Boeing Launches

seven thirty seven Max aircraft. So far, it's resulted in two fatal accidents in less than half a year, which led to the entire fleet of seven thirty seven Max aircraft being grounded across the world, while lots of people are looking into it and figuring out how to fix things and how to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future. Now, in a subsequent episode, I'll look into that specific problem more closely, because obviously it is very important.

A lot of people lost their lives in those tragedies. But today we're going to look at the history, the origins of Boeing and the role that the company has played in technology over the years, not just in commercial jets, but also military technology like helicopters and bombers and things like that, and missiles as well as even components for space vehicles. And the company is more than a century

old at this point. So how did it all get started? Well, we should probably begin by focusing on the founder of the company itself, William E. Boeing. William E. Bowing was born in eighteen eighty one in Detroit, Michigan, and his is not a rags to riches story. It's more like a riches to holy cow. That's a lot of money riches story. His father was Wilhelm Boeing. Uh that spelling

of Boeing is slightly different from the modern spelling. Modern spelling is b o e i n g the Anglicized spelling of Boeing, but originally it was b oh with an oombl out i n g. So. Hillhelm Boeing immigrated from Europe to the United States in eighteen sixty eight. Wilhelm himself was from a well to do family, though he did not have a fortune to his name upon arriving in the US. He had a lot of connections which helped him out. But he didn't exactly come over

to the States with pockets full of cash. He had to make his own fortune. He would meet a man named carte Ortmann, who essentially helped Wilhelm get into the lumber trade, where he would flourish and he amassed a fortune. He also got into mining during his own lifetime. The mining operations that he created weren't terribly um profitable, but they would prove to be so in the long run. It was just unfortunately after he had already passed away.

He also eventually married uh cart Portman's daughter, Marie, and they had three kids, including William E. Boeing Uh. He was born into wealth as a result, and Wilhelm would die in eight nine. He contracted influence. He actually died on a train ride back home. William Boeing was only eight years old at that time. His mother remarried and he was sent off to attend a prestigious boarding school in Switzerland. So talk about a life that I can't

really identify with at all. He would return to the States. He attended other rather exclusive prep schools before he would eventually enter Yale University, and he decided to study engineering. Now at the time, the engineering program at Yale was a three year program, but Boeing wanted to pursue his own fortune a little earlier than that, and so he draw out of university after just two years. He then decided to move to the Pacific Northwest and following his

father's footsteps and get into the lumber trade. At this point, the Michigan area was pretty heavily deforested. I mean there's still had plenty of forests, but the lumber industry had really operated for quite some time there, so he decided the Pacific Northwest was the next prime real estate for the lumber industry. Boeing's company, the Greenwood Timber Company, proved to be very successful, and by now it was the

early nineteen hundreds. Around nineteen ten, William E. Boeing would attend an air show near Los Angeles, California, and he got a look at early airplanes. Now keep in mind this is nineteen ten. The Right brothers had their successful flights just in nineteen o three, so very early days

for aviation. William Boeing was immediately interested in airplanes and aviation, and he even tried to arrange for a ride in an airplane, but found that none of the pilots were particularly willing to provide one, and so it would go until about nineteen fourteen. That's when William Boeing met another person named George Conrad Westerveldt. He was an officer in the U. S. Navy who also had a fascination with aircraft and had been stationed over on the West Coast.

The two men became close friends. They shared a lot of common interests together, and in nineteen fifteen they met an aviator named Terra Mahoney and he was happy to have them aboard his Curtis seaplane and he gave them some flights around and that just cemented their interest in aviation. Boeing decided to officially enroll in flight school in nineteen fifteen in Los Angeles, California. He completed his training, and then he decided to, you know, treat himself the only

the way that that multi millionaire types can. He bought his own airplane. There was a model t a seaplane, and essentially this was a type of training aircraft. To be fair, there weren't a whole lot of different varieties in nineteen fifteen. There's still very early days for aircraft. He did not exactly fall in love with this airplane as soon as he purchased the aircraft, he had to pay for a replacement pontoon. This seaplane had a single pontoon upon which it would land, as opposed to the

dual pontoons you often see with seaplanes. He hired on a crew to maintain the plane, but he didn't own it for very long before it had an accident and got partially wrecked. In the fall of nineteen fifteen, it crashed into Lake Washington. Boeing was not aboard the plane at the time, so he wasn't piloting the aircraft or anything, so he was not injured in this, but the aircraft itself was damaged, and Boeing was just largely unimpressed with

the performance of the aircraft. He became convinced he could help design a superior airplane. Now, around that same time, there were more than a dozen fledgling companies that were trying to design and build aircraft, but I don't mean to suggest there were a lot of actual aircraft being

produced as a result. In fact, in nineteen fourteen, there were fewer than fifty planes manufactured by all of these companies put together, and at this point there were no real practical applications for planes, so there wasn't much call for making more of them. They were mostly seen as playthings for wealthy hobbyists who were otherwise pretty bored with life.

So if you had a lot of money and you didn't have a whole lot of concern for your own personal safety, you might try to start building aircraft or buying one. So a lot of those companies were founded by people who weren't that different from William Boeing himself. Though at least Boeing had had some engineering training under his belt, some of the people who founded some of

these early airplane companies didn't even have that. Boeing reached out to Westervelt to help him with the design, and they also hired on a mechanic and pilot named Herb Munter as well. Westervelt secured time with a wind tunnel that was operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or m i T, and they tested their various designs. They would bring wooden models to test in the wind tunnels and take very careful measurements of how well those designs

were doing. These were not full scale replicas, but you know, small scale wooden ones. Ultimately, Westerveldt designed a plane that didn't look that much different from the Model T A C plane that Boeing had purchased in the past. There were some important differences, So the Model T A had that single pontoon on it, but the new aircraft would actually have two pontoons to help with stability. But in many other ways, it was a fairly close copy of

that T A airplane. They called this first plane that they built the Blue Bill, and they put it through a test flight on June fift nineteen sixteen. It was a success. It actually did very well on that test flight, and it would become the basis for the company's first aircraft, which became known as the BMW Model one B and

W stood for Boeing and Westerveldt. Of course. One month after that test flight, on July nineteen sixteen, William Boeing filed articles of incorporation for a new company called the Pacific Aero Products Company. Those articles of incorporation were rather vague, no telling if it was purposeful or not, but it would end up being a huge help to the company

a little later on. I'll explain more in a bit, but this is the company that would ultimately become bowing and why Boeing The company traces their history back to nineteen sixteen. Officially, the company would change its name a little less than a year after it had formed, and it became the Boeing Airplane Company in May nineteen seventeen. But we've got a little bit more to talk about before we get to nineteen seventeen. So Westerveldt would not

stay on. He couldn't. He was actually transferred back to the East Coast. So he had this sort of end his official business relationship with Boeing. However, he would remain important to the company. He would refer talent from the East Coast to go and work for his friends company out west, and one of those referrals was a man named Wong Sue, who would become known as the first actual engineer on Boeing's staff, and some would even call him the father of Boeing because of his influence in

those early early days. So Wang Sue was born in Beijing, China, in eighteen ninety three. When he was only twelve years old, the Manchu government would select him to become a navy cadet at the Young Thai Naval Academy. When he was sixteen, the government sent him to study naval architecture and engineering in England at Armstrong Technical College. Then he had the opportunity to attend m I T and study their brand new courses in aeronautical engineering. It was the first of

such programs in the United States. He expressed a desire to stay in the US for a couple of years beyond his graduation in order to get some practical experience designing and building aircraft before returning to China. When Westervelt was looking for someone to send over to Boeing, Wong's instructor at m I T, the guy who actually created this aeronautical engineering UH program at M I T, a guy named Jerome Huntsucker amediately said that Wong was the

right candidate. He would play an important part in Boeing's early successes. So the original Boeing factory back west was a boat house that wasn't too far from Seattle, Washington on the Duomish River. And by the way, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing and butchering names, and I will continue to do so throughout this episode, and my deepest apologies for that. That is a failing on my part. Well, William Boeing had some interesting ideas about creating incentives for employees his engineers.

He said, well, you know what if you are designing a plane, if you're building a plane, you also can fly it. You're allowed to fly the planes that you're building.

So they weren't just the engineers and manufacturers, they were the test pilots as well, and Wong would get to construct planes for Boeing and get to fly them if you wanted to the first plane, Wong would have a hand in designing, and really the main one was the Model C, which was ready for its first test flight on uh November five, nineteen sixteen, which was just a few months after the BMW test flights. So one thing that really struck me as I was doing research for

this episode was how close together some of these dates are. Like, it's amazing to me. The thought of putting together a prototype aircraft and then flying it, and then going right into the design and production of a different prototype aircraft right away and being able to do it within a month. It's phenomenal to me. Now. Granted, in these days these aircraft were made out of canvas and wood, that would be a while before they would switch over to metals

like aluminum. But still, and you know, they were also in lumber country up in the Pacific Northwest. They had no shortage of that, and and of course Boeing himself operated a lumber uh company, so that helped as well. But still, it's pretty amazing to me. Anyway, the BMW had showed that Boeing could make a working aircraft, but it had very little application outside of that wealthy obbyist market, which, as you might imagine, was a pretty limited slice of

the population. The Model C would prove to be much more versatile, and it was helped in no small part by the fact that over in Europe the Great War what we would later call World War One, was raging and it was only a matter of time before the

United States was pulled into it. So the aircraft that flew on November five, nineteen sixteen was called d C four, and that was because it was the fourth airplane that William Boeing ever owned, and Wong would redesign the Model C, giving it a bigger rudder, among other changes, and this redesign Model C was ready by April nineteen seventeen. That was the same month that President Woodrow Wilson would declare war on Germany, putting the United States into World War One.

As for Wong, he received the princely sum of fifty dollars and seventy seven cents for his work as an engineer and then was released from Boeing the company, that is, on May twenty, nineteen seventeen. He returned to China and

he established the first Chinese airplane factory there. So, while we're talking about money, this fifty dollars and seventy seven cents that Wong earned for all his work with the Boeing Company, let's talk a little bit about how much the Boeing Company earned from a contract they made with the United States Navy during World War One. The Navy wanted proof that the Model C would meet its needs, and they asked for a demonstration at a naval base

in Pensacola, Florida. Now, for those of you not familiar with US geography, Pensacola, Florida is pretty darn far away from Seattle, Washington. The two locations are on opposite sides of the country. Seattle, Washington's in the northwest, Pensacola, Florida's in the southeast. And the United States is really wide. Well. This presented something of a challenge because the Mode SEE

aircraft had a fairly short range of flight. These early airplanes could not go that far, so in order to get to this demonstration, Boeing actually had to pack a couple of planes up in pieces disassembled on a train

an urban munter. The mechanic and pilot I mentioned a little bit Ago, as well as a factory superintendent named Claude Berlin, would travel with these disassembled planes across the country on train, arriving at Pensacola and then assembling them again so that they could be flown on behalf of the Navy so that they could evaluate the aircraft. Now. The flight test was a huge success, and the Navy

put in an order for fifty Model c's. The price tag for those fifty planes was five hundred seventy five thousand dollars, so quite a bit more cheddar than Mr Wong had earned. The Boeing company would build a new manufacturing facility near Seattle nicknamed the Red Barn, and the Navy would also order a couple of other special aircraft on top of these fifty Model cs. They wanted a couple of modified models c's sometimes referred to as E A s of e A standing for experimental aircraft, and

these were land planes. They were meant to land on firm ground rather than on water. They also asked for another variant called the C one F, which had a single main pontoon as opposed to the pair of pontoons, as well as a couple of auxiliary floats to add stability. And that was the beginning of some pretty lush days for Boeing. But when we come back, I'll talk about another industry that opened up real opportunities for Boeing beyond

the military. But first let's take a quick break. You know, it's got to be pretty weird to have a business really take off, because whatever it is that you happen to be making is really important for war efforts, because your profitability is dependent upon violent struggles in which millions of lives are potentially at stake. And moreover, it creates an odd situation which you might on some level wish for continued hostilities because that means you stay in business.

It's pretty dark. In fact, the Boeing Airplane Company was almost completely dependent upon military contracts. In addition, to the model C aircraft they were making for the Navy. They also secured a contract to build another company's aircraft. This would be the Curtis H S two L from the

Curtis Aeroplane Company. The Navy would use these types of aircraft on anti submarine patrols off the coast of France, and the Navy anticipated a greater need than what Curtis could produce in its own manufacturing facilities, so Boeing landed what would have been a pretty lucrative contract to create licensed versions of the same aircraft. So Bowing didn't design this aircraft. They were working from a Curtis design uh and they would get a certain amount of money for

producing these aircraft. However, before Boeing could really get moving on this production, World War One came to an end and the Navy canceled the order for those HS two L planes. At that point, Boeing employed three seven people, but the contract with the military was seen as a really pivotal contract for the company's survival. It was important because there weren't really any other streams of revenue coming

in that were reliable. So William Bowing first loaned some of his own money to the Boeing Company for the purposes of meeting payroll, because they weren't bringing in enough revenue to pay everybody. Even so, the demand for aircraft plummeted once the war was over, and Boeing had little choice but to scale back the airplane company. They reduced

it down to sixty seven employees by nineteen nineteen. But Boeing had another application for aircraft early on that wasn't dependent upon military actions, and it wasn't commercial flights either, because those were still several years away. Instead, it was delivering the mail, or at least the potential for that.

On March third, nine, nineteen, William Boeing himself co piloted a plane that was designated the Sea seven hundred, so another variant of the Model C. It was to carry mail from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to Seattle, Washington, and technically it was the first international airmail delivery to the United States. I think it was something like sixty letters or packages, so it wasn't a whole lot, and it

wasn't exactly a total success. Boeing and his co pilot, a guy named Eddie Hubbard, were forced to land prematurely. They landed about twenty five miles north of Seattle, because again these aircraft weren't really capable of taking very long flights and they were running very low on fuel. But it was a sort of proof of concept for air delivery and would help establish the practice in earnest. Later on, the Post Office would take full control of that for

quite a few years. Now, there was a real danger of Boeing going out of business in these early years. Not only did the contracts with the military dry up, but the country was also entering into an economic depression. This wasn't the Great depression that would come on a little bit later, but it was an economic depression and there was very little call for aircraft. So to keep the factories in operation, the company began to produce other stuff.

This was partly possible because, as I mentioned earlier, when William Boeing was first incorporating his business, his articles of incorporation were pretty darned vague, So his company was allowed to make lots of different stuff, and he dedicated factories to build whatever was in demand, like furniture, So you could have ended up with a dining table created by

aeronautical engineers possibly. The company also had a contract to provide maintenance and service to military aircraft, which helped a little, and Boeing would land another big military contract. This time, the agreement involved the design and construction of twenty g A one and twenty g A two bombers. Now, these were also aircraft that weren't designed by Bowing. These were designed by the New Army Air Service, and Boeing would just act as the producer of those aircraft. The manufacturer

of those aircraft. The company got to work, but the Army canceled the contract after ten g A one bombers and three g A two bombers were complete. However, the Army also chose Boeing to build two hundred MB three aircraft, and the NB three were fighter planes, also not designed by Boeing. They were created by a different company called Thomas Morse. So why did Boeing end up with the

contract to build this other company's planes. It's because William Boeing was incredibly aggressive when bidding for contracts, and Boeing came in with the lowest bid at one point four million dollars for two d aircraft, and so the government said, you win, you get to build them. Meanwhile, there was still a need to find civilian uses for airplanes. Eddie Hubbard would convince William Bowing to make a sincere push

for air carrier operations, so airmail. Essentially, those were the guys who had made history back in with what had been at the time mostly a proof of concept airmail run, but Hubbard felt that it was a possible legitimate avenue and a source for revenue for the company outside of military contracts. At the time, the United States Post Office was operating all of its own aircraft for air mail delivery.

The aircraft in question was a clunky beast called the d H four, and it wasn't a particularly agile for more importantly safe aircraft. The Post Office initially hired forty pilots to deliver airmail by and this is a sobering fact, thirty one of those forty pilots had died in plane crashes. So the Post Office sought for a new, more reliable, and more maneuverable plane to take over the job of the d H four, which obviously was not not performing

up to standards. It was far too dangerous. Boeing proposed a new design. They called it the Model forty A. One of the most important components of this particular aircraft was that it would use a totally different kind of engine from previous aircraft. So engines can get really hot and airplane engines like the d H four relied on water cooling, but that meant the airplane would have to carry a tank of water in addition to everything else

in order to keep the engine cool. Water is heavy, and the slashing of water can make it hard to fly a plane steady. The Model forty A instead had an air cooled engine designed by a company called Pratt and Whitney, which was essentially part of the Boeing family. As the name implies, these engines manage heat by dissipating it into the air, typically through a finned surface. The finned surface increases surface area and thus increases air cooling efficiency.

In addition to the opportunity to build air mail aircraft, Boeing also had the chance to bid for actual airmail routes see the Post Office. Would open up this possibility because the US government passed a piece of legislation called the Contract air Mail Act, and that did pretty much what the name suggests. It gave private come and E's the opportunity to bid on airmail routes on a contract basis, and there were lots of different private companies that could

do this. There are a lot of companies that were operating very small regional aircraft services. So Hubbard would convince Boeing to go after one of these routes, this being a big one between San Francisco and Chicago. Boeing once again got really aggressive with his bidding for that particular contract. In fact, his bidding was almost too aggressive. The Post Office very nearly disregarded Boeing's bid because they considered it

too low to actually be serious. It was much much lower than the main competitor for that contract, that was a company called Western air Express. Bowing used his political connections to reach out to Wesley Jones, who was a Senator from Washington State, in order for Jones to reach out to the Postmaster General and reassure the Postmaster General that Bowing, both the man and the company was serious and that the company was completely capable of doing the

job at the quoted price. Even so, Boeing was compelled to put his money where his mouth is. He had to post an eight hundred thousand dollar bond to guarantee his company would actually live up to its contractual obligations. I guess you got to spend money to make money with the ink drying on that contract. Boeing also reached out to Pratt and Whitney with an order of twenty five of those air cooled engines, and William Boeing would

form a subsidiary company called Boeing Air Transport. It officially went into business on July one, nineteen twenty seven. The contract would give Boeing the stability it needed to continue

to grow. In addition, Charles Lindbergh made history by flying across the Atlantic Ocean in nineteen twenty seven, which prompted renewed interest in aviation, and the stock market was performing well right at that time, so bowing the company went public in n in an effort to raise more money through a stock offering that also began to offer out the opportunity for passengers to fly on aircraft. Now, this was not exactly luxury travel, nor was it a big

commercial jet or anything along those lines. Boeing altered a few of its Model forty A aircraft, the ones that were being used for airmail, and these altered aircraft had two whole extra seats in them, so you had the pilot and co pilot seats, and then you had two passenger seats, so passengers could book one of two seats and travel with all the airmail to a specific route. Air travel for passengers was in its infancy and Boeing

was a dominant player in that space. It was a small space, but Bowing had carved out a pretty significant portion of that pie. Uh The estimate was that Boeing was handling about of all passenger and airmail travel in the United States at this time, and William Boeing wanted to bring his subsidiaries altogether and unify them under a

single holding company. And this was in an effort to remain competitive against other growing companies, and it led to the foundation of what was called the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, which was formed in nineteen twenty nine. It was essentially an umbrella company for the new Boeing air Transport Company, the older Boeing Airplane company, Pratt and Whitney, that engine manufacturing company I talked about a second ago, and some other smaller companies that Boeing had kind of

acquired along the way. In nineteen thirty the United States Congress passed the air Mail Act in an effort to improve air mail service across the United States and to encourage the development of commercial air travel for passengers. As part of that strategy, companies like Boeing would be allowed to make use of the infrastructure that the United States Post Office had established when it first built out airmail routes, so all those air travel booy's and things of that

nature these companies were allowed to use. The Postmaster General, a guy named Walter Brown, thought the best way to improve airmail service was to rely almost exclusively on larger air carrier companies, and he put criteria in place that only the big companies could actually meet, and it ended up pushing out a lot of smaller, independent companies that had been doing these routes up to that point. And more importantly, some of those smaller companies had been doing

this at more competitive bids than the bigger companies. So a reporter investigated this matter in nineteen thirty three and discovered that the Postmaster General had met with a few select large companies like Boeing's parent company, and essentially divvied up the nation's airmail routes between a select few big companies, leaving out these smaller ones, even the smaller ones that

were posting more competitive bids. This prompted a full on investigation into the matter by Congress, and ultimately the investigation found that Brown technically didn't do anything against the laws, so the Postmaster General didn't technically do anything illegal, but it seemed like it was unethical, and so Congress ended up putting pressure on the airplane companies as well as on President Franklin Roosevelt to make something happen to change things.

So Roosevelt initially ordered that all air mail service should fall exclusively under the auspices of the Army Air Corps in ntour, and that the Army Air Corps was to take over immediately and provide that service, which ended up being a disaster. Twelve pilots would die in crashes within the first two months of this change, which of course prompted the President to reverse this decision and flip it

back so that private companies would provide airmail service. However, Hugo Black, who was the the politician who had actually overseen the congressional investigation into the whole mess earlier would offer a new piece of legislation called the Airmail Act of nineteen thirty four, and that prohibited companies from operating as both an airplane manufacturer and an airmail carrier. You could do one or the other, but you couldn't do both.

You could not be both an airmail carrier and build airplanes. And the big companies that have been part of the cozy relationship a couple of years earlier were expressly forbidden from getting airmail contracts. So those same big companies that the Postmaster General had met with in just a you know, a few years earlier, were they were out of luck. So in response, United Aircraft and Transport would break apart

into three separate companies. There were two manufacturing companies. There's the Boeing Airplane Company that's the one we're gonna stick with, that's still bowing that oversaw manufacturing operations west of the Mississippi. There was United Aircraft that was a manufacturing company that had its factories east of the Mississippi. And then you had a third company that would actually act as an air transportation company for cargo and for passengers that would

become United Airlines. So I could talk all about United Aircraft, United Airlines, but that's for a totally different show. So when we come back, I'll talk more about the history of Boeing, starting with the departure of its founder. But first let's take another quick break, all right, So we're

up to nineteen thirty four. The holding company that had only been around for a few years had to break up into three different companies, and William Boeing, who did not take this terribly well, was fed up with everything he had to give testimony during that congressional investigation, and during that process he felt he was being somewhat unfairly targeted he and his company, so he chose to retire.

He was fifty three years old. He divested all of his stock in the company in the process of retiring, and this really wasn't too far off from what his established plan had been, because he had frequently spoken of determining that he was going to retire by the time he was fifty, So he actually stuck around a little longer than his original intention happened to be. So it wasn't so much that he retired early. He actually retired late. If you take him at his word from his previous statements.

Now I'm only going to focus on Boeing in your plane from this point forward, because, as I said, the other companies would require their own episodes. It would just make this far too long. Boeing the man leaves Boeing the company in clairemont Claire, act VET. And I know I've butchered that last name. It's E G T V E D T. It's a Norwegian name and I cannot pronounce Norwegian words to save my life. Anyway, he became the new chairman of Boeing. He had been working for

the company since nineteen twenty. He started as a draftsman and designer. He rose to the position of chief engineer, became a vice president, and then would become the successor to William Boeing. And he also would play an important role in bringing the company to new heights. And yes that was a pun. See Another thing happened in that was really important to Boeing, and that's the the Army Air Corps had issued a specification sort of a request for proposal for the design of a long range heavy

bomber aircraft. And by long range, we're talking five thousand miles of a range that's a heck of a distance to travel. So Lair pursued this opportunity. He submitted a bid that landed the company the chance to design a bomber of this type, and the prototype was called the

x B fifteen. Initially, Boeing was competing against the Glen L. Martin Company, which today is actually part of Lockheed, but the Martin design never got to the prototype phase it was it was canceled while it was still an idea on paper. And the XB fifteen was quite a beast. It had four engines. Most bombers at the time only

had two engines. It measured more than eighty seven and a half feet long or twenty six point seven meters, had a wingspan of nearly one fifty feet or nearly forty five and a half meters when it was empty

without any bombs or anything like that. It weighed nearly thirty eight thousand pounds or more than seventeen thousand kilograms, and its top speed it could travel one dred ninety seven miles per hour or three D seventeen kilometers per hour, so it wasn't a speed demon, and that meant that a five thousand mile trip would take more than thirty hours to complete, so you would actually have multiple crews

on one aircraft and they would operate in shifts. The bomber actually had sleeping quarters aboard it and so big it was at bunks that people could sleep in. The aircraft also featured an autopilot mode, which was pretty revolutionary at the time. It also had independent gasoline fueled electrical generators to act as auxiliary power units. So it was a really impressive aircraft and while the military would take possession of the prototype, it would not order more to

be made. However, Boeing would incorporate much of that aircraft's designs into the next big project, known internally as Model TO, but it would be known to the rest of the world by the designation BE seventeen Flying for Trip. This was another response to an Army Air Corps specification. This one was searching for a long range bomber that could fly at high altitudes far above anti aircraft artillery range

and also be used during daytime bombing runs. It had to travel at least two hundred miles per hour at top speed to meet specifications. Also had to be capable of flying for ten hours at least, so Boeing would go into competition with two other companies. Glenn Martin was one of them, and the Douglas Aircraft Company was the other, and this sort of flyoff competition would happen in nineteen

thirty five. Boeing's aircraft exceeded the specifications. It could travel at a top speed of two hundred eighty seven miles per hour with an average cruising speed of more than two hundred fifty miles per hour, so it was plenty fast enough according to the specifications. It was also heavily armed. Uh the initial designs had five thirty caliber machine guns and a capability of holding up to forty hundred pounds

or twenty ms of bombs. The flyoff competition went incredibly well for Boeing, and the Army Air Corps put in an initial order of sixty five of the aircraft and nearly a hundred thousand dollars each, which amounted to about two million dollars per plane in today's money. However, a disaster nearly made all of that moot on October. This is still before the whole competition is over. Boeing has already received an initial preliminary order for those sixty five

aircraft well on that day. On October, Boeing employee Less Tower and an Army Air Corps pilot named Major Player Peter Hill were to take the prototype for another test flight. But the control surfaces on the test the prototype aircraft. Those would be the surfaces that can move in relation to the aircraft to control things like steering, pitch, yaw and roll. If you've ever looked at an airplane's wing and you've seen a little flap that can go up

or down, that's the sort of control service we're talking about. Anyway, they were all locked down and what was called gust lock mode gust as in gust of wind. This was to prevent those surfaces from being damaged by winds when the aircraft was actually on the ground. Proper operating procedure would include the ground crew disengaging the gust locks before the aircraft would be allowed to taxi and then take off. That would allow the pilot to have full control of

the aircraft in flight. Tragically, that step was not done on October, so the gust locks were still in place when they took the aircraft up and as it was climbing, the aircraft stalled it went into a dive and Tower and Hill could not control the plane and the plane would crash. It kill both pilots and it injured several people on the ground. The crash meant the aircraft could not complete the full competition and the Air Corps would cancel the order of sixty five B seventeens. Instead, they

opted to order the Douglas B eighteen Bolow aircraft. It might have all ended there, but the Air Corps personnel were so impressed by Boeing's performance that through some maneuvering, the next year they were able to place an order for thirteen B seventeens. This would be in November nineteen thirty six. These would be just the first B seventeens

that Boeing would deliver to the US military. Over the next several years, orders would continue to come in for more, and for the first few years it was usually fewer than forty aircraft per year, but then the United States would enter into World War Two. But then the U s would enter into World War two and Boeing would have to step up production significantly. In total, the company would manufacture are nearly thirteen thousand B seventeen bombers is

around twelve thousand, seven hundred or so. There were so many orders that Boeing would be in a new position. It would license out the aircraft designed to other manufacturers like Lockheed, Vega and Douglas. So similar to what Boeing itself had done in the past, now it was licensing, licensing out its own designs, and the design would actually evolve over time too. It wasn't like the B seventeen

was designed, and that's exactly how it was made. From that point forward, the thirty caliber machine guns would be replaced by fifty caliber versions. At turrets were in the upper fuselage, the belly, and the tail of the aircraft. The B seventeen G variant, which entered into service in nineteen forty three, had thirteen fifty caliber machine guns. It

was pretty intimidating. The Army Air Corps also had developed a strategy in which nine or twelve aircraft would fly together in what was called a box formation, sometimes called a staggered formation, which was a pretty daunting site. Even so, the B seventeens needed fighter pilot escorts. They could not just operate without any sort of fighter pilots around them because while they could suffer an impressive amount of damage and remain operational if they didn't have more maneuverable aircraft

supporting them, they were very vulnerable to enemy fighters. By the way, despite the fact that there were thousands of these things made, the B seventeen was not the most produced bomber. That honor would actually go to the consolidated Aircraft B twenty four Liberator. But the B seventeen would be the most prolific US bomber in World War Two. It dropped more bombs than any other US aircraft, which is a dubious honor, to be sure, but one that

spoke to Boeing's design. Now, in our next episode, I'm going to continue the story of Boeing and now the B seventeen set the stage for an even larger and much more expensive aircraft, the B twenty nine super Fortress. I'll also talk about Boeing's contribution to commercial aircraft and the space race. But for now it's time to sign off.

So in our next episode will continue our story. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff, you can let me know by sending an email the addresses Tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop on over to our website that's text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our past shows. There, you'll find links to where we are on social media. You'll also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make

goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H