Leeham News and Analysis
There's more to real news than a news release.
Leeham News and Analysis
- China bans Boeing, US parts imports in tariff war April 15, 2025
- Boeing welcomes COMAC competition as Asia-Pacific demand soars April 15, 2025
- How good is the C929? April 14, 2025
- Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 17. April 11, 2025
- Uncertainty plagues airline, aerospace, lessor industries over tariffs April 10, 2025
17 Days and 17 Miles Apart: a book review
Reviewed by Scott Hamilton
Donald J. Porter
McFarland & Co. © 2025. $39.95.
March 1, 2025, (c) Leeham News: 17 Days and 17 Miles Apart is a disappointing book. It’s the second by author Donald Porter. His first, in 2020, is called Flight Failure: Investigating the Nuts and Bolts and Air Disasters and Aviation Safety.
I bought that book then and reviewed it in LNA; it is still available on Amazon. I found Flight Failure more interesting than 17 Days, which seems pretty much like a pick-up of that book. Both recount the 1961 accident of TWA flight 529 in Clarendon Hills (IL). Flight Failure didn’t make my move from Seattle to Chicago last year, so I can’t go back and see if Northwest Airlines flight 706, which happened 17 days after TWA 529 and 17 miles away (after takeoff from Chicago O’Hare Airport), was recounted in Flight. It doesn’t matter. 17 Days suffers from a lot of flaws.
Unions Flying High: Book Review
Reviewed by Scott Hamilton
Unions Flying High: Airline Labor Power in the 21st Century
Ted Reed
McFarland & Co.
Feb. 25, 2025, © Leeham News: Ted Reed has been an aviation reporter for as long as I can remember. He also worked in corporate communications for US Air. Among his focus areas is labor relations in the US airline industry. He’s also the co-author of American Airlines, US Airways and the Creation of the World’s Largest Airline.
Reed’s new book, Unions Flying High: Airline Labor Power in the 21st Century, provides a detailed look at how labor unions have resurged from a long era in which their power was eviscerated through a series of airline bankruptcies (in some cases, more than once) and carriers that ceased operations.
This painful era began with the deregulation of the US airline industry in 1979. It continued through the 1991 Gulf War, which dramatically spiked fuel prices. Then came the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, which decimated US airlines. Add SARS (a pandemic largely limited to Asia) and other events, and unions lost most of their power. Wages and benefits were cut, and defined pension plans were terminated.
I lived through this era, first as a member of middle management with the first Midway Airlines beginning in 1979. Midway was the first airline to be certified by the then-ruling agency, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), in 40 years, right on the eve of deregulation.
The CAB liberally granted applications to cut fares and awarded new routes with abandon before deregulation became official. This led to the 1982 bankruptcy of Braniff Airlines and the following year of Continental Airlines. It was Continental’s bankruptcy that truly began the series of labor defeats that existed for the next three decades, ending with America’s 2011 bankruptcy.
Pontifications: Heros and a thriller–two book reviews
Fly Boy Heroes, The Story of the Medal of Honor Recipients of the Air War Against Japan
By James H. Hallas. Stackpole Books, $29.95.
The First Counterspy
By Kay Haas and Walter W. Pickut. Lyons Press, $29.95.
Aug. 22, 2022, © Leeham News: Two books from my summer reading aren’t about commercial aviation but will be interesting to the broader aviation community.
These are Fly Boy Heroes, The Story of the Medal of Honor Recipients of the Air War Against Japan, and The First Counterspy.
Fly Boy chronicles short stories about the US Medal of Recipients who flew against Japan in the Second World War. Author James Hallas begins with the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor and ends with an April 12, 1945, Boeing B-29 raid on Japan. In between, the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea, Midway (the outgrowth of the Doolittle Raid), and other combat missions are recounted. The Medal of Honor recipients of these battles are, as the book’s title suggests, the flyboys whose above-and-beyond exploits earned them the Medal. Not all survived their missions, but some did. For those who did, not all had happily ever after endings late in the war or in civilian life.
Being a Chicago area native, I knew that O’Hare International Airport was named after Lt. Commander Edward O’Hare, more commonly known as “Butch.” I also knew, though few others today might, that Butch was the son of Chicago mobster Edgar J. O’Hare, or E. J. E.J. was a lawyer for Al Capone and testified at Capone’s tax evasion trial that sent the mobster to Alcatraz. For his troubles, E.J. was murdered in 1939.
Pontifications: Two books examine GE’s fall from grace
Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric
By Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann
Mariner Books, $17.99, 361 Pages
The Man Who Broke Capitalism, How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crush the Sole of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
By David Gelles
Simon & Schuster, $28.00, 264 Pages
Aug. 1, 2022, © Leeham News: Two recent books about GE and its most prominent CEO, Jack Welch, offer different focus and fascinating insight.
By Scott Hamilton
One, Lights Out, is a detailed chronicle of the Welch era and those who followed. This book goes into much more detail than Gelles’, which is more of a biography of Welch than a corporate history—although obviously, there is pollination of both.
Gelles, a reporter for the New York Times, goes into some discussion about Boeing and the Welch-influenced people who came to lead Boeing, notably Jim McNerney and David Calhoun. But don’t expect Gelles’ book to take a deep dive into how Welch’s tutelage of McNerney and Calhoun affected Boeing. The discussion is superficial. This is, after all, a book focused on Welch.
Book Review: Flying Blind is a must-read about the Boeing 737 MAX crisis
By Scott Hamilton
Nov. 20, 2021, © Leeham News: Flying Blind, The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing is the sad story of how The Boeing Co., once renowned for its engineering prowess, 
descended into the depths of crisis with its most profitable airplane.
Authored by Bloomberg news reporter Peter Robison, much of the story is well known on the proverbial 35,000-foot level. Congressional hearings, investigative reporting, crash coverage of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 310, provided plenty of grist for the mill.
Robison delves deeper into the crisis that encompassed Boeing from March 2019 with the ET 310 crash, from which it won’t recover for years. I point to the Ethiopian crash as the start of the crisis, because for the most part, the Lion Air crash was viewed as just another crash—until Ethiopian’s tragedy made it clear there was something deadly wrong with the 737 MAX.
Pontifications: Book Review, “Tigers in the Sea”
By Scott Hamilton
May 17, 2021, © Leeham News: Tiger in the Sea is a new book about the 1962 ditching of a Flying Tigers Lockheed Constellation L-1049H in the stormy North Atlantic.
It was, in modern-day comparisons, the US Airways Flight 1549 of its day. But while all 155 passengers and crew on 1549 survived the ditching in Hudson River, 28 of the 76 on board died.
US Airways 1549’s captain, Chesley Sullenberger, landed in the cold but calm Hudson River. Rescuers surrounded the plane within minutes. Tigers Capt. John Murray ditched in 20 feet seas in the middle of a storm with gale-force winds. The nearest ship was 13 hours away. Those who died survived the impossible landing.