Airborne Trailblazer

Bibliographic Essay

The majority of the material for this book came from five different sources. The primary source of information was 60 individual interviews with engineers and managers from NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and industry who were involved with NASA's Boeing 737 or the technology the airplane helped to research. Information pertaining to the specific research projects conducted with the airplane was also obtained from NASA technical reports, technical papers, technical memoranda, and contractor reports. Some of these technical publications were located through the University of Minnesota Walter Library, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The remainder were found through the Floyd L. Thompson Technical Library at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, or in the Advanced Transport Operating Systems (ATOPS) program office, also at Langley.

A third important source, especially with regard to the early days of the Terminal Configured Vehicle (TCV) program, was specific correspondence, memos, proposals, and notes from the ATOPS office files. The ATOPS office files also contained extensive information about the 737, including flight logs, passenger manifests, detailed reports of each research flight, and summaries of the 737's flight time by year and by research project. In addition, several managers at NASA and at the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company provided copies of their personal notes that they had saved since the time they had worked with the TCV program. Information about congressional action related to the program, political forces that impacted the airplane's research, and material on the history of technology transfer in NASA came from the historical archives at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The fifth source for the material in this book was popular literature and industry publications. Aviation Week & Space Technology, a weekly aerospace news magazine, provided good background information on relevant developments in the aviation industry and the incorporation of new technologies into commercial products. Valuable information on the theories of technology transfer and change came from a variety of publicly available books, ranging from Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout.