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The world is full of people who would never imagine that a book about a company that makes commercial airplanes could be riveting. I was one of them until I read Michael Haenggi’s elegantly written (can this man be an engineer?) tale of Boeing’s back-to-the-wall fight for market share against the likes of Lockheed, Douglas, McDonnell-Douglas and the latter-day Hercules, Airbus.
In an industry so vital to commerce, subject to immense barriers to entry, and mortally unforgiving of defective design, engineering, and production, Boeing is doomed to compete with only a small cadre of competitors, one that has grown ever smaller with the withdrawal or acquisition of three of the five corporate monikers mentioned in the last pararagraph.
Haenggi narrates the remarkable tale of the breakthrough 747, the hybrid 767, the astonishing ‘triple-seven’, and Boeing’s barely subsonic future. The latter limitation is imposed not by technical obstacles but rather by the political impossibility of a sky producing sonic booms with every passing supersonic aircraft.
Haenggi intersperses his truly enjoyable prose with shrewdly selected photographs that do justice to the aircraft he so evidently admires.
What’s not to like about this book? This reviewer hopes Haenggi writes many more like it.
Canter Bridge 
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