Joe Sutter, whose team of 4,500 engineers took just 29 months to design and build the first jumbo Boeing 747 jetliner, creating a gleaming late-20th-century airborne answer to the luxury ocean liner, died on Tuesday in Bremerton, Wash. He was 95.

His death was announced by Boeing, the company where he had taken a temporary job after World War II and stayed for 40 years. He retired as executive vice president for commercial airplane engineering and product development in 1986.

His son, Jonathan, said Mr. Sutter had been hospitalized for pneumonia.

In less time than Magellan spent circumnavigating the globe, Boeing engineers transformed Mr. Sutter’s napkin doodles into the humpbacked, wide-bodied behemoth passenger and cargo plane known as the 747. The plane would transform commercial aviation and shrink the world for millions of passengers by traveling faster and farther than other, conventional jetliners, without having to refuel.

It dwarfed its predecessor, the 707, which had been introduced in 1958. The 707 came in many configurations — as the 747 later did — but it was originally about 144 feet long and its fuselage was 12 feet wide. It had a range of about 2,300 miles and could carry about 110 passengers.