Legend & Legacy: The Story of Boeing and Its People - Hardcover

Aviation buffs probably will revel in this thoroughgoing chronicle of Boeing Co., but the relentlessly upbeat text provides nonenthusiasts with appreciably more detail than they're likely to want. Serling, a novelist (Something's Alive on the Titanic, 1990, etc.) and journalist (Eagle, 1985, etc.), offers a lively, anecdotal account of the plane-maker and how it grew from a small outfit in the Pacific Northwest backwoods into the world's leading supplier of commercial jetliners. The name Boeing evokes images of WW II's B-17 and B-29 bombers as well as of the 707 and 747 transports that revolutionized air travel. As Serling makes clear, though, the company (which turned 75 last July) is a force to be reckoned with in other markets. Among other achievements, it built the first stage of the Saturn rocket that started us on the way to the moon; developed the Minuteman missile system; and is designing America's space station. In less affluent times, the author recounts, Boeing produced such offbeat goods as boats, furniture, low-income housing, railroad cars--and milk (from a corporate herd of cows). For all its vaunted engineering and organizational skills, though, the company has been a consistent failure at diversification. But memories of the ill-starred ventures and of the colorful characters (including a salesman tempted to swap a used 727 for $12 million worth of new underwear) who helped create a multinational colossus afford welcome respites from the author's preternatural fascination with the technological minutiae of almost every Boeing plane or system ever built. Troubling as well are his short-shrift, exculpatory accounts of the company's recent brushes with scandal--in particular, payoffs made to foreign customers, and Pentagon overcharges. An exhaustive log that may strike some as merely exhausting. (Sixteen pages of photos.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Strategic B-17 and B-29 bombers of WW II; Cold War B-52s and Minuteman missiles; moon vehicles, space modules and the jumbo jets that made air travel commonplace--these are some of the aircraft highlighted in this revealing profile of Washington State's Boeing company by aviation writer Serling ( The President's Plane Is Missing ). Of even greater interest are the personalities--the executives, engineers, designers, skilled workers, union leaders, financiers, government regulators, and airline figures like Lindbergh, Trippe and Rickenbacker--who have played roles in the production of today's airliner, with its 4.5 million parts. Two futuristic items in this gripping industrial epic stand out: Boeing's early planning for flights to Mars in the next century and current computerized construction-planning programs, which may avert the kind of aircraft flaws that are currently discovered only in fatal accidents. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.