On July 4, 1914, William Boeing, along with his friend George Conrad Westervelt, took their very first plane ride. It was in a Curtiss seaplane helmed by Terah Maroney, a barnstorming young pilot who had gotten his start three years earlier by building and flying an early biplane in Great Falls, Montana. Already interested in aviation, Boeing and Westervelt must have had a blast with Maroney, because they soon went to work on a seaplane of their own — which took its first flight in 1916 near Lake Union in Seattle.
Boeing launched Pacific Aero Products in July of that year and changed its name to Boeing Airplane Co. in the spring of 1917. That put the company on a flight path toward success that saw it become not just one of the top airplane manufacturers in the United States, but in the world.
Nowadays, Boeing is best known for its 7 Series jets, which debuted with the 707 in 1957, inaugurated the jumbo jet revolution with the 747 in 1969, and, in recent years, have developed a deadly reputation exacerbated by the events like the Air India Boeing 787 crash that killed 270 people. None of which has been able to knock Boeing off its perch as America’s top airplane manufacturer in terms of employees or market capitalization. At least, not yet.
But Boeing was bounced into second place for deliveries
Those issues, coupled with a machinists strike in 2024 and lingering supply-chain problems, have had their effect on the number of planes produced, though. Consider: Boeing’s deliveries dropped by some 34% last year, falling from 528 in 2023 to 348 in 2024. This was enough of a decrease that Boeing was surpassed by the smaller Textron company as the No. 1 aircraft manufacturer in the country by number of planes, with 569 deliveries.
Textron? The name may not mean much to the public, but Textron owns airplane brands like Cessna — manufacturer of the most popular aircraft in the world. We’re talking about the piston-powered Cessna 172 that, in fact, is in such high demand that one of them was stolen twice in one week. On a less anecdotal basis, Cessna has built more than 43,000 of them since 1955, when the first model took to the air. Meanwhile, another Textron brand, Beechcraft, boasts the best-selling business turboprop family in the world: King Air.
Both deliveries and revenue did slip last year at Textron, but results are supposed to gain altitude this year. Beechcraft has a contract to deliver up to 64 King Air 260 airplanes to the U.S. Navy. On the Cessna side of things, that brand followed up on last year’s certification by Transport Canada Civil Aviation by this year delivering the country’s first SkyCourier cargo-transport plane.
Does Boeing build military planes?
Remember Boeing’s buddy and company co-founder George Westervelt? He was actually a one-time lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and it appears that Boeing shared his interest in the military: Boeing (the company) began manufacturing aircraft for the Navy during World War I, starting with a seaplane for patrol missions. Boeing also was a major part of the Allies’ victory in World War II. For example, Boeing built the B-17 and B-29 bombers, the latter of which included the two planes that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At one point, Boeing even became the biggest defense contractor for aerospace and defense work in the United States. That ended after 2020, when a series of missteps, like losing $275 million on a contract for tanker planes, allowed Lockheed Martin to move into the No. 1 spot for aerospace and defenses — it had already been the No. 1 defense contractor overall.
Don’t worry about Boeing’s defense business, though. The company just won the contract for the U.S. Air Force’s next-gen fighter jet, to be known as the F-47, and it’s building next-gen satellites to control America’s nukes. As for the Boeing Starliner spaceship, well, it’s still having some troubles. After everything that went wrong withe the Starliner last time it ventured off-planet, it isn’t likely to lift off again until early next year.