This book is written by George M Skurla (a former President of the Grumman Corporation) and William H. Gregory. Mr Skurla opinions on what happened at Grumman are certainly controversial and strong.
Grumman produced many of the legendary naval aircraft already familiar to readers.
There’s lots of interesting “behind the scenes” details of the F-14 program and the fiscal tool is took on the company. The F-14 Tomcat program was still a financial burden to the company even after the Iranians bought 80 of them in the 1970s. For years Grumman operated at a loss while trying to get the Tomcat into service and maintained properly. The A-6 Intruder program was more a success but Grumman didn’t even bid on the re-winging that Boeing eventually won. They were also unable to sell the improved A-6F Intruder.
Some of the most successful programs that Grumman Aerospace had were the E-2 Hawkeye and the E-8 JSTARS.
Since before World War 2, the Government, the Navy specifically, had been Grumman’s primary customer. There were numerous attempts at diversification, canoes, aluminum truck bodies, electronics, refrigeration units, solar energy, trash disposal and many many more. The author believes that these attempts were distractions from building airplanes.
There’s some particular angst from the author over the spin-off of Gulfstream after Grumman had produced the relatively successful Gulfstream 1.
All in all a good book for anyone into learning about the “ins-and-outs” of the aerospace industry and Grumman’s internal politics in particular.
The book is available here.
I also found this somewhat average short documentary on the Grumman Corporation:
