21st Century Jet

"On May 15, 1995, one of the most important business stories of the decade entered its final act. For that is the date on which United Airlines took delivery of the first of a new generation of passenger aircraft... the Boeing 777." "The drama whose last act this is began more than five years earlier, when the Boeing Corporation - consistently one of the world's most successful and most admired companies - decided upon a multibillion-dollar gamble: to produce a two-engine jumbo jet that could successfully compete not only with aircraft from Airbus Industrie and McDonnell Douglas, but with its own twenty-five-year-old 747. Happily for historians of the future, and for readers in the present, they decided that each and every episode of this massive effort, including the 777's revolutionary manner of design, management, and financing, would occur under the watchful eye of Karl Sabbagh, the author of Skyscraper: The Making of a Building." "Boeing's accessibility and the author's talents make 21st-Century Jet an extraordinary business story. Or, rather, two: First is the large-scale story of an immense corporation betting its future on its ability to deliver an entirely new plane on sch