Title: Twenty-first Century Jet

Author: Karl Sabbagh

ISBN: 0-684-80721-1

Reviewed by: Richard Chambers

The book Twenty-first Century Jet describes the program to develop and market the Boeing 777 airliner.

The book is similar to other product development histories such as Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine. Twenty-first Century Jet reviews the history of the product development effort for the Boeing 777 at a high level occasionally drilling down into more details concerning a particular part of the effort.

All in all Twenty-first Century Jet is an interesting, enjoyable, and readable book. There are enough technical details that are well explained to peak the interest of a manager with a background in hardware engineering. The avionics software effort is touched upon briefly (one million new lines of source code not counting what was reused from the Boeing 767) but the emphasis is on the business processes that turned a concept into a product.

The history follows the development of the product from the first customer interactions, the negotiations with subcontractors, the first contracts with air carriers, the development of the 777, the first manufacturing and testing, and finally the first deliveries to customers.

The author was part of an independent documentary team which included a film team. The documentary team was give fairly free access to most of the people within the 777 development effort from manufacturing floor people to Phil Condit, program manager for the 777 program, who was promoted to president of Boeing during the 777 program.

If there is one single impression that I received from the book it is how integrated the marketing, engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, and sales departments are within Boeing. Boeing is a projectized organization as opposed to a functional organization such as Nortel. The 777 program had its own project organization within the overall Boeing organization meaning that the 777 program had its own engineering and manufacturing resources designated for the 777 program. There was no throwing work over the wall but an acknowledged interdependence between the team members and between the teams.

One other point that came out were how proud Boeing employees were to work for Boeing and to work on the 777 program.

Interestingly enough most of the Boeing managers appear to be ex-engineers rather than people with a marketing or other non-engineering background.

The Boeing Company began development of the 777 airliner due to market pressures from its major competitors, Airbus and McDonnell, in the 350 seat airliner market segment. The 777 was developed to provide a Boeing product offering between the 767 and the 747 Boeing jets to address those airline company market segments in which a 767 jet had too little capacity for the available traffic yet a 747 was too large.

Twenty-first Century Jet starts out during the late 1980’s when Boeing was conducting marketing research within the airline market place to determine what additional enhancements customers were wanting for the Boeing 767. After a great deal of work on product concepts and reviews with customers, Boeing marketing discovered something.

In order to spread the financial risk for the 777 program, Boeing used subcontractors who were active participants in the program accepting part of the financial risk as part of their responsibilities. Subcontractors included companies in Japan, Australia, and Europe who provided major assemblies such as rudders and fuselage sections. In addition to the subcontractors for the 777 body, Boeing selected three companies to provide engines for the 777; Prat Whitney, Rolls Royce, and GE.

Boeing treats subcontractors as part of the family. One aside in the book was the suspicion from Boeing people that the Japanese subcontractors were trying to learn as much as they could in order to develop a Japanese airplane industry.

The author spends some time on the development and test program for the Prat Whitney engine (factoid: Prat Whitney was at one time merged with Boeing and what is now United Airlines before a government mandated breakup in the early 1900s). One interest factoid quoted in the book is that Boeing mandated a minimum of 80,000 lbs of thrust from each of the two 777 engines and the first manned rocket, Mercury, went into orbit with 75,000 lbs of thrust.

The 777 program organization was made up of small, cross functional teams whose goal was to design and build a particular part of the airplane. Because of the large number of people involved in the program, a decentralized decision making process was provided to push empowered decision making down to the lowest level possible improving time to market.

The main tool for decentralized decision making was using budgets for each of the basic cost and performance drivers in the design. For instance, one of the major performance and quality drivers for an airplane is the empty weight of the craft. All other things being equal, a plane that weighs less has additional capacity for passengers or cargo. Since airlines are paid to carry passengers or cargo, a lighter plane is more desirable than a heavy plane. Each team was given a weight budget for their particular piece of the 777. The weight budget provided a maximum weight for the piece or subassembly and described how much the team could spend to reduce a pound without having to get approval from upper levels of management.

Boeing used a different process for the 777 program than was used for previous product development efforts. The emphasis on defect detection and elimination was moved from the prototyping stage to the earlier design stage. This shift of defect detection and elimination earlier in the product development process reducing a reliance on full scale mockups and prototypes for design validation reduced costs and improved time to market. The use of sophisticated computerized engineering tools sharing a common model database of the entire 777 design made such a shift possible.

Much as Microsoft develops software using a periodic freeze and integration phase, Boeing engineering had design intervals in which the engineers were free to make changes followed by a design freeze and integration phase in which existing designs were modeled electronically to check for interference between parts including parts designed by other groups.

Boeing also placed a greater emphasis on the design of subassemblies for reuse in other assemblies during design. One such subassembly was the external door. In previous Boeing aircraft, doors at various points on the fuselage were of different designs to accommodate the available area for an opening in the fuselage as well as the contours of the fuselage at the door opening. This could mean that an aircraft with six external doors may have two to four different door designs sharing some common parts. With the 777, the door design team had as one of their objectives to make a single door design.

During the development of the Boeing 777, the customers who had signed the first delivery contracts were brought in and directly involved in design reviews. This involvement of the customer provided valuable product usage information that the design teams didn’t have. One example given in the book is the height of an access door. The original design placed the door at such a height that a step was required to open the door and service the parts inside. One customer pointed out that trying to service the equipment on a windy, winter day at O’Hare airport in Chicago would not only be difficult but actually dangerous. The design was changed to lower the access hatch.

Another design change was made when a customer pointed out that the access hatch for servicing a part within the wing was too small to actually remove the part from the wing without disassembling the wing. The hatch was made wider so that the part could be removed and replaced in a couple of hours rather than a couple of days.

The description of how the first flyable plane took shape on the manufacturing floor was interesting by providing a look at the logistics of material movement and the impact of design changes on manufacturing. Not only did the 777 require an enormous engineering effort but the assembly tools and automated assembly jigs also required engineering effort. The book only brushes by the design and engineering of the huge automated assembly jigs required to build some of the larger assemblies such as the wings and tail.

The amount of effort Boeing spent on design validation and testing is impressive. Boeing designed the 777 with specific engineering targets which exceeded expected as well as emergency use. The test program then tested to these limits.

The description of the test program was fascinating. Not only did Boeing perform tests in environmental chambers and other facilities, the proof of the aircraft was whether it would fly or not. During the flight tests, newspapers had a tendency to describe events in as lurid a prose as possible. Due to the openness of the 777 test program, Boeing made a headline more than once in the local Seattle newspapers.

The professional manner of the 777 program participants comes through during the entire book. There were numerous conflicts and issues that had to be worked out during the program in order for the program to succeed.

But what runs through out the book is a theme of professional, well trained people working towards a common goal and I found myself envious of such a working environment.