McDonnell Douglas

~ the last words ~

Two Scottish-descended MIT graduates who had both passed through the Glenn L. Martin Company put their firms together on 28 April 1967. Donald Wills Douglas had built the Douglas Aircraft Company around the DC series, and the DC-3 is the aircraft that made scheduled passenger flight pay for itself. James Smith McDonnell had built a fighter house in St. Louis with the Phantom and the Banshee. Douglas was short of cash after overcommitting on DC-9 orders, while McDonnell had cash and no commercial line to spend it on, which is most of why the merger happened at all.

The military half was outstanding for thirty years. The F-4 Phantom II ran to 5,195 airframes and flew for a dozen air forces. The F-15 Eagle arrived in 1974 and has still not been shot down in air-to-air combat. The F/A-18 followed in 1978 and the AH-64 Apache arrived in the eighties. The company also built the Harrier under license in those years, and it knew exactly how to sell to a government.

The commercial half went the other way. The DC-9 and its stretched descendants, the MD-80 and MD-90, kept the St. Louis and Long Beach lines busy through the eighties on a fuselage cross-section drawn in the early sixties. The DC-10 arrived in 1971 into a market that only needed one wide-body of its size, and Lockheed put the TriStar into the same slot at the same moment, so the two of them split a segment that could not support either. The MD-11 of 1990 undershot its own range guarantees. The MD-12 double-decker was announced in 1992 by a company that had no plausible way to fund it.

By the mid-nineties Airbus and Boeing were taking the orders and McDonnell Douglas was holding under ten percent of the market for large airliners. Boeing and McDonnell Douglas announced a merger on 15 December 1996, valued at about $13.3 billion on the previous Friday's stock price. It closed on 1 August 1997. Boeing was the surviving company and the McDonnell Douglas name came off everything, with the MD-95 rebadged as the Boeing 717 before a single one was delivered.

~ the record ~

~ the cargo door ~

The DC-10 carried its lower cargo doors outward-opening rather than plug-type, because an outward door does not eat cabin volume. An outward door also has to be held shut by latches strong enough to resist the pressure differential on their own. The latching system was designed so that a handle could be forced to the closed position, and the vent flap could show as shut, while the latches themselves had not traveled fully over center.

The failure mode was demonstrated before anyone died of it. On 12 June 1972 the rear cargo door blew off American Airlines Flight 96 over Windsor, Ontario, and the cabin floor collapsed onto the control cables running underneath it. The crew landed the aircraft with partial control. Dan Applegate, an engineer at the Convair subcontractor that built the fuselage section, had written a memorandum in 1970 saying a door failure would probably cost the aircraft. The National Transportation Safety Board recommended an airworthiness directive. What happened instead was an informal understanding between McDonnell Douglas and the FAA to fix the doors through service bulletins, which are advisory, and the fleet was not grounded.

~ ermenonville ~

TC-JAV was a DC-10-10 belonging to Türk Hava Yolları. On 3 March 1974 it left Istanbul for London by way of Paris. The Heathrow flight was full because British European Airways staff were on strike and passengers had been rebooked onto whatever was leaving. Nine minutes after taking off from Orly, at around 11,500 feet, the rear cargo door separated. The floor above it collapsed and took the control runs to the tail with it. The aircraft flew into the Ermenonville forest north of Paris. All 346 people aboard were killed. It was the deadliest air accident that had ever happened, and it held that place until Tenerife in 1977.

The locking pins on that particular door had been filed down at some point in its service life, so a door rated to hold roughly 300 pounds per square inch of pressure was being held by something nearer fifteen. That detail lets the manufacturer's version of the story put the weight on a ground handler, and it was used that way. It does not survive contact with Windsor twenty-one months earlier, or with the Applegate memorandum from 1970, or with the decision to write service bulletins instead of an airworthiness directive. The civil cases were settled out of court for something close to $100 million, with McDonnell Douglas carrying about $80 million of it.

In Turkey this is not an aviation-history footnote, it is the worst thing that ever happened to the national carrier, and the number 981 is still recognized on its own. THY had taken delivery of the aircraft a few months earlier as part of becoming a wide-body operator. The airline carried the accident for a long time afterward, through a second bad decade in the seventies and eighties, and the modern version of it was built by people who grew up with Ermenonville as the thing that had to be lived down. The American company that drew the latch merged itself out of existence twenty-three years later with none of that attached to its name.

~ who bought whom ~

Boeing was the surviving entity on paper and the buyer in every legal sense. The senior jobs went the other way. Harry Stonecipher, who had run McDonnell Douglas, became Boeing's president and chief operating officer, and a set of St. Louis executives moved into the top of the combined company with him. The finance-first, shareholder-return doctrine that McDonnell Douglas had run on came with them, and the headquarters left Seattle for Chicago in 2001, away from the factories.

Legacy Boeing people have described the result ever since as McDonnell Douglas buying Boeing with Boeing's own money. It is a bitter line and it is not literally true, but the argument behind it has been made at length in the years since the 737 MAX, by people who trace a straight path from the 1997 merger to an engineering culture that stopped being able to overrule a schedule. Whether that path holds is a live dispute. The personnel facts under it are not disputed.

~ the last DC ~

The final commercial aircraft to carry the lineage was the Boeing 717, which was the MD-95, which was a short DC-9 with new engines, which was a design first flown in 1965. The last one was delivered on 23 May 2006, thirty-nine years after the merger that created the company and nine years after that company ceased to exist. The fuselage cross-section Donald Douglas's engineers drew is still flying in Hawaii.

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