Company
ActiveBoeing
Arlington, Virginia · Since 1916
Still independent, a manufacturer of commercial aircraft and a major defense contractor.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
William Boeing founded the company in Seattle in 1916. It built airplanes, then bombers, then the jetliners that made intercontinental flight ordinary. A merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 produced the present corporation, a commercial manufacturer and a defense contractor under one name.
Boeing's place in a space chapter is not romance. It is the workforce. The company already employs the machinists, inspectors, and regulatory specialists a new aerospace line has to hire from, because those trades do not appear when a startup wishes for them.
A factory the regulator knows
A Boeing program is a long argument with the Federal Aviation Administration, conducted by people whose job is the argument. On the floor, machinists and quality inspectors build a wing that must be the same wing every time. The 737's later crashes and the production failures that followed were a crisis of that system, not a footnote. The company is in this catalogue partly because the work of building a certified aircraft is a profession that can decay, and the decay is visible.
Still building
Boeing remains independent, now headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, with its commercial factories still around Seattle and in South Carolina. The 2045 chapter pairs it with Airbus as the incumbents. That pairing is a projection about a future space economy. The employment this page describes is the current one: airliners, defense programs, and the trades that go with both.
The work it organized
- Machinist
- Quality inspector
- Structures engineer
- Certification specialist
On the timeline
Related
- AirbusActive
- Lockheed MartinActive