can say, this is wrong and he can override it. That’s a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition.

As comparison, the series "21st Century - Jet Building the Boeing 777 " is online. [VIDEO] They have pretty intense meetings with the subcontractors.