As an aerospace afficionado from before the term even existed, not to mention a stint in SAC as an aircraft on a B-52G, followed by 14 years in line service with United Airlines, during which time I used my employee travel privileges extensively to go to both the Paris and Farnbrough airshows, the latter of which was even followed once taking up a personal invitation to the Concorde main assembly plant in Filton, the SST episode is riveted in my memory. Which is why I am so perplexed that the foremost detail in the SST saga,i.e. the REAL reason the program failed, has been hastily danced past, glosed over, shamelessly misrepresented, or dodged altogether. In a few words, JFK's successor, LBJ, for reasons that were (not surprisingly) purely political, took the SST program out of the Dept. of Transportation where, as a commercial transport(!!) it had originated, and moved it to the Dept. of Defense, which placed it under the control of(dum de dum dum) Robert S. ("the Edsel WILL sell"/"light at the end of the tunnel" in Vietnam) McNamara, who, in another of his infamous snap decisions, based on back-of-an-envelope calculations, and stubbornly adhered to even when proven disastrously wrong by events, decided that a big.big ten(!!) percent of SST developement costs could be saved if the originally planned competitive fly-off between the Boeing and Lockheed prototypes was cancelled and the best design picked by feeding the respective specs into a ...computer(!!!) and letting it decide the winner according to which looked the best on paper. Which was Boeing's variable sweep wing design, because they had not yet begun to "cut metal" and thus had not yet found (as they would) that the amount of materiel needed to give the wing hinge mechanism the structural integrity mandatory for commercial ops was so much greater than originally thought that the overage alone was (literally) equal to the plane's entire(!) payload (ca. 50 TONS!!!), leading to a scenario in which, if produced to those specs, the 2707 would have been at max ATOG before the first passenger even set foot on board, and overgrossed by their combined weight once they all were, and reducing the plane's range performance to that of another Lockheed aircraft,.......the F-104!!! Unfortunately, this design flaw was only disovered AFTER all the government money originally appropriated had been spent, the environmentalists having been defeated at each vote, leaving Boeing in a position of either doing a major redesign on their own "dime" or going back to the U.S. trough. They opted (a no-brainer there) for "plan-B", but were doomed when the word leaked out that the fixed-wing re-work wasn't much better than the variable sweep original, thus causing Congress to bail on the scheme altogether, citing hysterical (and phony as a Confederate $3 bill) "environmental concerns" as a cover for a FACE-SAVING(!!) exit from what was actually shaping up as the biggest technological failure in the history of aviation and a bodyblow to the prestigious (and lucrative) legend of U.S. technological supremacy. In short, it was all politics. If LBJ had left well enough alone, Lockheed would have won, going away, and third generation L-2000s (sporting synthetic foward vision instead of a 'droop snoot", fly-by-wire controls, FADEC-controlled JTF-17s, uprated to allow taking off (quietly) on fan power alone power alone, and using electric field generation to control the sonic boom) would be filling the skies today. And THAT'S the "rest of the story".

--Bob the Dog

I heard that the remains of the prototype are in some junkyard in Florida somewhere. What a sad legacy.

--L.I. Airplane Fan

The Boeing SST, well part of it, has been fully restored at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos California (San Carlos is located somewhere between San Francisco and San Jose).

--MikeSullivan

Growing up in the Super70s I was and still am a great fan of airplanes. I was but ten years old when the SST project was canceled. . . it was only later that I found out all the facts behind it.

Sad to say but the whole situation was indicative of the loss of vision and imagination this country once had. Where once we dreamed and envisioned living and working on the moon for example now there is only talk. And it still takes 5-6 hours to cross the Atlantic by plane. . . a sad legacy indeed.

All I can say in closing is maybe one day soon we will see men and women of great vision and invention.



Thank goodness we can still dream.

--T-Cat21