The Sporty Game: The High-Risk Competitive Business of Making and Selling Commercial Airliners

by John Newhouse

An examination of the current state of the airline construction industry focuses on the dramatic, highly competitive, high-stakes competition between Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, and Europe's Airbus Industrie

Genres: Aviation, Nonfiction, History

242 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Wilfred John Newhouse was an American journalist and author.

Reviews

[Stephen Shapiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

The airliner business is one with lots of moving parts: the airframe and engine manufacturers, the airlines, the governments, the financiers, the passenger and fuel markets, not to mention the parts in the airplanes themselves. In The Sporty Game Newhouse manages to explain most of this business with remarkable charm. The narrative meanders quite a bit, but it keeps coming round again to the launch of the first wide-body airliners: the success of the Boeing 747, the mutual bloodbath between McDonnell Douglas's DC-10 and Lockeed's L-1011, and the future chances of an upstart European consortium called Airbus (a topic that Newhouse revisited 25 years later in Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business).

[Len Washko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very fine chronicle of the billion dollar market battles between Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Airbus and Lockheed in the seventies. Good lessons in strategy, industry vision and management. The number and magnitude of mistakes they made are astonishing - and the airlines and American manufacturing continue to the this day under the strange industry structure they created.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nearly perfect book of its kind—the author clearly believes that the people who build airplanes are forced by the way the business works to be very competent lunatics and he demonstrates that for 200-300 pages. ("Sporty" is how airliner execs of the late 70s and early 80s described behavior like betting your company on the success of, say, your new 747 design. That's kind of crazy, but it's also the only way anyone has ever built a jumbo jet... development costs are higher than the value of your company almost as a matter of course.)

I'm going to dock it one star because he spends a lot of the book wondering how Boeing will meet the need for a small two-engine jet for the shorter routes that are thriving after deregulation, but only mentions the 737 a couple of times in the book. (It was already in production but not yet stretched.)

I have a personal fondness for books that are a) about building and designing really complicated objects with b) a ton of competition that c) take place in a time when you have to build clay models of things and fax people and all that stuff. (Car: A Drama of the American Workplace is another great one.) At one point in The Sporty Game a highly advanced jet engine design is scrapped—nearly bankrupting two billion-dollar companies—because it fails a test where you throw a chicken into the engine to prove it can handle bird strikes.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sporty Game is an excellent work that was written for businessmen working in other industries who would have wanted to understand how the American airplane manufacturers were running their operations in the early 1980s, The fact that the Sporty Game is now only of historical interest does not take away from what an outstanding work it was for its era.

Newhouse's main point was that building for the commercial aviation market is a highly risky proposition as the cost of developing new airplanes is huge and that there is never any guarantee that the commercial airlines will buy yours rather than those of your competitor. The way to sure profits is to build for military purposes. Currently Bombardier is having huge problems for the very reasons described by Newhouse in this very fine book.

[Udhara De Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though published in 1982, there are so many aspects of aviation that haven’t changed since then - the big bold bets airframers make that can break companies if things go wrong, the aeropolitics of aircraft orders, and the bold and relentless and sometimes reckless optimism of airlines that lead to oversupplying the market with too many seats, leading to price wars and ultimately negatively affecting the customer. Ultimately the book builds a case for government supported aviation programs so that the US can remain a global leader in a critical and highly visible public utility - flying.

[Thamrong]

The politics of commercial aviation and the unbending determination to break the American monopoly in the long and medium ranges commercial aircraft industry. The formation of European consortium 'Airbus' and the decision on wide-body and twin engines.