Like cars, trains and buses, planes are one of the means of transport that we take for granted. We owe the fact that it has come this far to one company in particular: no aircraft company has changed flying as fundamentally as them Boeing Company.
It all started very small: William Boeing, scion of the successful immigrant Wilhelm Böing from Hohenlimburg in the Sauerland, entered the timber trade with $60 in equity. Son “Bill” Boeing was already able to study at Yale, saw an airplane for the first time at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific trade fair in Seattle in 1909 – and was infected by the flying bug.
Soon he was at the controls of an airplane himself, developed the first “B & W Seaplane” together with George Conrad Westervelt and founded the Pacific Aero Products Company on July 15, 1916, which was called the Boeing Airplane Company from 1917. Today, Boeing is the largest aerospace company in the world with 160,000 employees and sales of $96 billion.
The photo series shows the milestones of Boeing’s aircraft developments. Sad irony of history: Bombers built by Boeing destroyed the small town of Hohenlimburg at the end of the Second World War.