Airframe crashes; Flying High cruises:

Of Wings and Tales

Book review for The Stranger, 4/10/97

The jetliner is Seattle’s first big contribution to the world, unless you count Gypsy Rose Lee. Both Michael Crichton’s Airframe (Knopf) and Eugene Rodgers’s Flying High: The Story of Boeing and the Rise of the Jetliner Industry (Atlantic Monthly Press) are massive hardcover tomes (each weighing about a pound and a half) that build their narratives around the public fascination with this big, complicated, beautiful machine (perhaps the most complex machine ordinary folks regularly go inside of). Both also contain enough crash-related material, it’s a safe bet neither will be made into a movie that’ll ever be shown in-flight.

Chricton’s Freefall

In his latest plodding “thriller,” Airframe, Crichton (pronounced “Kryton,” same as the Red Dwarf ninny) pushes all his wearisome big formula-suspense buttons. At least here he has a reason to insert tech talk, unlike the ridiculous way it was tacked on to Disclosure in the form of improbable virtual-reality computing.

And the creator of ER manages to find a way to blast TV and modern journalism (a theme he previously addressed in a Wired essay), here in the form of a villanous taboid-TV producer.

Both the evil producer and our aircraft-company-investigator hero are females, a step probably intended to provide juicy roles for whoever’s the most bankable actresses when the movie version gets made. It also allows the final confrontation between the two to be mercifully free of the gender-war crap Crichton overused to death in Disclosure. (It might also be intended to placate readers who thought Disclosure dissed ambitious career women.)

In keeping with the Hollywood-intended plot devices, Crichton’s heroine is both the aircraft company’s chief crash investigator and its media spokesperson. In real life these jobs would be handled by two people (or two committees), but this trick lets Crichton keep the attention on one character, forever getting into bureaucratic, technical, and physical perils. (The physical threats to her, obviously intended to become movie action scenes, turn out to have little to do with the crash-investigation plot.)

Since I don’t like to spoil a good story, I’ll tell you the jumbo-jet crash our heroine investigates is due to human error, thanks to an underqualified foreign pilot. Among other things, this solution ensures the movie’s producers won’t get immediately turned away when they ask airplane companies for technical advice or factories to film in.

When Airframe becomes a movie, it may be the first such project involving both the main industries of Burbank, CA. While Boeing is now the king of civilian aerospace, much of the rest of the industry’s centered in that valley city where Lockheed and Warner Bros. both found the space for big hanger-like buildings. When Laugh-In and Johnny Carson joked about the nonglamour surrounding NBC’s studios, they referred to a landscape of squatty assembly shops, faceless engineering buildings, and vast employee parking lots–an area whose Pentagon-funded largesse helped enrich many of those anti-big-government California Republicans.

Boeing’s Highs & Lows

Flying High, the first major history of Boeing not funded or controlled by the company’s PR department, notes that California’s powerful politicians helped keep Boeing from a lot of military work after the ’60s. While military work has been a relatively small part of the boeing picture (at least until recent mergers), it’s still been big stuff, with B-52 and AWACS planes and missile components still in use. It wasn’t always this way.

As Rodgers notes, Bill Boeing was a rare breed of aviation pioneer–a businessman first, an air enthusiast only second. A mere decade after the Wrights’ history-making first flight, Boeing started building planes, not out of a fascination with flight itself but as a means to enhance his established timber fortune. Between the world wars, he built a lucrative Post Office air-mail contract into a vertically integrated company, including the future United Airlines. But after FDR’s antitrust guys forced a Boeing/ United divorce, Boeing fell way behind its L.A. rivals in supplying the nascent passenger airlines. When WWII turned planemaking into an all-military industry, Boeing’s company thrived. (Bill Boeing retired in the late ’30s; his descendents weren’t involved in the firm.)

In the early ’50s, the company made a last-ditch effort to get back into the passenger biz with the 707 (whose initial R&D was piggybacked onto work for a military transport).

In the 11 years from the first 707 to the first 747, Boeing (and the airlines it supplied) became a global institution. Then came the 1970-71 bust. Several boom-bust cycles later, the company again booms. For how long? The company, and Rodgers, see no immediate end, at least in manufacturing; on the engineering side, though, there may be enough already-designed airplanes to last the company for a decade or two.

Keeping with the company’s squaresville mindset, Rodgers gets into a little of the initial romance of flying, but not much. There’s almost nothing about passenger aviation in the propeller era, since Boeing was a minor player there. As with Crichton, Rodgers reveals only as much technology as is needed to tell his stories (i.e., why airlines preferred to buy a particular Boeing plane instead of a particular Douglas plane).

Both books almost hypnotically lead the reader into the pressurized, insulated world of their companies’ corporate cultures. Especially in Rodgers’s account, airplane-land is depicted as a near religious order, insulated by both internal politics and obscure knowledge, where outside interests (even airline customers) are treated with hands-off distance or even hostility.

Rodgers devotes one chapter to the sociocultural effects of Boeing’s presence in Seattle. Rodgers points out how Bill Boeing’s cloisered lifestyle in The Highlands, an exclusive compound north of town, influenced the almost antisocial culture of the company’s higher-ups (and of Seattle’s rich in general), forming a perennial obstacle to those who’ve tried to develop high-art and high-society institutions. He also mentions how Boeing’s “Lazy B” work culture and its periodic massive layoffs have affected the region’s economy. He could have gone further, depicting how the firm’s introverted, hyper-rational engineering mindset combined with Scandinavian reserve to form a city where excessively bland “tastefulness” became a fetish.

Boeing turned a timber-and-railroad town, barely beyond the frontier era, into the excessively moderate burg Seattle’s musicians got famous for rebelling against. Its products have helped propel the “globalization” of world culture and trade. As much as we try to ignore Boeing (and as much as it tries to ignore its community in return), it’s helped make us what we are. Eugene Rodgers’s book is a vital first step in understanding this.