Boeing 707 Group

A History

Graham M. Simons

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781473861367
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Boeing 707 family - that includes the forerunner Model 367-80, the KC-135 series of military transports and the slightly smaller Model 720 - was the pioneer of the sweptback wing, incorporating podded engines borrowed from the B-47 military bomber. It was the aircraft that many regard as the design that really ushered in the Jet-Age.This new book from the established aviation historian Graham Simons examines the entire course of the Boeing 707s history, charting an impressive design evolution and illustrating the many ways in which the 707s legacy continues to be felt to this day. In laying the foundation for Boeing's preeminence on the words jetliner market during the 1980s and 90s, the 707 paved the way for future innovations in both civilian and military fields and Graham Simons has put together an image-packed history that records the historic and landmark milestones of this iconic aircraft type.

Chapter One

In The Beginning

The Boeing Company was founded by William E. ‘Bill’ Boeing, the son of a wealthy timber man. Boeing took up flying for his own amusement at the age of thirty-four. He became convinced that he could build a better aeroplane. He and Commander G. Conrad Westervelt, a Navy officer assigned to engineering work at a Seattle shipyard, Washington, decided to build a pair of seaplanes. By December 1915, an aircraft called the ‘B & W Seaplane’ was under construction in a hangar on the east shore of Lake Union, a large body of freshwater roughly two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide in the heart of the city. Often referred to as a floating hangar, the building was constructed above water level on piling driven offshore at the foot of Roanoake Street on the eastern shore of the lake. The impression of floating was conveyed by the sloping seaplane ramp which hid the piling from view, and was reinforced by the prevalence of houseboats and other floating buildings in the immediate area. Although used originally to house a Martin seaplane that ‘Bill’ Boeing had bought following his decision to build aircraft in partnership with Westervelt, it was constructed with the manufacture of aircraft in mind. Bluebird – some sources say it was called Bluebill - the first B & W, was completed in early 1916, marking the modest beginning of aircraft production at the Boeing Company; it flew for the first time on 29 June.

Although work on the aircraft had been in progress since 1915, Commander Westervelt did not see the fruits of his labours, having been transferred to the east coast on Navy orders before the machine made its first flight in June 1916. With the original partnership dissolved by Westervelt’s departure, and the B & W aircraft a success, corporate identity was not achieved until the Pacific Aero Products Company was incorporated on 15 July 1916 and a new airline subsidiary, Boeing Air Transport, was formed. On 26 April 1917 the name was changed to The Boeing Airplane Company - Boeing kept his office in the Hoge building in downtown Seattle, while his plant managers were at the shipyard.

The company attracted interest from the US Navy, which was becoming aware of the rapid growth of military aviation in Europe and the need for expansion of its own air arm. While the Navy did not buy either B & W, it did encourage the development of a new model designed specifically as a trainer that could be used in the anticipated expansion of the Navy flight-training programme.

Pacific Aero enlarged its engineering and manufacturing facilities and undertook the design of two new models, a seaplane that could be used for private flying as well as meeting the Navy requirements for a primary trainer and a landplane for Army requirements. After testing in Seattle, the second and third examples of the new seaplane were sent by rail to the Navy test facility at Hampton Roads, Virginia.

The lakeside hangar was not suitable, so Boeing expanded by setting up aircraft manufacturing facilities in the Heath Shipyard, a small yacht-building firm on the Duwamish River, south of Seattle, which had built the floats for the B & W, and was a company that Bill Boeing had acquired some years previously. Many of the existing buildings and much of the equipment could be used to produce aircraft parts, but additional facilities were still required.

William E ‘Bill’ Boeing (b. 1 October 1881 – d. 28 September 1956)

A large final assembly building was erected after the Navy asked Boeing to build 50 Curtiss HS-2L flying boats for the wartime programme. The Lake Union hangar was retained as a flight operations base until after the war, when it was sold.

Boeing – the Man.

William Edward Boeing (b. 1 October 1881 – d. 28 September 1956) was born in Detroit, Michigan to a wealthy German mining engineer, Wilhelm Böing and his wife Marie. His father, who arrived in the United States in 1868, was a descendant from an old and well-to-do family in Hagen-Hohenlimburg area of Germany, and had served in the German army. Wilhelm had emigrated to the USA at the age of 20, starting work as a farm labourer, but soon joined forces with Karl Ortmann, a lumberman and, ultimately, his father-in-law. Young Wilhelm bought timberland, with its mineral rights, in the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, built a large home, and became the director of Peoples Savings Bank, president of the Galvin Brass and Iron Works, and a shareholder in the Standard Life Insurance Company. He also bought land in Washington State in the area now known as Ocean Shores and timberland in the redwood forest in California.

When Wilhelm was logging in Minnesota he had difficulty running compass lines on his property, the reasons being he was logging over an iron-ore range. Fortunately, when he purchased timberlands he kept the mineral rights also. There was low-grade iron ore known as taconite near the surface, and below that lay veins of high-quality ore. Though Wilhelm did not live to see the development of those mining rights, his widow received the benefits of the mineral rights later in her life. Wilhelm Boeing died of influenza in 1890 when he was only 42 years old.

Young William was sent to school in Vevey, Switzerland, leaving after a year, continuing his schooling in public and private schools in the United States. Between 1899 and 1902, he studied at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale but did not graduate. Instead, in 1903 at age 22, William E. Boeing left college, went west, and started his new life in Grays Harbor, Washington, where he learned the logging business on his own, starting with lands he had inherited. Boeing bought more timberland, began to add to the wealth he had inherited from his family, and started to explore new frontiers by outfitting expeditions to Alaska.

He moved to Seattle in 1908 to establish the Greenwood Timber Co. His first home there was a genteel apartment-hotel on First Hill, but in 1909, he was elected a member of The Highlands, a brand-new, exclusive residential suburb in the Shoreline area north of town. In 1910, he bought the Heath Shipyard on the Duwamish River to build a yacht, named the Taconite.

Three years later Boeing asked the architecture firm of Bebb and Mendel to design his white-stucco, red-roofed mansion in The Highlands. While president of Greenwood Timber Company, Boeing, who had experimented with boat design, travelled to Seattle, where, during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, he saw a manned flying machine for the first time and became fascinated with aircraft. He soon purchased an aircraft from the Glenn L. Martin Company, and received flying lessons from Martin himself. Just as many pioneer flyers, Boeing soon crashed the aircraft. When he was told by Martin that replacement parts would not become available for months, Boeing blew up. He angrily told his US Navy friend Cdr. George Conrad Westervelt ‘…We could build a better plane ourselves and build it faster’. Westervelt agreed. They soon built and flew the B & W Seaplane, an amphibian biplane that had outstanding performance. Boeing decided to go into the aircraft business and bought an old boat works on the Duwamish River near Seattle for his factory.

In 1909, Edward Heath built a shipyard on the Duwamish River in Seattle. Heath became insolvent, and Bill Boeing, for whom Heath was building a luxurious yacht, bought the shipyard and land for ten dollars during 1917, in exchange for Boeing’s acceptance of Heath’s debts. Building 105, also known as the Red Barn, was part of the package. The Boeing Company began producing aircraft from the simple barn-like structure.

In 1921, William Boeing married Bertha Marie Potter Paschall (1891-1977). She had previously been married to Nathaniel Paschall, a real estate broker with whom she bore two sons, Nathaniel ‘Nat’ Paschall Jr. and Cranston Paschall. These two sons became Boeing’s stepsons. The couple had a son of their own, William E. Boeing Jr. The stepsons went into aviation manufacturing as a career. Nat Paschall was a sales manager for Douglas Aircraft and then McDonnell Douglas. William E. Boeing Jr. became a noted private pilot and industrial real estate developer. Bertha was the daughter of Howard Cranston Potter and Alice Kershaw Potter. Through her father, Bertha was a descendant of merchant bankers Alexander Brown of Baltimore, James Brown and Brown’s son-in-law and partner Howard Potter of New York; and through her mother, the granddaughter of Charles James Kershaw and Mary Leavenworth Kershaw, a descendant of Henry Leavenworth, a famous American soldier active in the War of 1812 and early military expeditions against the Plains Indians.

In 1926 Boeing began contracting for Air Mail postal routes, a business that made Boeing a wealthy man. His company took control of a loose-knit group of air carriers, bringing these entities together as United Air Lines Transportation Company, another Boeing subsidiary, which came to dominate air mail routes. Boeing threatened to move his companies to Los Angeles unless the local government built him a new airport, and in 1928 King County International Airport - commonly called Boeing Field - opened on Seattle’s south side.

Bill Boeing began investing most of his time into his horses in 1937. Between 1935 and 1944, William Boeing and his wife Bertha set aside a massive tract of land north of Seattle city limits for subdivision, including the future communities of Richmond Beach, Richmond Heights, Innis Arden, Blue Ridge and Shoreview.

Boeing retired from the aircraft industry. He then spent the remainder of his years in property development and thoroughbred horse breeding. In 1942 Boeing donated his Highlands Hills Mansion to the Children’s Orthopaedic Hospital and moved to the 500-acre Aldarra Farm near Fall City. The mansion was subsequently sold to raise funds for the hospital, and in 1988 was placed on both the National and Washington State Registers of Historic Places.

On 15 May 1954, he and his wife Bertha returned to The Boeing Company again for the 367-80 rollout. This time Bertha was able to use real champagne, unlike the time she was asked to launch the first Model 40A mail plane during the era of Prohibition, when no champagne was allowed on Crissy Field in San Francisco. ‘I christen thee the airplane of tomorrow, the Boeing Jet Stratoliner and Stratotanker,’ she proclaimed.

William Boeing died on 28 September 1956, just three days before his 75th birthday. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the Seattle Yacht Club, having had a heart attack aboard his yacht.

Peace breaks out – and making ends meet.

With the end of the war in November 1918, the Boeing Airplane Company, like many others building aircraft for the war effort, suffered rapid, catastrophic loss of contracts. Suddenly finding itself without work, it turned its hand to other things, making furniture, phonograph cases, and even fixtures for a corset company.

Business slowly recovered. The company started to show a profit from repairing military aircraft and building biplane fighters designed by other companies. By 1921, the company had re-established itself, and soon new Boeing designs appeared for both naval and civilian use.

The Post Office Department issued a specification for a Liberty-engine powered biplane to replace the De Havilland DH.4s then in use. The Boeing Model 40 was designed in April 1925 as Boeing entry into the competition and first flew on 7 July. The Post Office bought the single machine, but did not place a production order.

US air mail operations had began in August 1918, after starting in the United States Army Air Service in May, with pilots and aircraft belonging to the United States Post Office. For nine years, using mostly war-surplus De Havilland DH.4 biplanes, the Post Office built and flew a nationwide network. Subsidies for carrying mail exceeded the cost of the mail itself, and some carriers abused their contracts by flooding the system with junk mail at 100% profit or hauling heavy freight as airmail. Historian Oliver E. Allen, in his book The Airline Builders, estimated that airlines would have had to charge a 150-pound passenger $450 per ticket in lieu of carrying an equivalent amount of mail.

Then, early in 1927 Boeing decided to bid for the San Francisco – Chicago portion of the transcontinental airmail route that the US Post Office Department had sought to turn over to private enterprise. The Seattle factory redesigned their 1925 Model 40 to take the new Pratt and Whitney air-cooled Wasp engine and based their bid on the modified design with its increased capacity and could therefore add passenger revenue to mail payments. Competing bids were based on aircraft using the heavy Liberty engine and carrying no passengers, so were twice as high – the Boeing Airplane Company was awarded the route.

A total of eighty-two Model 40s were built. Their introduction signalled the beginning of regular commercial passenger service over long distances and served as the vehicle for the first regular passenger and night mail flights.

So began a new era for the company. Boeing Air Transport was formed as an airline to operate the service as a separate corporation, but Boeing Airplane executives made up the entire management structure. The original routes were expanded late in 1928 by the acquisition of Pacific Air Transport (PAT), a San Francisco to Seattle airline. The combined lines became known as ‘The Boeing System’. Under Boeing ownership, PAT bought Boeing machines but continued to operate some of its original aircraft.

The first of four Model 80 tri-motor biplanes were delivered to Boeing Air Transport in August 1928, only two weeks after its first flight. Twelve passengers - and later, eighteen - were carried in a large cabin provided with hot and cold running water, a toilet, forced air ventilation, leather upholstered seats and individual reading lamps. The needs of a dozen or more passengers during long flights soon indicated the desirability of a full-time cabin attendant who could devote all his/her attention to their comfort. While some European airlines used male stewards, Boeing Air Transport hired female registered nurses who became the first of the now-universal stewardesses. The pilot and co-pilot were enclosed in a roomy cabin ahead of and separate to the passenger cabin.

The company expanded in other directions, too. In February 1929, Boeing acquired the Hamilton Metalplane Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which continued to manufacture aeroplanes of its own design under its own name. That same year Boeing and the Hoffar-Breeching Shipyard of Vancouver, Canada, a yacht-building concer, formed Boeing Aircraft of Canada Ltd to build Seattle-designed aircraft. Their first products were a number of Model 204 flying boats, called the C204s to denote their Canadian manufacture.

The United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, with headquart...