McDonnell Douglas: The Unbuilt DC-10 Twin, the MD-11 and Express Scripts

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McDonnell Douglas joined two empires built by men with parallel lives. James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas shared Scottish ancestry, both graduated from MIT and both worked for the Glenn L. Martin Company. Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles built roughly 10,000 C-47s in World War II with a peak workforce of 160,000, then the DC-6, DC-7 and DC-8. McDonnell Aircraft outside St. Louis built military jets such as the F-4 Phantom II and the Mercury and Gemini capsules. By the 1960s Douglas was drowning in late-delivery penalties while McDonnell depended on a single customer, the U.S. government, so in 1967 McDonnell bought 1.5 million Douglas shares and the companies merged. In the 1970s David S. Lewis revived the Douglas division, the DC-10 beat Lockheed's L-1011, and the F-15 Eagle and F-18 Hornet followed. Engineers drew up a twin-engine DC-10 Twin, but no prototype was built, and Airbus launched the A300.

In 1989 a reorganization called TQMS cut 5,000 supervisory and managerial jobs and made leaders re-interview for 2,800 new posts; workers said the acronym meant "time to quit and move to Seattle." In January 1991 Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the $4.8 billion A-12 Avenger II stealth program, triggering 5,600 layoffs, and the company lost the Joint Strike Fighter and Advanced Tactical Fighter competitions. The MD-11, a stretched DC-10, could not fly Singapore to Paris fully loaded against winter headwinds, and Singapore Airlines canceled 20 jets in 1991. In August 1997 the company agreed to a $13 billion stock swap with Boeing, which later closed the Long Beach airliner lines and kept the McDonnell Douglas globe in its logo.

• The defense-minded St. Louis leadership was unwilling to risk company money on a new twinjet while military contracts were profitable.
• The company had acquired Hughes Helicopters in the 1980s, bringing in the AH-64 Apache.
• The 1992 MD-12, a double-decker jumbo announced at a press conference, never had a prototype built.
• McDonnell Automation Company, or McAuto, ran mainframes for aircraft design and grew to 3,500 employees.
• A McAuto venture into medical claims led to a pharmacy benefits partnership in St. Louis that became Express Scripts.