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Sanford Noyes “Sandy” McDonnell — an engineer, businessman and philanthropist — was CEO and then chairman of the board of McDonnell Douglas Corp., one of the country’s largest aircraft manufacturers. He also served as national president of the Boy Scouts of America.
McDonnell was born in Little Rock on Oct. 12, 1922, to William Archibald McDonnell and Carolyn Cherry McDonnell. After graduating from Little Rock High School (now Central High Shcool), McDonnell planned to follow his father into finance. He enrolled in Princeton University in 1940 but was diverted by World War II.
In the U.S. Army, he trained as an engineer and worked in New Mexico as a technician on the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. He later wrote in a history article that as a “lowly G.I.” he had not contributed anything of note to the project and that most of the soldiers did not know what they were working on. He wrote: “At the end of the work day, I remember washing my hands until I no longer got a reading on the Geiger counter.”
Businessman and engineer Sanford (Sandy) McDonnell (From the Arkansas Aviation Historical Society collection, courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System)
After his discharge from the army, McDonnell married Priscilla Robb of Albuquerque, N.M., and they had two children. McDonnell received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton in 1945 after receiving academic credit “in absentia” for six months of engineering in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). After the war, he attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, receiving a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (1948), followed by a master’s degree in applied mechanics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1954.
McDonnell’s paternal uncle, James McDonnell, was at that time already one of the most significant aerospace industrialists of the 20th century. He had begun his engineering career in the mid-1920s at the Huff-Daland Airplane Co. in New York. After working for a series of companies, including Hamilton Aero and the Glenn L. Martin Co. during the Great Depression era, he went out on his own in 1939. In 1945, McDonnell Aircraft created its own identity by winning the U.S. Navy’s contract to develop the first carrier-based jet airplane, a significant coup in light of the Navy’s considerable ties to the Grumman and Martin companies.
Sandy McDonnell joined his uncle’s McDonnell Aircraft Corp. in 1948 as a stress engineer. He participated in the development of the supersonic F 101 Voodoo and the F-4 Phantom II jet fighters. The F-4 Phantom II ushered in an era of dominance for McDonnell products. The Phantom II had the rare distinction of being the fighter aircraft of choice of all three American air services during the 1960s. McDonnell Aircraft also produced the F-15 Eagle for the Air Force and the F-18 Hornet for the Navy in the 1970s and 1980s. While the company’s work with the military was ongoing, McDonnell aircraft entered the emerging field of aerospace, bidding on requests from the government for America’s first spacecraft, the Mercury capsule, in 1959. The company later provided the Gemini capsule and served as a major contractor for NASA in the Apollo and Skylab programs.
In 1962, Sandy McDonnell was named vice president and general manager of all combat aircraft. Five years later, McDonnell Aircraft moved into the commercial aircraft industry by merging with the ailing Douglas Co. in 1967, becoming McDonnell Douglas. The combined company continued the production of two of the industry’s standards in passenger planes, the Douglas DC-8 and DC-9. The engineering experience of the combined companies helped usher in the age of mass air travel with the tri-engine, wide-body DC-10 series.
In 1971, Sandy McDonnell became the president of McDonnell Douglas. The following year, he became CEO. He was CEO when McDonnell Douglas completed the Skylab space station in 1973. In 1980, James S. McDonnell died, and McDonnell succeeded him as chairman of the board, a role he retained until 1988. (The Boeing Co. bought McDonnell Douglas in 1997.)
During his service at the company, McDonnell had a strong interest in ethics. He had been a Boy Scout as a youth, and after serving as the national president of the Boy Scouts of America from 1984 to 1986, he used the Scout Promise as the basis for the company’s code of ethics.
In 1987, McDonnell became the first president of the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, a foundation that supports the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program that recognizes U.S. organizations. The Arkansas Aviation Historical Society inducted McDonnell into the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame in 1989.
McDonnell died at age 89 at his home in Clayton, Mo., on March 19, 2012, from complications from pancreatic cancer. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. — Richard N. Holbert and William M. Smith Jr.
This story is adapted by Guy Lancaster from the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. Visit the site at encyclopediaofarkansas.net.
