The swoosh on Boeing’s logo

Look closely at the Boeing logo and you will see a globe circled by a swoosh. It is not a Boeing design. It is the McDonnell Douglas emblem, folded into the winner’s identity after the two companies merged in 1997, and it is itself a tribute: the circling line recalls the first aerial circumnavigation of the world, flown in 1924 by Douglas aircraft. So the most famous logo in aerospace carries, quietly, the memory of a company that no longer exists. For thirty years, McDonnell Douglas built some of the most important aircraft of the Cold War — and then, almost overnight, it was gone.

Two Scots from MIT

The company was a marriage of two men with uncannily similar lives. James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas were both of Scottish ancestry, both graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and both alumni of the Glenn L. Martin Company. By the mid-1960s their firms needed each other. McDonnell in St. Louis lived almost entirely on military orders; Douglas in Long Beach was drowning in the cost of the DC-8 and DC-9, its jets nine to eighteen months behind schedule and estimated to be less than a year from bankruptcy. McDonnell bought 1.5 million Douglas shares to keep it afloat, and on 28 April 1967 the two became one.

The fighter factory

St. Louis supplied the swagger. The F-4 Phantom II, already in production when the merger came, ran to 5,195 aircraft and set 16 world records; it remains the only type flown by both the US Air Force Thunderbirds and the US Navy Blue Angels. Its successor, the F-15 Eagle, first flew in 1972 with engines whose combined thrust exceeded the weight of the loaded aircraft, and it built a combat record of 104 air-to-air victories without a loss. Then came the F/A-18 Hornet, reworked from Northrop’s YF-17 after the Navy rejected a naval F-16, which replaced the Blue Angels’ Skyhawks in November 1986.

A trijet with a bad door

Long Beach had a harder time. The DC-10 trijet, first flown in August 1970, carried a flaw in its outward-opening cargo door. In March 1974 a door blew out on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 near Paris, killing all 346 aboard — at the time the deadliest air crash in history. In May 1979 American Airlines Flight 191 lost an engine on take-off from Chicago, the deadliest accident in US history, and the FAA briefly banned DC-10s from American airspace. Orders collapsed. Salvation came from the old DC-9, stretched into the MD-80 “Super 80”: 1,191 were built, some of them assembled under licence in Shanghai from 1986.

Helicopters, space stations and pharmacies

McDonnell Douglas was never only an aircraft maker. In 1984 it paid $470 million for Hughes Helicopters, and with it the AH-64 Apache, which went on to become its most successful helicopter. Its engineers turned a spare Saturn V third stage into Skylab, America’s first space station, launched in May 1973. It built Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles and the Delta II rocket, and tested the DC-X, a vertical-landing reusable rocket, in 1993. Strangest of all, its McAuto computing arm drifted into medical claims, and a 1986 partnership gave birth to Express Scripts, the pharmacy-benefits giant.

Time to quit and move to Seattle

The end of the Cold War hit hard. In January 1991 Defense Secretary Dick Cheney cancelled the A-12 Avenger II stealth bomber that McDonnell Douglas was developing with General Dynamics, a fight over the money that lasted until a settlement in 2014. The workforce shrank from 132,500 in mid-1990 to about 87,400 by the end of 1992. A management overhaul called TQMS cut 5,000 supervisory posts at Douglas, and employees renamed it “Time to Quit and Move to Seattle”. The MD-11 missed its range targets, Singapore Airlines cancelled 20 in favour of the A340, and the double-deck MD-12 never left the brochure.

Swallowed, but not forgotten

On 15 December 1996, a month after losing the Joint Strike Fighter competition, McDonnell Douglas agreed to be bought by Boeing in a stock swap valued at $13.3 billion, each share becoming 0.65 of a Boeing share. The deal closed on 1 August 1997. Its products outlived it: the F-15 is still built as the F-15EX, the Super Hornet it designed still flies from US carriers, and the last C-17 left Long Beach in 2015. Its chief executive, Harry Stonecipher, later ran Boeing itself, and analysts still debate how much of the old McDonnell Douglas culture took over the company that bought it.

Fábricas

• St. Louis (Lambert Field) · Berkeley, Missouri — Headquarters and fighter works: F-4, F-15, F/A-18, AV-8B
• Long Beach (Douglas Aircraft division) · Long Beach, California — Airliners from DC-8 to MD-11 and the C-17; closed by Boeing after 2015
• Mesa helicopter plant · Mesa, Arizona — Former Hughes facility where the AH-64 Apache was built
• Shanghai MD-82 line · Shanghai, China — Licence assembly from kits by Shanghai Aviation Industrial Corporation from November 1986

Pessoas

• James Smith McDonnell · founder of McDonnell Aircraft; chairman and CEO 1967–1980 — Founded McDonnell Aircraft at Lambert Field on 6 July 1939
• Donald Wills Douglas Sr. · founder of Douglas Aircraft; honorary chairman — Former Martin chief engineer who founded Davis-Douglas in 1920
• David S. Lewis · president, 1967–1970 — Turned the Douglas division to positive cash flow within two years of the merger
• Sanford N. McDonnell · president 1971–1980, chairman 1980–1988 — Nephew of the founder
• John F. McDonnell · chairman, 1988–1997 — Son of the founder; chairman when the Boeing merger was agreed
• Harry Stonecipher · president and CEO, 1994–1997 — Negotiated the merger and later became Boeing’s chief executive

Recordes e pioneirismos

• F-4 Phantom II set 16 world records; five speed records stood until the F-15
• F-15 air-to-air combat record of 104 victories and no losses
• F-4 is the only aircraft flown by both the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels
• Skylab, built from a Saturn S-IVB stage, was America’s first space station, launched 14 May 1973
• MD-90 carried the largest rear-mounted engines ever used on a commercial jet