21st Century Jet

Karl Sabbagh

"On May 15, 1995, one of the most important business stories of the decade entered its final act. For that is the date on which United Airlines took delivery of the first of a new generation of passenger aircraft... the Boeing 777." "The drama whose last act this is began more than five years earlier, when the Boeing Corporation - consistently one of the world's most successful and most admired companies - decided upon a multibillion-dollar gamble: to produce a two-engine jumbo jet that could successfully compete not only with aircraft from Airbus Industrie and McDonnell Douglas, but with its own twenty-five-year-old 747. Happily for historians of the future, and for readers in the present, they decided that each and every episode of this massive effort, including the 777's revolutionary manner of design, management, and financing, would occur under the watchful eye of Karl Sabbagh, the author of Skyscraper: The Making of a Building." "Boeing's accessibility and the author's talents make 21st-Century Jet an extraordinary business story. Or, rather, two: First is the large-scale story of an immense corporation betting its future on its ability to deliver an entirely new plane on schedule and on budget... and not just any new plane, but one designed entirely on computer and built to be "fly-by-wire" - with wings, flaps, and ailerons operated by electronic impulses, rather than by hydraulics. 21st-Century Jet is a penetrating explication of the engineering of some of the largest movable structures in the world, a book that reveals the engineering process at work - professionals sweating for weeks to remove ounces of weight from a door handle, for example - while making you feel the engineers' pride and excitement when they succeed." "But the second story is even more important: This is a book about team building... about the 777's "Working Together" management strategy and its revolutionary design-build teams, or DBTs. As a virtual management primer in coordinating the work of thousands of professionals (and in defusing their inevitable turf battles), this record of the massive effort of the DBTs - and the 777 required more than 200, each including a senior design engineer, a manufacturing supervisor, a financial manager, and (frequently and interestingly) a representative of a customer company, such as United Airlines or British Airways - makes 21st-Century Jet the business book of the year."--BOOK JACKET.