Boeing: From a Red Barn to the 787

Every Boeing airliner traces back to a red wooden boathouse on a muddy river in Seattle. In 1916, a timber businessman called William Boeing, who had caught the flying bug a few years earlier, set up shop there to build seaplanes. The building is still around: it was moved to Seattle’s Museum of Flight, where visitors can walk through the place where the company began.

More than a century later, Boeing is one of the two companies that build most of the world’s large airliners. Its story is one of enormous bets, each of which could have sunk the company and several of which changed how the world travels.

The early years: mail planes and the first modern airliner

Boeing’s early business mixed building aircraft with flying them: its own airline carried airmail across the United States. In 1933 it produced the Boeing 247, an all-metal, twin-engined monoplane with retractable landing gear that is often called the first modern airliner. It was quickly outsold by the Douglas DC-3, but it set the pattern for everything that followed.

In the late 1930s came the 307 Stratoliner, the first pressurised airliner in service, which let passengers fly above much of the weather. Read how that works in our cabin pressurisation explainer.

Betting the company on jets

In the early 1950s Boeing built a jet transport prototype with its own money, a risky move at a time when airlines were still buying propeller aircraft. The yellow-and-brown prototype, the 367-80 or “Dash 80”, first flew in 1954. It became the 707, which entered service with Pan Am in 1958 and brought the jet age to millions of passengers. The Dash 80 itself survives today at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center.

The 747 and the biggest building in the world

Boeing’s next bet was even larger. In the mid-1960s Pan Am wanted a jet more than twice the size of the 707. Boeing had nowhere big enough to build it, so it built a new factory next to Paine Field in Everett, north of Seattle, in 1967. The 747 first flew in 1969 and entered service with Pan Am in January 1970. The Everett plant has grown ever since, and today it’s the largest building in the world by volume, around 13.4 million cubic metres. Read the full story in the 747 and mass travel.

Where Boeing builds today

• Renton, Washington: the 737 family, rolled out at a rate of dozens per month. Its narrowbody factory sits on the south shore of Lake Washington.
• Everett, Washington: the 767 (largely for freighters and military tankers) and the 777, including the new 777X.
• North Charleston, South Carolina: all 787 final assembly since 2021, with a major expansion under way to raise production.

Parts arrive from suppliers all over the world. Large 787 sections fly in on the Dreamlifter, a 747 rebuilt with a vastly enlarged fuselage to carry them.

The merger and the hard years

In 1997 Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, its long-time rival and the maker of the DC-9, DC-10 and MD-80 family. The deal created the world’s largest aerospace company. Many analysts have since argued that it shifted Boeing’s culture away from engineering and toward cost-cutting and finance, a debate that grew louder after the company’s recent troubles.

Those troubles were serious. The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide from March 2019 to late 2020 after two officially investigated accidents linked to a flight-control system called MCAS. Production quality problems followed, and the 777X has been delayed by years. Boeing remains one of the world’s two dominant airliner makers, but rebuilding trust with regulators, airlines and passengers has become as important as building new aircraft.

Its great rival, Airbus, started in 1970 with almost nothing. Its rise is the other half of this story.

Sources & Further Reading

• History of Boeing — Wikipedia ↗
• Boeing Everett Factory — Wikipedia ↗
• Boeing Renton Factory — Wikipedia ↗
• Boeing completes McDonnell Douglas merger — Boeing ↗
• Fifteen years of Boeing South Carolina — Boeing ↗