Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

by Peter Robison

War was actually the reason the American company would go on to dominate the jet age that brought international travel to the masses in the decades that followed. Days after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, a Boeing engineer named George Schairer sent a letter from a forest near the town of Braunschweig. Schairer had joined a team of civilian advisers working with U.S. Army intelligence there to examine the research files of the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring Aeronautical Research Institute. What he saw stunned him. The Germans, he realized, understood far more than anyone else about the potential of mating jet engines to swept-back wings. Most planes at the time still used propellers and perpendicular wings, jutting out from the fuselage at ninety-degree angles. Wind tunnel data that Schairer examined in the files showed a massive increase in speed and performance when wings were made to point slightly back, particularly when the engines hung beneath the wings in pods rather than being nested inside them, as had been the custom. The arrangement compensated for drag by making the wing itself more flexible in meeting wind resistance. Schairer sent seven cramped pages of mathematical formulas and sketches to a colleague in Seattle.