A timber man on Lake Union

On 15 June 1916 a twin-float biplane called the B&W lifted off Lake Union in Seattle. It had been built in a boathouse hangar by William Boeing, a Yale-educated timber man who had caught the flying bug at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and George Conrad Westervelt, a US Navy engineer. A month later, on 15 July, Boeing incorporated Pacific Aero Products Co.; in April 1917 he put his own name on the door. The Navy declined the two B&Ws, so they were sold to a flying school in New Zealand, where one later made the country’s first official airmail flight. Boeing’s very first sale was an export.

The engineer who kept it alive

The man who kept the young firm alive was not Boeing at all. Wong Tsu, an MIT graduate hired in May 1916 as the company’s first engineer, designed the Model 2, and after testing at Pensacola the Navy ordered 50 — the first real money. Later Boeing chief executives made a point of crediting him with the company’s survival. Mail did the rest: Boeing Air Transport began flying the San Francisco–Chicago route on 1 July 1927, and by 1929 Boeing sat inside United Aircraft and Transport alongside Pratt & Whitney and Chance Vought. The Air Mail Act of 1934 broke that empire into three — Boeing Airplane Company, United Airlines and United Aircraft — and William Boeing sold his shares and walked away.

Bombers by the thousand

The Model 299 bomber first flew on 28 July 1935. Three months later it crashed on take-off because a control gust lock had been left engaged, killing Major Ployer Hill and test pilot Leslie Tower. Out of that wreck came something every pilot still uses: the written pre-flight checklist. The Army ordered 13 test aircraft anyway, and as the B-17 Flying Fortress it was built 12,731 times by Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed-Vega. The B-29 Superfortress followed in 1942; its design and production cost $3 billion, far more than the $1.9 billion Manhattan Project. By March 1944 Boeing was turning out more than 350 aircraft a month. When peace came, 70,000 Boeing workers lost their jobs.

The barrel roll that sold the Jet Age

The jet age arrived via the bomber shop. The B-47 of 1947 hung its engines in pods under swept wings, a layout that shaped the jet airliners to come. In October 1948 Boeing engineers redesigned their next bomber over a single weekend in a Dayton hotel; the result, the B-52, first flew in 1952 and is expected to serve into the 2050s. Then the company bet its own money on a jet transport demonstrator, the 367-80. On 7 August 1955 test pilot Tex Johnston rolled it, unauthorised, in a full barrel roll over Lake Washington to show what the jet could do. The 707 that followed began service with Pan Am in October 1958, and its military sibling, the KC-135, is still refuelling the US Air Force.

Turn out the lights

Next came the boldest bet of all. Under Joe Sutter, Boeing designed the 747 and built a new factory at Everett just to assemble it — still the largest building in the world by volume. The jumbo first flew on 9 February 1969, and 1,574 were built before the last left for Atlas Air in January 2023. But the bet nearly broke the company. Congress killed funding for Boeing’s supersonic transport in March 1971, and the commercial workforce collapsed from 83,700 in 1968 to 20,750 in 1971. Seattle unemployment hit 14 per cent, and a billboard asked the last person leaving Seattle to turn out the lights. The humble 737, first flown in 1967, would go on to become the best-selling airliner of its era.

The merger that swallowed its parent

In the mid-1990s Boeing went shopping. In December 1996 it agreed to buy Rockwell’s aerospace and defence business, the heir to North American Aviation, and days later announced a merger with McDonnell Douglas, completed in August 1997. Boeing kept the name, but many observers argued that McDonnell Douglas kept the culture, with finance pushing aside engineering. The headquarters left Seattle for Chicago in 2001, and scandal followed: the Darleen Druyun tanker affair cost chief executive Phil Condit his job in 2003, and his successor Harry Stonecipher was forced out in 2005. In 2022 the head office moved again, to Arlington, Virginia.

346 lives and four missing bolts

Then came the 737 MAX. Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019, killing 346 people; both were traced to the MCAS flight-control software, and 387 aircraft were grounded worldwide. A 2021 settlement with US prosecutors cost $2.5 billion. On 5 January 2024 a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines MAX 9 at more than 16,000 feet; investigators found four bolts had been removed at Renton and never replaced. A seven-week machinists’ strike, a $11.8 billion loss and 17,000 job cuts followed in 2024. Under Kelly Ortberg the recovery came in 2025: 600 deliveries, $89.5 billion in revenue, a return to profit and the F-47 sixth-generation fighter contract.

Factories

• Lake Union boathouse · Seattle, Washington — Where the first B&W seaplane was built in 1916
• Plant 2 · Seattle, Washington — B-17 production
• Everett · Washington — Built for the 747; widebody assembly; the world’s largest building by volume
• Renton · Washington — 737 assembly; where the Alaska 1282 door-plug bolts were left out
• North Charleston · South Carolina — Commercial aircraft production
• Ridley Park · Pennsylvania — V-22 Readiness Operations Center, established 2015
• Sheffield · South Yorkshire, England — Factory opened 2018
• Headquarters · Crystal City, Arlington County, Virginia — Since 2022, after Chicago (2001–2022) and Seattle (1916–2001)

People

• William E. Boeing · founder — Timber businessman; sold out after the 1934 breakup
• George Conrad Westervelt · co-founder, US Navy engineer — Co-designed the B&W seaplane
• Wong Tsu · first engineer, hired 1916 — Designed the Model 2, the company’s first commercial success
• Clairmont Egtvedt · president from 1933, then chairman
• Leslie Tower · chief test pilot — Died after the 1935 Model 299 crash
• Wellwood Beall · engineer — Championed the 314 Clipper, reusing the XB-15 wing
• Tex Johnston · test pilot — Barrel-rolled the 367-80 over Lake Washington, 1955
• Joe Sutter · engineer — Led the 747 design team from 1965
• Phil Condit · chief executive — Led the McDonnell Douglas merger; resigned over the 2003 tanker scandal
• Harry Stonecipher · chief executive — Forced out by the board in March 2005
• Jim McNerney · chairman, president and chief executive from June 2005
• Dave Calhoun · chief executive 2020–2024 — Announced his departure after Alaska 1282
• Kelly Ortberg · president and chief executive since 2024

Records and firsts

• Everett plant: world’s largest building by volume
• 307 Stratoliner: first pressurised-cabin transport aircraft, 1938
• 314 Clipper: first aircraft to carry a sitting US president, January 1943
• 247: San Francisco to New York in 19.5 hours on its first service, 1933
• 777: first commercial aircraft developed entirely by computer-aided design
• 787: first airliner with an airframe primarily of composite materials
• 737: highest-selling airliner until October 2019, most delivered until September 2025
• B-29: most expensive weapons programme of the Second World War, $3 billion
• MQ-25: first air-to-air refuelling by an unmanned tanker, 4 June 2021
• MQ-28: first unmanned aircraft to fire an AIM-120 AMRAAM, 8 December 2025
• KC-135: more than 60 years of continuous service with its original operator