When it got out of the Boeing workshops in 1937, the 307 model,
also known as the Stratoliner, had many similarities with the
famous B-17 Flying Fortress, of the same company. Unlike the
latter, though, a huge and unpleasant bomber, the 307 was
concieved as a small comfortable commercial airplane with a
33-passanger capacity. This comfort comes, not only from the
fact that its interior is pressurised, allowing it to travel at
great altitudes, above turbulence, but also, the cylindric shape
of its fuselage is responsible for its spacious interior. You
could say the 307 set the pattern for modern airplanes: a four-
engined, pressurised plane with a five-member crew, including a
flight engineer. Ten copies of this model had been built when
WWII broke out and production stopped while every effort went
into building military models, such as the B-17. The excentric
millionaire Howard Hughes bought one that belonged to the TWA
fleet and turned into the first aerial executive means of
transportation. Industrial design