Flying High: The Story of Boeing and the Rise of the Jetliner Industry - Hardcover

Rodgers, Eugene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871136554 ISBN 13: 9780871136558

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr, 1996

Synopsis

An investigative history of one of the world's most influential corporations, the Boeing Company, offers an objective account of how the company developed jetliners that re-defined travel, shrank the world, and made America the international ruler of the aircraft industry.

About this title

About the Author

Eugene Rodgers has worked as an adjunct instructor in the management department of the School of Business at Virginia Commonwealth University.

From the Inside Flap

Flying High is the first investigative history of one of the world's most influential corporations, the Boeing Company. In an objective and riveting journalistic account, Eugene Rodgers tells how this giant of a company developed the jetliners that revolutionized travel, shrank the world, and made America the international ruler of the aircraft industry.

Through interviews with present and past managers, engineers, and executives, and with access to internal company documents, Rodgers has reconstructed the compelling history of an American business that started small, dodged pitfalls, and managed to evolve into a leader despite intense competition and near collapses. Founded just prior to the outbreak of World War I, Boeing and its bombers played a pivotal role in World War II, but the company suffered in peacetime due to lack of contracts and only narrowly survived. After Boeing's creation in the 1950s of the first practical jetliner, the 707, the company led the burgeoning passenger-plane business. In 1965, Boeing began one of the most daring and ambitious research and development projects ever attempted by a private company: the 747. In a feat of extremely daring financing, Boeing staked its future on the model's success, came near to economic ruin because of it, and in the end pulled off an amazing triumph.

Three towering figures dominate Boeing's epic rise: its founder, Bill Boeing; president and CEO Bill Allen; and Allen's successor, "T" Wilson. Based on company archives, documents including Allen's previously unseen diaries, and interviews with top executives, Flying High chronicles Boeing's achievements, controversies, and inner workings and sheds much-needed light on one of the only American industries that still dominate the world.

"How Boeing became the winner-take-all survivor in the decades-long struggle for American airplane manufacturing supremacy is a good story, and...Eugene Rodgers has told it well."--The Washington Post

"The best company history to date...Flying High provides a much broader glimpse of how things work inside the Boeing company and the Boeing culture than its predecessors."--The Seattle Times

"Telling [Boeing's] story afresh isn't especially easy when the few warts are widely known. That's where Eugene Rodgers' fluid style and narrative ease come in; he tells his story well in Flying High."--USA Today

"The Boeing company's story is an exciting chapter in aviation history. Eugene Rodgers's account is well crafted, catching the drama and personalities of a great American enterprise."--Dr. Charles D. Bright

"Flying High belongs on the short list of superb investigations of the aviation and airliner industries. It is required reading for anyone interested in the ways large, dominant corporations in these industries operate and the nature of the relationships between such businesses and governments in the increasingly complex business environment."--Robert Sobel, Lawrence Stessin Professor of Business History, Hofstra University

"A broad and fascinating look at aviation's most prolific aircraft builder."--Airliners

"This is one of the relative handful of aircraft books that are literally difficult to put down. Roberts has the talent of making an informal business history more than merely palatable--he brings Boeing and its people to life, without losing the flow of the overall story, warts and all."--Airways: A Global Review of Commercial Flight

Eugene Rodgers is the author of Beyond the Barrier: The Story of Byrd's First Expedition to Antarctica. He has worked as an adjunct instructor in the management department of the School of Business at Virginia Commonwealth University, and he lives with his wife in Midlothian, Virginia.

Reviews

Rodgers offers this book as an antidote to Robert Serling's Legend and Legacy, which he asserts was Boeing-funded. He covers Boeing's history from its founding just before WWI to the present day. His research is thorough, though the book would have been more readable had he remembered to forget many of the details. Cliches needlessly elongate sentences, as when we're told that a particular deal was done at "cherry blossom time, the most glorious part of the year along the Potomac." Some of the language strikes an incredulous chord: "Boeing was already involved in the ruthless world of Washington, where the only principles held sacred seem to belong to the world of Machiavelli." The engineering of the different aircraft, the competition, the personalities of the executives and the union disputes are all chronicled. Rodgers (Beyond the Barrier) adds a poignant coda to each chapter by incorporating the personal stories of two workers, explaining how the particular events described affected these men.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An evenhanded and informative history of Boeing, the American airframe manufacturer that bestrides the world of civil aviation like a colossus. Drawing on a variety of sources, Rodgers (Beyond the Barrier, 1990) offers a lively, anecdotal account of the plane maker's dicey transformation from a fly-by-night operation in the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest into the Global Village's leading supplier of jetliners. The name Boeing evokes not only images of the 707 and 747 transports that revolutionized air travel but also memories of WW II's workhorse B-17 and the Cold War's B-52 bomber. Without altogether scanting the Seattle-based concern's considerable accomplishments as an aerospace and Pentagon contractor, however, the author focuses on how experience gained on military projects has helped Boeing best any number of rivals (Airbus Industrie, Convair, de Havilland, Douglas, Fokker, Lockheed, et al.) in the invariably intense and seemingly endless competition to furnish commercial carriers with moneymaking aircraft. In addition to detailing the substantive risks run by the company (which turned 80 this year) in getting breakthrough designs from the drawing board to flight line, Rodgers addresses Boeing's frequently rancorous labor relations as well as its typically arrogant management style, vulnerability to economic cycles, and jarring brushes with scandal (notably, the illicit procurement of classified defense documents and payoffs made to foreign customers). Also covered are the visionary executives, engineering wizards, and lesser lights who over the years made Boeing what it is today. An astute and independent observer's engrossing (albeit unsparing) perspectives on one of the 20th century's genuinely consequential enterprises. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0871136554
• ISBN 13: 9780871136558
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 502