The Boeing Company’s (BA) origins date back to 1916, when William E. Boeing founded Pacific Aero Products Co., after developing the single-engine, two-seat B&W seaplane with Conrad Westervelt. Renamed The Boeing Airplane Company in 1917, Its first source of income came from the U.S. military, as Boeing began building various military aircraft (patrol bombers were a mainstay) in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1920s, the company ventured into airmail services, after which it acquired several aircraft and component manufacturers such as Avion, Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky Aviation, and Hamilton Metalplane.
In 1931, it morphed several smaller airlines into a single large airline, better known as United Airlines (UAL). It also bought up various aircraft manufacturing companies, including Avion and Pratt & Whitney.
After a series of name changes, the company went back to the name Boeing Airplane Company and was highly instrumental in building military aircraft in the second world war, including the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-29 Superfortress. After the war, the B-47 Stratojet and the eight-engine B-52 Stratofortress followed.
With the war years over, Boeing returned to the idea of building commercial planes that could take customers across the country in a single flight. That meant shifting from propeller-based aircraft to turbojets, which was not popular with airlines, which had poured millions of dollars into propeller-based airplanes. Boeing spent abundant time and money on its transatlantic airliner, and by 1958, it finally rolled out the 707, which immediately went into service for Pan American Airlines.
With the war years over, Boeing returned to the idea of building commercial planes that could take customers across the country in a single flight. That meant shifting from propeller-based aircraft to turbojets, which was not popular with airlines, which had poured millions of dollars into propeller-based airplanes. Boeing spent abundant time and money on its transatlantic airliner, and by 1958, it finally rolled out the 707, which immediately went into service for Pan American Airlines.
Boeing began branching out in the 1960s, first with a new line of helicopters, including the CH-47 Chinook and CH-46 Sea Knight military choppers, which rolled off assembly lines in 1961. The company also began developing missiles for the U.S. military, with its silo-launched Minuteman missile delivered in 1962.
But Boeing had even grander plans, as it began building both air- and land-craft for NASA. First came the Lunar Roving Vehicle, widely used on the Apollo space flights in the 1960s and 70s. Boeing also built a Lunar Orbiter, which first traveled around the moon in 1966. Boeing would also go on to build the Mariner 10 space probe and the initial Saturn V rockets that Apollo used to fly men to the moon in the late 1960s and 1970s. Boeing would also begin building vehicles for NASA’s space shuttle mission in the 1970s and continued to do so until NASA shuttered the project in 2011.
The 1980s saw Boeing refocus on the commercial airline sector, as it began work on the Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 aircraft, which featured, for the first time, a common flight deck that enabled pilots to train and fly both aircraft, thus saving airlines millions of dollars in training and staffing costs.
Computerization in the form of computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) software enabled Boeing to build its 777 aircraft in the 1990s, without having to build a physical frame for the aircraft first, saving time and money for the aviation company.
The 787 Dreamliner followed, not without presenting a host of production problems for Boeing. Building began in the early 2000s, but the Dreamliner didn’t begin filling orders until 2011, as the plane routinely failed stress tests and suffered production flaws that held up production. In 2013, further problems developed, as the 787 was grounded for a short period of time by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, due to the risk of battery fires on the aircraft.
In the end, though, the 787 proved to be the fastest and most fuel-efficient passenger aircraft in the industry, and hundreds of orders poured in from airlines around the world, ensuring another winning aircraft for the company, with annual revenues clocking in between $66 billion and $101 billion from 2006 and 2019.
By 2017, Boeing was building and delivering hundreds of their aircraft annually, with a total pre-order price tag of $134.8 billion, with more than 500 of the 737 model, the most ordered, 94 of the 787s and 60 of the 777 model.