The Boeing 247 was the end result of a battle between company management and its engineers. Unfortunately, the engineers lost. Although enshrined today as “the first modern airliner”—and it certainly looked the part—the 247 was actually too small and low-powered to make it as a money-making passenger carrier. It was the wrong airplane at the right time.
That time was the early 1930s, when a series of events and innovations was transforming air transportation. Until then commercial aviation had been a cold, miserable, noisy, cramped, vibratory and often vomitous experience. Airline passengers flew aboard drafty biplanes, three-engine antiques with fixed landing gear and a shrubbery of struts and rigging. Operators offered no creature comforts, and passengers were little more than an afterthought, since carrying government-subsidized airmail paid the bills. According to Transcontinental and Western Air pilot Daniel W. Tomlinson IV, “Flying in the old Ford [Trimotors] was an ordeal…. The flight was deafening. The metal Ford shook so much that it was an uncomfortable experience. It surprised me that people would pay money to ride in the thing.”
At that time, the Boeing Aircraft Company had no experience designing passenger airplanes. It built biplane pursuits for both the Army and Navy, as well as two mail plane designs and a surprisingly modern bomber for the Army. Boeing’s first passenger airplane was the 1925 Model 40A, a single-engine, fixed-gear biplane with space for just two passengers in a pair of tiny, handsomely wood-trimmed, enclosed cabins, each with its own door, below and ahead of the pilot’s open cockpit. The original plan was that those cabins could be occupied by a riding mechanic and, if necessary, a deadheading pilot.
Boeing built only one straight Model 40, since it was powered by an oily and obsolete Liberty V-12 engine. The company replaced it with the just-introduced 410-hp
