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The company was founded from the firms of James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas. Both were graduates of MIT and had worked for the aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company. Douglas had been chief engineer at Glenn L. Martin before leaving to establish Davis-Douglas Company in early 1920 in Los Angeles. He bought out his backer and renamed the firm the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1921.
McDonnel founded J.S. McDonnell & Associates in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1928. His idea was to produce a personal aircraft for family use. The economic depression from 1929 ruined his ideas and the company collapsed. He went to work for Glenn L. Martin. He left in 1938 to try again with his own firm, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, this time based near St. Louis, Missouri.
The war was a major earner for Douglas as well, the company produced almost 30,000 aircraft from 1942 to 1945 and the workforce swelled to 160,000. The company produced a number of aircraft including the C-47 (based on the DC-3), the DB-7 (known as the A-20, Havoc or Boston), the Dauntless and the A-26 Invader. Both companies suffered at the end of hostilities, facing an end of government orders and a surplus of aircraft. Both heavily cut their workforces, Douglas sacking almost 100,000 people. As part of their wartime work Douglas had established a USAAF think-tank, a group that would later become the RAND Corporation.
Douglas continued to develop new aircraft, including the successful four-engined DC-6 (1946) and their last prop-driven commercial aircraft, the DC-7 (1953). The company had moved into jet propulsion, producing their first for the military - the conventional F3D Skyknight in 1948 and then the more 'jet age' F4D Skyray in 1951. Douglas also made commercial jets, producing the DC-8 in 1958 to compete with the new Boeing 707. McDonnell was also developing jets, but being smaller they were prepared to be more radical, building on their successful FH-1 Phantom to become a major supplier to the Navy with the BansheeThe McDonnell F2H Banshee was a military carrier-based jet fighter aircraft, used by the US Navy from 1951 to 1959 and by the Royal Canadian Navy from 1955 until 1962. It was a development of the FH-1 Phantom, although it was being planned before the Phan, DemonThe McDonnell F3H Demon was a US Navy carrier-based jet fighter aircraft. The successor to the F2H Banshee, after initial problems, it served from 1956 until 1964. Development work began in 1949. The aircraft was designed around only a single Westinghouse, and the VoodooF-101 Voodoo Description Role Fighter bomber CrewOne Dimensions Length67. 55 m Wingspan39. 09 m Height18 ft5. 49 m Wing area368 sq ft34. 19 m˛ Weights Empty28,970 lb13,141 kg Loaded51,000 lb23,133 kg Maximum take-off52,400 lb23,768 kg Powerplant EnginesTw. The advent of the Korean War helped push McDonnell into a major military fighter supply role, especially with the noted F-4 Phantom IIThe F-4 Phantom II (simply "F-4 Phantom" after 1990) is a two-place (tandem), supersonic, long-range, all-weather fighter-bomber built by McDonnell Douglas Corporation. It was operated by the US Navy, the USMC and later the USAF, from 1961 until 1995. (1958).
Both companies were eager to enter the new missileA missile (British English: "miss isle"; U. English: "missl") is, in general, a projectile—that is, something thrown or otherwise propelled. Missiles can range from a rock thrown from a slingshot, through a crossbow or ballista bolt, to a Minuteman III in business, Douglas moving from producing air-to-air rockets and missiles to entire missile systems under the 1956 Nike program and becoming the main contractor of the Skybolt ALBM program and the Thor ballistic missile program. McDonnell made a number of missiles, including the unusual ADM-20 Quail , as well as experimenting with hypersonic flight, research that enabled them to gain a substantial share of the NASA projects Mercury and Gemini. Douglas also gained contracts from NASA, notably for part of the enormous Saturn V rocket.
Both companies were now major employers, but both were having problems. Douglas was strained by the cost of the DC-8 and DC-9, and the companies began to sound each other out about a merger. Inquiries began in 1963; Douglas offered bid invitations from December 1966 and accepted that of McDonnell. The two firms were officially merged on April 28, 1967 as the McDonnell Douglas Corporation. The DC-10 began production in 1968 with the first deliveries in 1971.
The new corporation continued its profitable association with the military, producing the F-15 Eagle (1974) and the F/A-18 Hornet (1975) as well as the Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles. The oil crisis of the 1970s was a serious shock to the commercial aviation industry and McDonnell Douglas was forced to contract heavily and also began to diversify to reduce the impact of potential future downturns. In 1984 the corporation acquired Hughes Helicopters.
Following Boeing's 1996 acquisition of Rockwell's North American division, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merged in 1997 in a $13 billion stock-swap to create The Boeing Company.
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