The international Gold Quill Awards program recognizes superior achievement in the field of organizational communication. Entries are judged by two expert panels, the first regional and the second international. The first panel received 1,677 entries and forwarded 475 finalists for a second review. The Graphics Team for McDonnell Douglas Flight Times employee newspaper was selected by the international blue ribbon panel as a Gold Quill Merit winner.

The McDonnell Douglas team is among the top five percent of all the 1997 entries, which represented organizations from around the world, including such countries as Australia, Brazil, Germany and Slovenia.

Flight Times is distributed every other week to current and retired employees of McDonnell Douglas. Team members cooperatively, but independently, produce a single eight-page publication that features a "wrap" of corporate news around component-specific pages. Five editions are published bi-weekly at three print shops in Missouri, Arizona and California and distributed to more than 80,000 people worldwide.

The IABC is a 12,500-member not-for-profit association and learning community for professionals committed to improving the effectiveness of organizations through strategic communication. IABC has more than 110 member chapters in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, New Zealand and southern Africa.