McDonnell Douglas: A Tale Of Two Giants [Hardback], Bill Yenne

The McDonnell Douglass Corporation is a result of the 1967 merger of two companies built by two of the dynamic giants of the American aviation industry. Donald Wills Douglas cut his teeth as a designer at the Glenn Martin Company, starting out on his own in 1920. Douglas built the first planes to circumnavigate the globe and found the DC Series (Douglas, Commercial) airliners that would come to be the most famous family of commercial aircraft ever built. James Smith McDonnell founded his firm in 1939 and within a decade he had developed the US Navy’s firs jet fighter. McDonnell went on to establish a family of jet fighters that would include America’s best, the F-4 Phantom and F-15 Eagle. McDonnell also built America’s first manned spacecraft, Mercury and Gemini. This book is the story of these two men, the companies they built and the dozens of aircraft types that have carried their names to the far corners of the world.