AVIATION: Phil Johnson

For 20 years, solid, hard-headed Philip Gustav Johnson, president of the Boeing Aircraft Co., did his best to take the romance out of aviation. But he never forgot the romantic characters of aviation’s past. When the Army allowed the company to use a Flying Fortress for wartime business he picked George Willingham, a tiny, aging, ex-air-mail pilot, to fly it. Last week the plane, nicknamed The Drone, carried the pair from Seattle to Washington, D.C., a trip which had become routine since Johnson began mass production of the huge B-29 Superfortresses.

Phil Johnson, who had a Scandinavian indestructibility which no amount of toil seemed to affect, stopped off for a day’s work at Boeing’s Wichita plant on the way home. That night, without warning, he collapsed with a cerebral hemorrhage. By next evening Phil Johnson was dead.

Men in every branch of the industry heard the news with incredulity. Phil Johnson was only 49. He had called the bets for the company since its ramshackle beginnings; he had shouldered the vast problem of expanding Flying Fortress production after Pearl Harbor; he was counted on to steer Boeing’s postwar course.

Transport Revolution. Johnson had steered a postwar course before. He left the University of Washington during World War I to become an engineer in Bill Boeing’s little airplane factory, became its president nine years later. When the company won a contract to carry air mail from San Francisco to Chicago, he built the planes for the job, and then found himself running an airline. From the first he disapproved the carnival atmosphere aviation had then, and the disapproval drove him to innovations that have become standard in all U.S. air transport.

Boeing Air Transport, which was later incorporated into United Airlines, was the first radio-equipped transport line; the first with stewardesses, one of the earliest with pilots in uniform. In 1933 Phil Johnson built the first all-metal, twin-engined transport—the famed Boeing 247, which instantly outmoded the hodgepodge of U.S. aircraft equipment.

Boeing and United became part of a huge aircraft group—United Aircraft & Transport Corp., with Johnson, at 39, its president. He thus became a natural target in 1933 when the Black Committee’s famed airline investigation began. The Air Mail Act of 1934 ostracized him and other airline officials from the industry. Johnson contemplated retirement but, instead, went off to organize and operate Trans-Canada Airlines. His exile ended in 1939, after the legislation which had driven him out of the industry was rescinded. Vindicated, he came home, became president of Boeing.

By then Boeing was millions of dollars in debt. Johnson shored up the finances, fought for bigger contracts, and finally put Boeing back on its feet.

Boeing’s emphasis on design had produced the two most famous heavy bombers in the world. But its future is as foggy as is that of all planemakers. Boeing will miss Phil Johnson’s clear foresight.