Boeing once owned an airline, until a 1934 law split it apart
In its early years Boeing built planes and flew them too. By 1931 its parent group had merged four small airlines into United Airlines. Then a 1934 rule demanded that aircraft manufacturing be separated from air transport, and the empire broke into three pieces: Boeing, the engine and aircraft group later called United Technologies, and United Airlines.
The company began in Seattle in 1916, when lumber industrialist William Boeing founded Pacific Aero Products shortly after building a seaplane with Conrad Westervelt. Renamed Boeing Airplane Company in 1917, it grew by 1929 into United Aircraft and Transport, which swallowed makers including Pratt and Whitney, Sikorsky and Chance Vought. After the forced breakup, Boeing kept building aircraft and later diversified, buying Vertol, then the largest independent helicopter maker, in 1960, and venturing into space, marine craft, energy and transit systems through the 1960s and 1970s.
The defining modern deal came in 1997. Boeing announced its merger with McDonnell Douglas in December 1996 and completed it on 1 August 1997, after the European Commission extracted conditions including an end to exclusive supply deals with three American airlines. Later reporting described a culture clash between Boeing's engineers and McDonnell Douglas's cost-focused managers, one the accountants reportedly won, and critics have linked that shift to later safety failures.
Those failures became a crisis. Two 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people, and regulators worldwide grounded 387 aircraft. A congressional investigation found the company had dismissed employee concerns about a flight control feature called MCAS and put deadlines and budgets ahead of safety. In January 2021 Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion to settle a fraud charge over withholding information from regulators. In January 2024 a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9, and investigators found that four bolts meant to secure it appeared never to have been refitted at the Renton factory.
The headquarters has wandered from Seattle to Chicago in 2001 and to Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, after 2022. Measured in dollars, no American company exports more than Boeing, which runs commercial, defence and services divisions, and in September 2024 its machinists struck for the first time since 2008, returning after seven weeks with a 38 percent raise over four years.
Source: Boeing
