The Rise and Fall of Boeing, And the Way Back, reveals how Boeing fell from its engineering roots to flirt with bankruptcy and how it will recover.

Dec. 1, 2025, (c) Leeham News: In October, Boeing announced another delay in certification of the 777X and a delay from 2026 to 2027 of entry-into-service of the -9 model. Tim Clark, the president of Emirates Airline, is vocal about his dismay over the continuing delays. Emirates has more 777Xs on order than any other customer. The first airplane was due in early 2020. Had it been on time, Clark says Emirates would have had 110 in service by now.

During the Dubai Air Show, he told the financial news network CNBC that he believes Boeing can restore its glory. He doesn’t know or predict when. But legacy Boeing’s last hurrah was the development of what is now called by some to be the “Classic” 777.

Scott Hamilton’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Boeing and The Way Back, details not only how Boeing lost its glory and how it’s recovering. It tells the story of legacy Boeing’s last hurrah: development of the 777 Classic.

Here is an excerpt.

Legacy Boeing’s Last Hurrah

“Working Together.”

—The 777 Family

In 1985, Airbus, Boeing, and McDonnell Douglas (MDC) were planning for the next round of twin-aisle jets. Boeing toyed with the idea of building a larger 767. One concept included a partial double deck, but it was a very odd design. Instead of a 747-like hump at the front of the airplane, the upper deck began at about the wing and went aft. MDC considered a stretch of its DC-10 with initial working titles of Super 50, Super 60, etc. Airbus, still in the development phase on the A320, was already planning twin-aisle, two- and four-engine aircraft under the code names TA-6 and TA-7. These would become the A330 and A340.

Boeing’s humpback 767 design was short-lived. It soon gave way to a wider twin-aisle, larger-capacity airplane that eventually became known as the 777. United Airlines was one of the leading contributors to Boeing’s customer input process. The initial design became known as the 777-200. There were a shorter-range “A” model and a long-range “B” model. Both seated about 301 passengers in a mixed-seating configuration. The A model’s range was 5,240 nautical miles (nm); the B model, which later was named the ER (for Extended Range), had a range of 7,065 nm. The planes’ dimensions were identical.

The Classic’s folding wingtips

One proposed feature for the 777 was the inclusion of folding wing tips to allow the plane to use some of the ramp and gate space of smaller widebody aircraft. Boeing eventually dropped the idea for weight-related and other reasons. But the idea would resurface decades later and become a key component for the next-generation 777.

Today’s notable feature of the Boeing 777-X is its folding wingtip, designed to allow the wider wingspan to fit into today’s airport gates. The idea was first conceived for the 777 Classic in the 1990s but discarded then. Credit: Leeham News.

Boeing was going to be last on the market with the 777. The MDC MD-11 and Airbus’s four-engine A340 would precede the 777. The three-engine MD-11 was essentially a stretched DC-10 with new engines, a glass cockpit, and split winglets. Even with such features, however, when the airplane went into service with American Airlines, it was a big disappointment. American ordered MD-11s and planned a major overseas expansion from its prime hub at Dallas–Fort Worth Regional Airport (DFW). DFW, situated in north Texas in the southern-middle of the United States, presented range challenges for American’s ambitions across the Pacific. When the airline received route authority from DFW to fly to Tokyo, for example, American’s long-range DC-10-30s couldn’t make the hop non-stop. The airline acquired two ex–TWA 747SPs for the route. As a shrink, the plane wasn’t as efficient as the standard 747, but it could make the 6,500-mile trip non-stop.

The MD-11 was supposed to be able to make the trip from DFW to Hong Kong, but it burned more fuel than expected, and its actual range was less than its designed range. DFW–Hong Kong was out, and the economics on other long-haul routes within its reduced range strained airlines’ ability to make these runs profitably. MDC worked diligently to make up for the shortfalls but, in the end, engineers couldn’t recover 100 percent of the deficiencies. With MDC already on the decline, the shortcomings of the MD-11 didn’t help sales. Eventually, only 200 MD-11s were sold.

Over at Airbus, super-salesman John Leahy did everything he could to jump on the MD-11’s shortcomings. The third engine sitting on top of the MD-11’s fuselage at the base of the tail was, he sniffed, just a big aerodynamic drag. Leahy’s rhetoric was seen for what it was. But his company’s A340 had its own problems, which were not insignificant: the plane was designed around the SuperFan engine that Rolls-Royce (RR) and Pratt & Whitney (P&W) ultimately killed, destroying the planned economics of the aircraft. Airbus executives met with P&W executives and pressured them unsuccessfully to reverse the decision. So, Airbus’s next stop was CFM International, the 50-50 joint venture between GE and what was then known as Snecma (now Safran Aircraft Engines), a French company. The CFM 56 powered the re-engined MDC DC-8 Super 60 series (rebranded the -70) and the Boeing 737-300/-400/-500, later called the 737 Classic. It had been a monumental mistake by P&W to cede the 737 market from the original 737-100/200/200A models to the re-engining of the -300/-400/-500 series models. The Classic series put CFM on the map. Like an amoeba, CFM’s dominance in the small jetliner market spread across the world. Airbus initially chose the CFM 56 to power the A320. International Aero Engines (IAE) later joined this market with its V2500 engine, but CFM products ruled.

Airbus’s engineless A340

When Airbus went to CFM, hat in hand, to power the A340 Glider, CFM exacted its pound of flesh. Airbus had no choice but to take it. The result was an airplane that was overweight to the power provided and slow compared with other trans-ocean airliners. Leahy, well after he retired in 2018, put it in his typically direct way: The A340 was prone to bird strikes from the rear. With four engines, maintenance costs were naturally higher. Fuel economy wasn’t as good as some of its competitors, either.

Airbus tried mightily to overcome the A340’s operational and economic disadvantages. In those days, ETOP aircraft, and the Extended-Range Twin-Engine Operations Performance Standards (ETOPS) that applied to them, which were developed and implemented by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), were both still fairly new. Qualifying for ETOPS certification was complicated, and some of the less-sophisticated airlines found that doing so strained resources. A four-engine airplane didn’t require the same level of training, support, and sophistication as other models did, so the A340 fit nicely into airlines’ systems. The A340, being lighter than the 747 and with less restrictive engine-out performance than a twin-engine widebody airplane, also could serve challenging airports more easily. For example, South African Airways found the A340 a better fit for its hot environment than the early 777s. The A340 could operate out of the French/Dutch island of St. Maartin in the Caribbean, with its short runway and mountains near one end of the runway, more easily than the 747.

Airbus produced the A340 in four versions—the original -200, with its underpowered CFM engines; the -300, with an upgraded engine; the -500 ultra-long-haul model; and a stretched -600 version, the last two featuring RR engines. Nevertheless, Airbus sold only 377 A340 models, a poor showing but still better than the MD-11.

Out-of-the-park winner

Boeing’s 777, with its subsequent versions, proved an out-of-the-park winner. Only eighty-eight of the base model -200s were sold, with United Airlines being a principal customer. The longer-range -200ER saw 422 sales. The ultra-long-range -200LR, the same plane dimensionally as the -200 and the -200ER, added sixty-one sales. Boeing stretched the airplane into two versions of the -300: the base model and the extended-range -300ER. These typical models seated around 365 passengers in a mixed-class configuration. The base -300 traded a little range (about 100 nautical miles) for capacity. The -300ER recovered the original ranges and added about 300 nautical miles more. It proved the most popular model, with sales of 837 aircraft.

Even then, Boeing wasn’t through. It took the -200LR and made a freighter out of it. As of 2025, the freighter was still in production, with a total of 321 orders. The 777LRF is to remain in production until 2027, when new noise and emissions regulations will render the model obsolete. The 777 became one of Boeing’s best-selling jetliners of all time. Production peaked at a rate of 8.6 a month, a record for a widebody airplane up until then. The 777 and 737 carried Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes division (BCA) through future industrial snafus with the 787 and the delays of the poor-selling 747-8.

Unmatched safety

The program manager for the 777 was Phil Condit. A lifetime Boeing employee and an engineer, Condit and former Boeing CEO Alan Mulally are credited with ushering in a major transformation in the way Boeing designed airplanes. The 777 was Boeing’s first computer-designed aircraft. Its entry into service (EIS) was in 1995. The 777’s development budget of $6 billion ballooned to nearly $12 billion (about $25.95 billion in 2025 dollars). But the airplane’s reliability and performance over the following decades was unmatched. So was its safety. The first 777 hull loss didn’t happen until 2008, fourteen years after the plane’s introduction, when a British Airways 777-200ER lost power in both engines on a short final approach to London’s Heathrow Airport. Through marvelous piloting, the plane crash-landed short of the runway. There were no fatalities and only forty-seven injuries, most of them minor. The power failure was traced to a freak icing condition that blocked fuel to both of the plane’s RR engines. The 777 itself came away with a rather enhanced reputation for its strength.

The second hull loss happened to a 777-200ER when a cockpit fire broke out while the plane was parked. There were no injuries, and the fire damage was such that the airplane was written off. A third hull loss occurred when an Asiana Airlines 777-300ER crashed on landing at the San Francisco airport. Pilot error was blamed. Although the plane split in two upon the crash landing and spun around before coming to rest, only three of the 310 people on board died. They were the first fatalities of a 777 accident.[1]

777 success due to culture

How did legacy Boeing succeed so spectacularly with the 777 Classic? The reason is ironic, considering the future criticism that would come Boeing’s way on the very same topic: culture.

“I believe that it was primarily the culture that we built essentially for the program,” Condit recalled in 2023 in an interview for this book. “I had an advantage. I was coming from being executive VP so I could pick my team for the Triple Seven. I had the experience with the 757 program. We learned a lot on the 757 program. For example, what I discovered on the 57 program was that while we had a really good core team when we started, the developmental team, when the program got authorized, engineers started coming on the program at 200 to 300 a week. The culture very quickly shifted to what I call a traditional culture, because the core team was the minority all of a sudden. Everybody, in my words, set up camp the way they had always set up camp.

“On the 777 reset, when people come on to the program, everybody goes through what we call boot camp. Everybody got introduced to the program and got introduced to the culture. We actually took the whole initial team offsite on a Saturday and spent a whole Saturday crafting an eleven-word mission statement for the program very, very carefully. Every word in that mission statement had a really important meaning.”

This was in 1990. Condit remembered that the theme then was people working together to produce the preferred new airplane family. “The first word in there was ‘people’. The whole program had a very strong focus on people, how important they were in the program, how critical they were to the program. ‘Working together’ became the buzz phrase, if you will, for the program.” Boeing had a tradition of putting a pilot’s name under a plane’s flight deck window on the left side, and a co-pilot’s name on the right side of the airplane. At the time, “Working Together” was printed under the left side of each cockpit window.

“It was people working together,” Condit recalled. “Working together to produce. We had a great, long debate. Not surprisingly, the engineers said it ought to be ‘design.’ The factory guys said it ought to be ‘built.’ The support people said, ‘Well, how do we get it there?’ The word[s] we settled on w[ere] ‘to produce.’ It included design, build, all of the pieces together.  Next, ‘the preferred.’ We had another debate. We were looking at one, at the word[s] ‘quality,’ ‘performance,’ ‘customer satisfaction.’ ”[2]

Working together

As with other Boeing 7-Series airplanes, with the exception of the 757, the 777 was going to be a new airplane family. “That was very intentional,” Condit said. “We looked at a lot of derivatives that had potential for that program. [The 777] really changed the world. The whole program was designed with the intent that there would be a family of airplanes. We talked about that mission statement with everybody who came on the program, what it meant, why were we doing it. We said, for example, that ‘working together’ wasn’t just internal, it was external. It meant that working together, we would work together with suppliers. We were going to work together with airlines. We actually had airlines on the team.”

Condit’s description of “working together” at all levels, internally and externally, is a marked contrast to how things evolved at Boeing over the next thirty-plus years, when confrontations with labor, suppliers, and even customers became the rule rather than the exception.

The 777 program was launched in October 1990. The original 777 entered service in June 1995. The highly successful 777-300ER, in 2004. The 777 “Classic” was the last airplane designed and developed by Boeing before its 1997 merger with MDC. In many respects, the 777-300ER was probably the best airplane Boeing ever designed. Through 2024, more than 1,700 of all sub-types had been delivered. As a widebody airplane, the 777-300ER paled in comparison to the 737. The company’s 787 model had higher gross sales. But unlike the troubled 737 and 787 programs, the 777 Classic proved to be a superb program.

It was legacy Boeing’s last hurrah.

Footnotes

[1] Two more 777 hull losses occurred, resulting in fatalities to all on board the planes: Malaysian Airlines flight 370, which mysteriously disappeared in the ocean near Australia on a flight from Indonesia to China, and another Malaysian 777, which was shot down in a mistaken combat action by Russia during fighting in Ukraine. There have been a couple more hull losses, but no passengers died in these other accidents.

[2] In 2024, when Kelly Ortberg was named by Boeing’s board of directors to succeed departing CEO David Calhoun, Ortberg began using the phrase “working together” when meeting with employees.

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The Rise and Fall of Boeing and the Way Back is available here. Rise and Fall continues the story told in Air Wars, The Global Combat Between Airbus and Boeing, published in 2021, also by Scott Hamilton. This tells the story of 35 years of competition between Airbus and Boeing, and the role played by super -salesman John Leahy of Airbus. Air Wars is available here.