What Killed Douglas Aircraft

The involved tale of why McDonnell Aircraft got to buy Douglas Aircraft in 1967. This paper was authored by Jonathan S. Leonard from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley

Having been there at that time, I can say two things: First that old man MAC admired Donald Douglas and, since he had always wanted to build commercial aircraft (Think Model 119/220), he was happy to keep the company in business. Second that he knew how a merge was supposed to go, in that the new company became McDonnell Douglas and the Douglas name (and the “bug”) didn’t disappear! Other companies forgot this!!

Click here to download the paper in PDF form

or download from the University here