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THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF MCDONNELL DOUGLAS AIRCRAFT

From Cloudster to Boeing.

Mike Badrocke and Bill Gunston

Donald Douglas was one of the first people to gain a BSc in aeronautics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and gained valuable experience at the Glenn L. Martin Company: but it is still amazing that a man who was working from a rented room at the back of a barber shop was taken seriously by the US Navy, when he offered to design and build them a torpedo bomber!

From that moment on, Douglas Aircraft gradually became a favoured supplier to both the Army and the Navy, and in World War 2 the company produced 40,000 aircraft which was second only to North American Aviation. Military contracts have remained a huge part of McDonnell Douglas output to the present day, through the Skyhawk, Voodoo, Eagle, the F-4 Phantom - all 5,000 of them - the AV-8B Harrier II and the Hornet, as well as military cargo aircraft such as the Globemaster and Cargomaster, and were one of the key motivating factors in the Boeing takeover. But this is, of course, only half the story.

From the moment that TWA took a gamble on the daring, stressed-skin twin-engined DC-1 in 1933, McDonnell Douglas has been a commercial airliner builder with very few rivals. The company would go on to produce some of the best-loved aircraft ever to fly, such as the immortal DC-3. Another example of success was the DC-9. It was so successful that it almost destroyed the company! Order books were so full that the aircraft were delivered months late and over-budget, a situation which would lead directly to the McDonnell 'merger' (in fact a takeover) in 1967. Part of the interest in this book is the comparison of the parallel development of the two companies to that date. The extraordinary X-3, designed to explore flight at Mach 2, was a 1952 Douglas failure; the fighter escort XF-88 a few years before had been a McDonnell flop!

With photographs collected from sources worldwide, close technical analysis from Bill Gunston and artist Mike Badrocke's meticulous cutaway drawings presented to the best effect on fold-out pages (of which there are over 30), this volume tells the complete story of one of the truly great aircraft builders with of such a variety of aircraft - the book containing over 70 examples.