Boeing Reading List
Unlike most topics that I write about, the aircraft industry is an industry that has enthusiasts: lots and lots of people are interested in following various aspects of the commercial aircraft world for fun (example: not only are there extremely accurate flight simulators, but there are also air traffic control simulators that people participate in as a group). This has pros and cons. On the one hand, it means there’s a lot of stuff written about the commercial aircraft industry. You can find books detailing the development history of almost every major commercial aircraft, for instance (would that we had this level of detailed documentation for other industries!). On the other hand, things written tend to be written by, and for, enthusiasts: they often dive very deep into various technical details (fuselage lengths, takeoff weights, landing gear structure, etc.) at the expense of any kind of broader synthesis.
As usual, these books and sources are roughly in order of how useful I found them.
The Sporty Game by John Newhouse (1982)
This is the classic book on the commercial aircraft industry and the brutal competition between the various players as they bet their companies on new aircraft development. Still a good and useful look at how the industry operates, though the players have since changed (at the time the US industry consisted of Boeing, Lockheed and Mcdonnell-Douglas, Airbus was still the young upstart, deregulation had only just begun, etc.) It’s a great and gripping read, and probably the most “readable” out of any of these books save for “Flying Blind”, but even Newhouse can’t help but get bogged down in technical minutiae in a few places.
This book is also interesting for a look at how the industry seemed to be evolving in the early 1980s. Already at the time it was obvious that Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas were on their way out, and Airbus was poised to become a great challenger to Boeing, but it wasn’t yet clear what the ultimate effects of deregulation would be, or that the industry would evolve to be focused on small-capacity aircraft like the 737 (the A320 program had not yet begun). Japan as a potential competitor to American and European aircraft producers gets a lot of coverage, and why not (they had successfully entered nearly every major manufacturing industry, after all, and were interested in building commercial aircraft).