Boeing

Headquarters	100 North Riverside Chicago , IL 60606 United States

Legally known as Boeing Company, Boeing is an aircraft and spacecraft development company in the Aerospace industry. The company, together with its subsidiaries, designs, develops, manufactures, sells, and supports: commercial jetliners, military aircraft, satellites, missile defense, human space flight and space launch systems.

Company Heritage

Boeing was founded by William E. Boeing. Boeing was incorporated on July 15, 1916, as the "Pacific Aero Products Co.", in Seattle, Washington. The company changed its name to "Boeing Airplane Company" on May 9, 1917.

Background & Birth

In 1903, two events launched the history of modern aviation. The Wright brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., and William Boeing left Yale engineering college for the West Coast. Boeing moved to Seattle, Wash., in 1908 and, two years later, went to Los Angeles, Calif., for the first American air meet. Boeing tried to get a ride in one of the airplanes, but not one of the dozen aviators participating in the event would oblige. Boeing came back to Seattle disappointed, but determined to learn more about this new science of aviation. Boeing's air travel was mostly theoretical, explored during conversations at Seattle's University Club with George Conrad Westervelt, a Navy engineer who had taken several aeronautics courses from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The two checked out biplane construction and were passengers on an early Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Co.-designed biplane that required the pilot and passenger to sit on the wing. Westervelt later wrote that he "could never find any definite answer as to why it held together." Both were convinced they could build a biplane better than any on the market.

In the autumn of 1915, Boeing returned to California to take flying lessons from another aviation pioneer, Glenn Martin. Before leaving, he asked Westervelt to start designing a new, more practical airplane. Construction of the twin-float seaplane began in Boeing's boathouse, and they named it the B & W, after their initials.

Early Years

After Charles A. Lindbergh made the first solo nonstop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in a Ryan monoplane in 1927, there was a tremendous surge of interest in aviation.

William Boeing developed a close business relationship with Fred Rentschler, president of Pratt & Whitney, manufacturer of the air-cooled engine that made the Model 40A a success as a mail and passenger transport. In 1929, Rentschler and Boeing set up a new holding company called the United Aircraft and Transport Corp. (UATC). The Boeing Airplane and Transport Corp. became UATC on Feb. 1, 1929, with Boeing as chairman and Phil Johnson as president.

War & Post-war Development

The United States entered World War II only 16 months after Boeing introduced the Stratoliner. Sales of commercial transports came to a halt. Suddenly, the country needed warplanes, and soon all the aircraft manufacturers began too produce the warplanes the USAF needed.

On June 20, 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps became the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF). To serve the USAAF during World War II, Boeing produced the country's most important heavy bombers, the B-17 and the B-29; Douglas produced the C-47 and several other crucial military transports and medium bombers. North American built the country's most universally used trainers, the B-25 Mitchell and the P-51 Mustang.

In 1940, the Army Air Corps ordered 80 heavily armed versions of the B-17 Flying Fortress. Twenty were delivered to the British Royal Air Force in the fall of 1940. These were the first Flying Fortresses to enter combat. By 1941 Boeing workers were building B-17s at a rapidly increasing rate.

The years immediately following the end of World War II came with change. The military canceled its bomber orders; Boeing factories shut down and many people lost their jobs. Aircraft Industry was somewhat ruined.

The CEO promised to start hiring people back as soon as airlines ordered the Stratocruiser, a luxurious commercial airliner version of the company's four-engine troop C-97 transport, which first flew in 1944. oeing also expanded its product base beyond military aircraft by becoming a major producer of small turbine engines during the 1950s and 1960s. Work continued on the B-50 bomber, although the Army had cut its initial order of 200 down to 60.

But the elegant Stratocruiser was not the financial breakthrough the company was hoping-for. What contributed most to the company coffers was adapting the C-97 air freighter as a propeller-powered troop carrier and as the KC-97, an aerial tanker.

Jet Era

By the late 1950s, the technologies forged in the fires of World War II had impacted every aspect of business and manufacturing. In less than a dozen years, these innovations brought the civilized world into the modern era. The company's CEO knew that the company had the scientists, the experience and the facilities to lead the country into uncharted territories -- across barriers of sound, time and space. Boeing created new divisions to meet the challenges that came with the Space Age. Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories was created in 1958, and the Pilotless Aircraft division, formed for Bomarc, became the Aerospace division in 1959. In March, 1960, Boeing acquired the Vertol Aircraft Corp., a major helicopter producer located in Philadelphia. Vertol began as a tiny operation called the P-V- Engineering Forum, incorporated in 1943 by Frank Piasecki, which later became the Piasecki Helicopter Corp.

In 1958, the U.S. Air Force established the Dyna-Soar development program. Named after "dynamic soaring" or skipping re-entry, it had three different approaches to crewed spaceflight. One was a blunt re-entry shape that later emerged as the McDonnell-built Mercury capsule. Another was a tailored version, allowing the crew to maneuver the vehicle during re-entry. The third was a flat-bottomed hypersonic glider. The Boeing Dyna-Soar, designed to be a 35.5-foot-long piloted vehicle with a sharply swept delta 20.4-foot-span wing, was shaped remarkably like the space shuttles of today. Constructed of super alloys, with a graphite and zirconia composite nose cap, the X-20 after re-entry would have landed on a dry lakebed using three retractable struts.

As markets evolved, so did Boeing jets. Later versions of the 707 used turbofan engines to reduce noise and increase range and power. The Boeing airplane "family" expanded to include the 727, the company's first and only trijet designed for smaller airports with shorter runways. The 737 was initially a smaller, short-range, twin-engine jet, designed to compete with the Douglas DC-9. Although initial sales were slow, by June 12, 1987, the 737 was the most ordered airplane in commercial history.

Joint Ventures and Partnerships

Boeing has a partnership with Lockheed Martin Corporation.

Future Plans

Chart containing the capacity of current and future Boeing aircraft

Yellowstone Project

• Y1-Intended to replace the 100-200 passenger aircraft (B717, B737, B757)
• Y2-To Replace the 200-300 passenger aircraft (B757, B767). Was originally developed as the Sonic Cruiser, became the 7e7 which became the B787.
• Y3-Intended to replace 300+ passenger aircraft (B777, B747)

Links

See Also

• Aerospace engineering
• Engineering
• Spaceflight
• Lockheed Martin Corporation

External Links & Related Organizations

• Boeing Company Home Page
  • New Airplane Official Site of Boeing's new aircraft
  • Randy's Journal Blog of the BCA Vice president-marketing Randy Tinseth