Boeing, the leading aviation company, turns 100 years old today. In the century, since William E. Boeing took the fortune he made in timber and turned it to the emerging, thrilling field of aviation , his company has delivered more than a few world-changing flying machines. From its earliest days building canvas and wood seaplanes, to the iconic 747 Jumbo Jet, to the first stage of the Saturn rockets for launching the Apollo missions to the moon it has created so many historical landmarks. Despite so many ups and downs in its 100 years life span, the company has helped to change the way people travel. If we say that the world has shrunk, boundaries between the countries are blurred, Boeing is also responsible for it.
The commercial jet aircraft market and the airline industry remain extremely competitive. Boeing faces aggressive international competitors who are intent on increasing their market share, such as Airbus, Embraer and Bombardier and, to some extent, from entrants from Russia (Irkut - United Aircraft Corporation), China (COMAC) and Japan (Honda Aircraft and Mitsubishi Aircraft). Boeing has tried to be competitive by focusing on improving its processes and continuing cost reduction efforts. The company continues to compete with other aircraft manufacturers by providing customers with greater value products, services, and support. It also continues to leverage its extensive customer support services network which span the life cycle of the airplane: aircraft acquisition, readying for service, maintenance and engineering, enhancing and upgrading, and transitioning to the next model - as well as the daily cycle of gate-to-gate operations.
In last 100 years, company opened so many new facilities, a number of facilities closed, , scandals rocked, strikes took place, faced great financial stress but one thing remains constant that is its' spirit to evolve, fight and innovate.
It all started in Seattle, USA.
Story goes like this : William E. Boeing, Sr, was son of a rich German migrant. After his Yale degree, he moved to Seattle to try his luck in furniture manufacturing , he had passion for the boats and yachts. He purchased a plane in 1916 but faced some trouble in its operation, one engine part needed replacement and supplier needed few months time to replace the part. So Boeing Sr. with the help of one of his friend worked hard to set the engine right. Voila ! he was able to set right the engine, Then he decided to manufacture his own plane. His workshop was located in Red Barn Building No. 105, where he used to make furniture, boats and yachts. This place is close to the Duwamish River south of downtown Seattle.
So, it was the modest beginning of Boeing aircraft factory. His first creation was seen by certain navy officials and they were so impressed that placed order for 50 Model C seaplane . MIT graduate Wong Su was the first engineer Boeing hired and he was the one who designed company’s first engine. The company hired woodworkers to build the air frames and seamstresses to sew fabric for the wings and control the surfaces.
Later Wong Tsu returns to his native China due to some personal reasons, and Boeing hired two graduating University of Washington engineers, Clairmont Egtvedt and Philip Johnson, who would become pillars of the company.
In 1919, Bill Boeing delivered the last Model C to the Navy and had one built for himself, which he promptly used for the then-novel idea of airmail delivery. Bill Boeing and Eddie Hubbard make North America’s first international mail delivery, flying 60 letters to Seattle from Vancouver, B.C.
In 1920 the first Word War was over, with the result, Boeing’s plane sales plummeted. To survive, the company started making furniture, speedboats and planes with large fuselages designed for water landings and takeoffs — flying boats.
Boeing bought several mail carriers and forms United Air Lines; plane manufacturing and air service were controlled by Bill Boeing’s United Airplane & Transport Corp. The planes used to fly passengers and mail across one corner to the other in USA, with the longest coast-to-coast route were taking 27 hours each way. In 1930, Boeing hired one registered nurse to fly with passengers.That way, Ellen Church became the world’s first airlines stewardess.
In 1934, a scandal erupted over how airmail routes have been divided among the biggest carriers. The U.S. government, using its antitrust powers, decided plane makers can’t also own airlines. Boeing’s United Airplane &Transport Corp. was forced to shed United Airlines. The company also split its manufacturing operations: Everything east of the Mississippi becomes United Aircraft (the precursor to the modern behemoth United Technologies), and everything to the west becomes the Boeing Airplane Co.
Bill Boeing, embittered, sold his stock and left the company to breed thoroughbred horses and hang out on his yacht.
But, the Year 1934 was another important landmark in the company’s history. Pan American Airlines asked Boeing for a long-range, four-engine flying boat to ferry passengers across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Boeing used the wings and engine pods of its giant XB-15 bomber to develop the whale-shaped Model 314, nicknamed clipper with a range of 3,500 miles. Passengers travel in luxury, with meals catered by four-star hotels, 74 seats that convert into 40 bunks for overnight trips, dressing rooms and a dining salon and bridal suite.
World War II broke in 1940, Boeing camouflaged its factories in South Seattle to make them look like a residential area, with canvas houses and fake trees on factory rooftops to hide them from aerial bombing !
Company’s B-17 Flying Fortress played a strategic role in the U.S. Air Force’s bombing campaign against German industrial and military targets. Among the cities hit was Wilhelm Böing’s hometown of Hohenlimburg, a center of metalworking, where the bombing destroyed family record and genealogy.
With increased demand and its male workforce called up to fight, the company encouraged women to leave their homemaking and build airplanes. The iconic Rosie the Riveter was born. To ease the transition, as well as to ensure the women’s safety in dangerous manufacturing settings, Boeing enlisted Hollywood designer Muriel King to develop ‘Fortress Fashions’ work attire, functional clothes that were shown off in Seattle department stores’ window displays.
Boeing hired its first batch of Afro-American employees in 1942. Thousands of African Americans moved from the South to work in the Pacific Northwest’s plane factories and shipyards after President Franklin D. Roosevelt in issued Executive Order, barring racial discrimination in defense plants.
Within a span of two years, Boeing boosted production from 60 aircraft a month to 362 a month. More than 12,000 B-17s were built in one decade. What an achievement !
On the war’s Pacific front, the B-29 Superfortress carried atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki towns in Japan, which changed the course of war.
With the war drawing to an end after the Nazis retreat, Boeing aerodynamics chief George S. Schairer joined a crew of U.S. scientists scouting for technology in Germany. He found detailed research validating the use of jet engines and swept wing, angled back from the body of a plane rather than extending perpendicularly. Boeing perfects those concepts on a new jet-bomber program, the B-47, laying the foundation for every future airliner.
By the year 1955, military sales were down and Douglas Aircraft’s propeller planes dominating the world’s commercial air traffic, Boeing played on a jet airplane for passenger service. The company invested all the profit it has made since World War II on the 367-80, or “Dash 80” prototype jet but experienced trouble persuading airlines to give it a chance. So the company's President Bill Allen invited aviation bigwigs to Seattle for Seafair and planned a simple flyover to show off the new plane. Test pilot Alvin “Tex” Johnston wowed the crowd — and almost gave the fuming Allen a heart attack — by executing two surprise barrel rolled over Lake Washington. His daring stunt in the 248,000-pound aircraft worked: Pan Am ordered 20 planes within a month, Allen reluctantly decides not to fire Tex, and the plane becomes the famous forerunner of the 21,000 airliners the company has built so far.
Bill Boeing died in September 1956 of a heart attack aboard his yacht, the Taconite, in Seattle at the age of 74.
Later Dash-80 morphed into the 707 — the marketing department thought that number has a good ring — and enters service. It’s not the world’s first jetliner — that distinction belongs to the disastrous British de Havilland Comet — but it’s the first to get the formula right, ushering in the Jet Age. Boeing’s risky decision established the company as a leader in aviation. Travel by air soon begins to surpass trips by rail and sea.
By 1964, Boeing’s 727 had major design shift from four engines to three, with one in front of the tail. Highjacker D.B.Cooper parachutes from a 727 with $200,000 in cash in 1971 somewhere above Southwest Washington, never to be found, which prompted Boeing to modify the plane so its back stairs can no longer be lowered in flight.
Boeing betted the company again in 1968, to develop the 747, the world’s first jumbo jet, for Pan Am. Seattle native Joe Sutter led a team that earned the nickname “The Incredibles” as they battle critics of the unprecedented undertaking and struggle for resources against the SST (supersonic transport plane), seen then as the wave of the future. The sleepy timber town of Everett got the global limelight when Boeing picks it as the site for the 747 factory the largest building in the world by volume. 747, the so-called “Queen of the Skies” entered in service in 1970 and thus shrunk the world, allowing the masses to become globe-trotters. It holds the distinction of being the world’s biggest passenger plane for 37 years, until the Airbus A380 super jumbo appeared on the scene.
In the year 1971, the aerospace industry nose-dived amid soaring gas prices and the high cost of the Vietnam War. Then US federal funding for the SST also got cut, and Boeing was forced to slash 60,000 jobs. Seattle’s economy was deeply dependent on the company by now, so the Boeing Bust was widely felt. Two real-estate agents put up a long remembered billboard that says, “Will the last person leaving Seattle — turn out the lights.”
Boeing faced serious market competition from Airbus Industries who introduced 'fly by wire controls' . So the company developed the 757 and 767 jets. Heat was really on as the leading U.S. carrier Pan Am placed an order for this European company’s A320, a rival to Boeing’s 737.
During nineties, some 10,000 Boeing employees build large portions of the B-2 stealth bomber’s wing and shaft fuselage in Seattle, under contract to Northrop Grumman. As Boeing engineers left that program utilize the composites expertize they’ve developed to conceive a lighter, stronger tail for the new 777, and later, to create the first composite fuselage for an airliner, the 787.
The 777 was also the first Boeing plane designed digitally (with computer-aided design, or CAD) and the first to adopt fly-by-wire controls.
In 1997, Boeing acquired beleaguered plane maker and defense contractor McDonnell Douglas and gives its St. Louis-based rival’s top executives key roles, leading to the bitter joke that “McDonnell Dogulas brought Boing with Boeing’s money..” The move sparked a cultural clash that lasts for almost a decade as Boeing becomes more cost-conscious and less engineering -driven.
The merger also led to a Boeing-Airbus duopoly in commercial-jet manufacturing, as other rivals could no longer compete and began to withdraw. Boeing tries to bury Airbus by drastically discounting planes. Orders flood in, and an attempt to double production runs into trouble. Assembly lines in Renton and Everett were shut down for 25 days to unsnarl the mess.
Same year, Boeing posted its first-ever annual loss. At the behest of Boeing President Harry Stonecipher, who had been McDonnell Douglas’ chief executive, CEO Phil Condit replaced Boeing’ s commercial-airplanes chief Ron Woodard with Alan Mulally. Fortune magazine called it “the first major management shakeup in Boeing’s eight-decade history.”
Boeing’s new data-driven financial focus led the company toward services as a profit center, spawning fresh efforts from maintenance to pilot training.
In 1970 a big trouble for the company was in offing, it engaged go on an extended strike for the first time in their SPEEA union’s 56-year history, citing as the central issue a lack of respect from Boeing’s new, McDonnell Douglas-infused management, especially the abrasive Stonecipher. The 40-day walkout is the largest white collar strike in American history.
In a huge jolt to its home town, in 2001, Boeing abruptly announced shifting its corporate headquarters to Chicago. Condit said that the move will help decentralize the company and aid objective decisions on where to deploy its resources.
Boeing adopted Toyota inspired process improvement methods to cut down the cost and boost productivity while modernizing to match Airbus’ newer factories. At the Renton plant, 737 production is put on gigantic assembly lines. where the planes are tugged along the factory floor at 2 inches a minute.
The Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks devastated the air travel and rocketed the oil prices, forcing airlines to delay scores of plane orders. Resulting thereof, Boeing drastically cuts production and lay off thousands of workers.
Boeing loses the Joint Strike Fighter Contract to rival Lockheed Martin, effectively booting it out of the future jet-fighter business.
Boeing killed its ambitious Sonic Cruiser Program in 2002, proposed in March 2001 to fly at nearly the speed of sound, as airlines struggling with the post-9/11 outlook say they need more fuel-efficient planes instead. The company’s engineers respond with the 7E7 (“E” standing for “efficient”), which becomes the 787. Scandal reaches the company’s highest levels as Boeing Chief Financial Officer Mike Sears, a McDonnell Douglas veteran, arranged a job for Air Force procurement official Darleen Druyun while she’s overseeing Boeing contracts, including a controversial $23 billion aerial-refueling tanker deal. Druyun admitted that she inflated the prices on some contracts for her prospective employer. She and Sears went to jail for corruption, Condit resigned, and Stonecipher returned from retirement to clean up the shaken company.
Boeing formally launches the 7E7. It’s the first jetliner made of lighter-weight plastic composites instead of aluminum, and features electrical flight systems and new engines and wings — a combination that promises to reduce fuel and increase range. Its efficiency and smaller fuselage are expected to open new “thin” airline routes that wouldn’t work with a jumbo jet.
Mullay decided Boeing can only afford such an ambitious new jet by sharing the investment with suppliers. The company devised a global production system, with 70 percent of the plane designed and built by major partners, leaving Boeing workers to assemble completed structural sections. It’s a huge step in outsourcing that, combined with the new materials used, led to unprecedented delays.
Vought and Alenia, two of Boeing’s partners for the 7E7, built their factories in South Carolina in the year 2004. When Boeing was forced to take over the facilities and their troubled assembly lines in 2008 and 2009, the site gave the company a Southeast foothold where it later sets up a manufacturing hub to rival Puget Sound’s.
In the year 2005, Boeing sold its huge parts plant in Wichita, Kan., to Spirit Aero Systems, the culmination of years long strategy of shedding facilities from Texas to Spokane. Considerable in-house expertise goes with the various plants.
CEO Stonecipher was ousted after an affair with another Boeing executive shows he hasn’t met the code of conduct he espoused. The board passed over the popular internal choice, Alan Mulally, and hired 3M CEO Jim McNerney a protégé of former GE Chief Executive Jack Welch.
In 2007, the 787 Dreamliner’s unparalleled ordeal began to unfold. The first model unveiled to a worldwide audience later turns out to be a hollow shell with fake parts; a shortage of fasteners and software issues forced Boeing to push back the plane’s first flight. By the end of the year, Boeing acknowledged the delays will be the longest in company history, and it replaces the program chief.
Boeing was outmaneuvered in 2008, on its own turf : after the corruption scandal that derailed the company’s previous contract for the Air Force’s $35 billion tanker program, it lost the contract to European rival EADS in a shocking reversal. Boeing contested the decision, managing to win it back three years later after successfully lobbying the government and slashing the price. through new collaboration between its defense and commercial sides.
In perhaps the worst-timed of the seven Machinists gone on strike in Boeing history, IAM members walked out a week before Lehman Brothers collapses and the world falls into the global financial crisis. The strike lasted 57 days — far short of the 140-day record set by Machinists in 1948 — but Boeing’s leadership was so angered by this work stoppage amid the 787 delays that it decided to put a second 787 assembly line in South Carolina.
In a major set back to Boeing, the rival Airbus lured away one of its’ major Customer American Airlines by putting new engines on its popular single-aisle plane, launching the A320neo. Boeing abandoned longer-term plans for a complete replacement of the 737 and instead offers a 737 MAX model with upgraded engines.
The 787 Dreamliner had certain serious technical glitches and the project delayed for some three years, finally entered into service after getting dubbed the’ 7 for 7’ ‘7-late-7’ for a three year and delays. Still, the plane racked up orders at record speed.
The Machinists and Boeing delivered a December surprise in 2010 with a “tsunami-sized deal” — a long term contract ensuring an end to a string of strikes — as part of an attempt to secure the 737 MAX work for Renton.
In 2012, Boeing decided to shutter its military operations in Wichita, its final presence in Kansas. Boeing had been a key employer in Wichita since buying Stearman in 1934 and had helped the city become known as the Air Capital of the World.
The 787’s woes continued as the entire fleet is grounded globally after the model’s new lithium batteries lead to a fire in a parked plane and smoldering in another during in flight. It’s the first time a model has been grounded since 1979 and adds fuel to the Dreamliner’s troubled narrative. Boeing is forced to redesign the batteries’ steel boxes and institute new safety features.
In 2014, company’s CEO McNerney declared that the company will avoid ‘moonshots’ such as the 707 and 787 has been, in favor of reusing already developed technologies and cutting costs.
Dennis Muilenburg, previously head of Boeing’s defense unit in Washington, D.C., is named president and CEO in preparation for McNereney’s 2016 retirement.
What is in the offing Now ?
This year, Boeing lost to Northrop Grumman in a competition for the $80 billion Long Range Strike Bomber contract, leaving the military side of the company with only a few commercial derivative planes for future development, including the P-8A surveillance aircraft and the delayed KC-46 tanker. Boeing’s defense operations shrunk and now the company plan to upgrades and support services to chase military revenues.
On the commercial side, Boeing prepares to develop the next generation of jets by 2030 while it winds down production of the 747 and 767. It announces plans to reduce its workforce in a cost-cutting move to counter rising competition. Canada’s Bombardier wins a market validating order for its new CSeries single-aisle jetliner, a rival to the 737 and A320, while China’s Comac aims to have its C919 competitor in the air by 2017.
.jpg "A Gumnam Actress Strips Nude to Protest Auto/taxi Fare Hike")
