BOEING COMPANY

BOEING COMPANY. In 1917, one year after forming Pacific Aero Products in Seattle, William E. Boeing changed his young firm's name to Boeing Airplane Company. During World War I, Boeing Airplane supplied American military forces with planes and assisted in training pilots. In 1929, Boeing Airplane joined several other firms, including United Air Lines, to form the United Aircraft and Transportation Company. Frustrated with a government investigation into the formation of this and other aircraft holding companies, Boeing retired in 1933 and Philip Johnson became the company's new president, a position he held until his death in September 1944.

Upon U.S. entry into World War II, Boeing began supplying planes to the military. Boeing's initial involvement was rather inauspicious: it supplied only 255 small trainers and 38 bombers out of the military's first order of 6,000 aircraft. Yet Boeing's B-17 bomber, nicknamed the Flying Fortress, proved tremendously effective and the military ordered large numbers of the plane. During its peak production period in the middle of 1944, Boeing produced a new B-17 every ninety minutes. To handle this demand, Boeing enlarged the workforce at its Seattle factories from under 2,000 workers in 1938 to nearly 45,000 in 1945.

Although the B-17 was a tremendous success, the military needed an even bigger plane. Boeing began designing one in 1942, an effort that culminated in the B-29 bomber, nicknamed the Superfortress. A very complicated aircraft, the B-29 became the second most expensive weapons project of the war, trailing only the development of the atomic bomb. These two projects were ultimately united when it was decided to use B-29s to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

After the war, Boeing again began to produce civilian aircraft. In 1953 William Allen, who had replaced Phil Johnson as the company's president, convinced government officials to allow Boeing to use government-owned facilities to develop a new civilian-military jet. In May 1954, Boeing introduced the B-707, a commercial jet that proved immediately popular. During the 1960s, Boeing introduced two new jet models, the 727 and the 737. Its next significant contribution was the introduction of the first jumbo jet, the 747, which was capable of carrying twice as many passengers as the next biggest aircraft. Boeing delivered the first 747s in 1969, and this model helped secure its place in the competitive commercial aircraft market. By the 1990s, only two commercial aircraft makers were left: Boeing and Airbus, a European consortium led by France and Germany.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCraw, Thomas K. American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2000.

Rodgers, Eugene. Flying High: The Story of Boeing and the Rise of the Jetliner Industry. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996.

Sell, T. M. Wings of Power: Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

Martin H.Stack

See alsoAir Transportation and Travel ; Aircraft, Bomber ; Aircraft Industry ; World War II, Air War against Germany ; World War II, Air War against Japan .