Boeing
Boeing Commercial Airplanes is the division that produces Boeing's commercial jetliners. Today, the main commercial products consist of the 717, 737, 747, 757, 767, and 777 families of airplanes, and the Boeing Business Jet. New product development efforts are focused on the Boeing 7E7, a super-efficient airplane that is expected to be in service in 2008.The founder of the Boeing company was a timberman named William Boeing who assembled his first seaplane in a Seattle boathouse in 1912. Four years later William Boeing started Pacific Aero Products, the forerunner of the Boeing Airplane Company, which came into being in 1917.
During the First World War, the Boeing Airplane company manufactured fighter aircraft but it was the bomber and commercial aircraft developed during the 1930s, such as the 247 and the B17, which were to become synomynous with the Boeing name.
During the Second World War, Boeing made only two models, the B17 Flying Fortress and the B29 Superfortress bombers; the advanced mass production techniques developed to assemble these types were to help Boeing become the world's dominant aerospace company for the next 30 years.
In 1947 Boeing used captured Nazi research data to build its first swept-wing jet bomber, the B47. This in turn laid the groundwork for the advanced Dash 80 of 1954, which formed the basis of the KC-135 tanker and, eventually, the 707 airliner that began Boeing's dominance in commercial air transports. The 707 was the foundation of an entire family of Boeing airliners and its fuselage cross-section was subsequently used for the 727, 737 and 757 families.
In 1969 Boeing introduced the 747, the so-called 'jumbo jet' and possibly the world's best known airliner. The next few years were a period of consolidation for the company. However, in the 1980s Boeing faced a serious challenge from a new competitor, the European Airbus Industrie consortium, and launched the 777 in 1994 to combat the Airbus A330/340. The 777 was the first completely new Boeing airliner for many years. Two years later, the Boeing company tookover its longtime US rival McDonnell Douglas (MDC). The latest addition to the Boeing airliner family is the 717, based on the MDC MD-95 and the only MDC-derived model still in production today.
2001 saw Boeing announce the "Sonic Cruiser", a high-subsonic aircraft production plans were subsequently abandoned in favour of the 7E7.
