Product Description

Introduced into a busy market for short-haul jet arilines in the mid 1960s, Boeing's 737 has gone on to become one of the world's most successful and numerous airliners. There can be few regular flyers who have not travelled on a 737, and the number of airlines that do not have one on their registers is small. The aircraft's progress through turbulent political and commercial times is followed, as is the 737's own operational history and its own undoubted influence in the constantly changing airliner industry of the last quarter of the 20th century and beyond.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #913523 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 200 pages

About the Author
Malcolm L Hill's interest in commercial aviation stems from his early years, growing up under the busy take-off path from London's Heathrow Airport. He has been a regular contributor to the US based Airliners magazine since 1995. He is the author of BAC One-Eleven [Crowood 1999]

Customer Reviews

Boeing 737
This book describes one of civil aviation's greatest success stories. Having worked as a marketing and public relations representative for a one-time Boeing 737 competitor (Fokker Aircraft, which produced the Fokker F.28 and Fokker 100 twinjets), I am well aware of just HOW successful the Seattle manufacturer has been.

When Boeing announced on February 22, 1965, that it would produce a short-haul jet transport, many people asked, "Will it sell?" The 737 was, after all, a late arrival in the short-haul market. The company's announcement came just three days before the first flight of the Douglas DC-9, and only six weeks before the BAC One-Eleven entered service. Today, with over 5,000 examples sold, and Boeing's production line still going strong, the 737 is the world's best-selling airliner -- by a very wide margin!

Coinciding with the 35th anniversary of its maiden flight, Malcolm Hill has given us a captivating and comprehensive history of the 737, detailing how Boeing turned its 'little giant' from a question mark into an exclamation point. The focus of the book is on marketing, not engineering. Readers will learn as much about the 737 operators as the airplanes themselves. But that is the real story of Boeing's smallest jetliner and its huge influence on air travel worldwide.

Hill describes the origins of the 737, and the competitive market of 1965. He also provides a short history of Boeing, which includes the company's highly-successful 707 and 727. Building on the foundations laid by those ancestors, Boeing hoped the baby in its jetliner family would enjoy similar success. It was, indeed, a family -- the 737 inheriting the same nose and 6-abreast seating as the 707 and 727, and sharing many common parts and components. That commonality sold a number of existing Boeing customers on the 737. The firm's willingness to tailor the 737 to the specific requirments of individual airlines won scores of new customers, too -- enabling the planemaker to slowly overtake its competitors. The rest, as they say, is history. That history is well-told in this book.

The author traces the development of the various models of the 737, from the Original -100 and -200, to the Classic -300, -400, and -500, to the Next Generation -600, -700, -800, and -900. The book offers a cornucopia of photographs. Two appendices give basic statistics for all nine variants, plus ten other types for comparative purposes.

The 737 saga far from over. Some day, new chapters will need to be written. But Malcolm Hill has done an exhaustive and masterful job of telling the story thus far -- relating the astounding impact of the 737 on the airline industry, the global economy, and the daily lives of millions of people.

I highly recommend this book to civil aviation students and airliner enthusiasts. The photographs alone are worth the price of admission!