Boeing: those were the days

An advertisement for Boeing from 1963, showing four very different products of Boeing’s inventiveness and ability to get things done: a jetliner, a hydrofoil, a rotating artificial gravity space station and a spaceplane. The spaceplane, the X-20 Dyna Soar, was cancelled the month after the ad was printed. The space station was never built. The hydrofoil was decommissioned in 1975 and never replaced with a more advanced version. The jetliner, the 727, took its last commercial passenger flight in 2019… 56 years after its first flight. The most advanced Boeing jetliner, the 787, is much more efficient than the 727, but is not a fundamentally different beast: it’s design would not have looked out of place in the design process for the 727, though the materials would have impressed the 727’s designers.

Sixty years ago, Boeing could bang out not only some amazing idea, but some amazing actual vehicles. and they could do so somewhere near the budget and somewhat resembling the schedule. Today? The SLS and the Starliner capsule are *how* many billions of dollars over budget and how many years behind schedule? How badly managed has the 737 max program been? Does anyone expect to see a “797” jetliner from Boeing anytime in the next twenty years?