“ In the late 1960s, Lockheed and Mcdonnell-Douglas drove each other to ruin by each developing a new aircraft (the L-1011 and the DC-10, respectively) for what

“ In the late 1960s, Lockheed and Mcdonnell-Douglas drove each other to ruin by each developing a new aircraft (the L-1011 and the DC-10, respectively) for what turned out to be a very small market: less than 700 aircraft were sold between them. Lockheed ended up abandoning the commercial aircraft market after losing $2.5 billion on the program (~$9 billion in 2023 dollars), and McDonnell-Douglas never recovered, ultimately selling itself to Boeing in 1997 as its market share declined and it was unable to fund the development of new aircraft.” I don’t think anyone who worked in the industry would attribute the 1997 merger to the DC-10 some 30-40 years earlier. First off, the DC-10 is, as the name implies, a Douglas aircraft. That fiasco did indeed cause a merger, to McDonnell… in 1967. Also, if McDonnell-Douglas “never recovered”, how did it afford to fund in the 80s and early 90s, the enormously expensive design and development of the C17, entirely with its own money? An effort so expensive no aerospace company ever tried to do it again? The cause of the 1997 merger was if anything the loss of the JSF contract in 1996 (which became the F35) , which was made necessary by the preceding loss of the ATF contract (which became the F22) and slow sales of the MD-11; most analyses of the 1997 merger focus on the MDC-Boeing rival in commercial airliners, but MDC would have lived through the MD-11 and the merger would have never happened in 1997 if it hadn’t lost two generational fighter contracts. At least, the merger wouldn’t have happened before 9/11.