Originally Posted by
Allan Lupton
Yes Shirer (Boeing Chief Engineer) and his team were "shown all" at DH's and a fortnight later announced the 727. "in early 1960 Hatfield accepted a return visit to Boeings and were politely received and told nothing". (as above this is from a senior de Havilland executive closely involved at the time.)
ETA SSD is right that you don't plan for now but for the future, hence the A300 and A380 had considerable capacity increases over what existed and were ready to go into service when needed
The old chestnut that Boeing copied de Havilland really needs to be put to bed. The idea that mighty Boeing, with nearly ten years experience of churning out hundreds of big jets, needed to learn anything from puny de Havilland, who's experience of (not very) big jets was producing a hundred or so Comets, is laughable. DH was a cottage industry compared to Boeing and the UK government knew it, hence the encouragement to merge the various British manufacturers into two groups.