Boeing

The Boeing Company
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: BA
Industry	Aerospace, defence, space
Founded	15 July 1916, Seattle, Washington
Founder	William E. Boeing
Headquarters	Arlington County, Virginia, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Kelly Ortberg (president and CEO), Steven Mollenkopf (chair)
Products	737, 767, 777, 787, 777X, F-15, F/A-18, KC-46, AH-64 Apache, CH-47 Chinook, Starliner
Services	Boeing Global Services, maintenance, training, parts
Revenue	US$62.3 billion (2021)
Subsidiaries	Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Boeing Defense Space & Security, Boeing Global Services, Spirit AeroSystems, Jeppesen, Wisk Aero
Website	boeing.com

The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace corporation that designs and manufactures airliners, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, missiles and defence systems, and provides leasing and product support services. It is among the largest aerospace manufacturers in the world, the fourth-largest defence contractor by 2022 revenue, and the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value.

Boeing was founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. The present corporation is the product of its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas on 1 August 1997, a transaction whose cultural consequences remain the most contested question in the company's modern history. Corporate headquarters are in the Crystal City neighbourhood of Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. The company is organised into three divisions: Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Boeing Defense, Space and Security, and Boeing Global Services. It recorded 62.3 billion dollars in sales in 2021 and ranked 54th on the Fortune 500 and 121st on the Fortune Global 500 in 2020.

For most of the twentieth century Boeing was regarded as the pre-eminent aircraft manufacturer in the world and, through the 707 and the 747, as the company that made intercontinental air travel ordinary. Since 2018 it has been defined instead by a sequence of safety and quality failures: two fatal crashes of the 737 MAX that killed 346 people, a twenty-month grounding of the type, a mid-air fuselage panel departure in 2024, criminal proceedings arising from its representations to regulators, and the repeated slippage of the 777X and Starliner programmes. The central argument about the company concerns whether these are unrelated engineering failures or the accumulated result of a strategic shift, beginning with the McDonnell Douglas merger, that subordinated engineering judgement to financial return.

History

Origins and the United Aircraft era, 1916 to 1934

The company began in 1916 when the lumber industrialist William E. Boeing founded Pacific Aero Products Company in Seattle. Shortly before, he and Conrad Westervelt had built the B&W seaplane, a float biplane constructed partly from materials Boeing's timber business had ready access to. The organisation was renamed Boeing Airplane Company in 1917.

Boeing formed Boeing Airplane and Transport Corporation in 1928, and in 1929 the group was renamed United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, acquiring a succession of aviation businesses including Avion, Chance Vought, Sikorsky Aviation, Stearman Aircraft, Pratt & Whitney and Hamilton Metalplane. In 1931 it merged its four smaller airlines into United Airlines.

The resulting conglomerate controlled aircraft design, engine manufacture, propellers and the airline that flew the aircraft, together with lucrative federal airmail contracts. The arrangement collapsed under political scrutiny. The Air Mail scandal of 1934 and the resulting Air Mail Act required that aircraft manufacturing be separated from air transportation. United Aircraft and Transport was broken into three: Boeing Airplane Company retained manufacturing west of the Mississippi; United Aircraft, later United Technologies, took the eastern manufacturing businesses; and United Airlines became an independent carrier.

William Boeing, embittered by the proceedings, sold his holdings and left the industry.

Military aircraft and the war

The 1930s established the design capability that defined the company. The Boeing 247 of 1933 is generally regarded as the first modern airliner, combining an all-metal monocoque structure, retractable undercarriage and cantilever wing, although Boeing's decision to supply United Airlines first allowed the Douglas DC-3 to take the market.

The Model 299, which entered service as the B-17 Flying Fortress, and the later B-29 Superfortress made Boeing central to American strategic bombing in the Second World War. Production reached extraordinary scale, with B-17s leaving the Seattle plant at a rate of more than one per hour at peak, and the workforce expanded rapidly, including large numbers of women who entered industrial employment for the first time.

The end of the war brought an abrupt contraction, and the company survived on military orders, notably the B-47 and B-52 bombers, whose swept-wing, podded-engine configuration was derived from captured German research and became the template for nearly every jet airliner since.

The jet age

Boeing's decisive commercial gamble was the Model 367-80, the Dash 80, a privately funded prototype first flown in 1954 at a cost approaching the company's entire net worth. It produced both the KC-135 tanker for the Air Force and the Boeing 707, which entered service with Pan American in 1958.

The 707 did not invent the jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet preceded it, but it was the first commercially successful one, and it made transatlantic air travel faster, cheaper and sufficiently reliable to displace ocean liners within a decade.

A family followed: the three-engined Boeing 727 of 1963, designed for shorter runways and unsophisticated airports, which became the best-selling airliner of its era; and the Boeing 737 of 1967, a small twinjet developed on a modest budget that became, across four generations and more than half a century, the most produced jet airliner in history.

The Boeing 747 was the largest commercial risk any manufacturer had taken. Developed from a losing military transport bid, it required a new factory at Everett, Washington, the largest building in the world by volume, and nearly bankrupted the company when the recession of the early 1970s coincided with its introduction. Boeing's Seattle employment fell from more than 100,000 to about 38,000, prompting a billboard reading "Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights". The aircraft went on to serve for more than half a century, and the final example was delivered in January 2023.

Diversification and deregulation

Boeing bought Vertol Aircraft Corporation in 1960, then the largest independent helicopter manufacturer, giving it the CH-47 Chinook. Through the 1960s and 1970s it diversified into space, marine craft, agriculture, energy and transit systems, most of which were later divested.

The deregulation of American aviation in 1978 changed the market its customers operated in, favouring frequency over capacity and creating demand for efficient medium-sized twinjets. Boeing answered with the 757 and 767 in the early 1980s and, after the extension of ETOPS rules permitted twin-engined aircraft to fly long overwater routes, with the Boeing 777 in 1995, the first airliner designed entirely on computer and the first developed in structured consultation with its launch customers.

Sea Launch and satellites

In 1995 Boeing partnered with Russian, Ukrainian and Anglo-Norwegian organisations to create Sea Launch, providing commercial satellite launches to geostationary orbit from a floating platform. In 2000 it acquired the satellite business of Hughes Electronics, making it a major manufacturer of commercial and military spacecraft.

Merger with McDonnell Douglas

In December 1996 Boeing announced its intention to merge with McDonnell Douglas, completing on 1 August 1997 after regulatory delay. The European Commission imposed three conditions: termination of exclusivity agreements with three American airlines, separate accounts for the McDonnell Douglas civil aircraft business, and the licensing of some defence patents to competitors.

The merger is the hinge of every subsequent argument about Boeing. On paper the acquirer was Boeing, but McDonnell Douglas executives, led by Harry Stonecipher, took senior positions, and the financial discipline of a company that had been losing the commercial aircraft contest was applied to one that had been winning it. Quartz reported in 2020 that the merger produced a clash of corporate cultures in which Boeing's engineers and McDonnell Douglas's accountants went head to head, and the accountants won, and suggested this contributed to the conditions that led to the 737 MAX crisis.

The documentary maker Rory Kennedy, whose Downfall: The Case Against Boeing was released by Netflix in 2022, put the same case: that for many decades Boeing did extraordinary things by focusing on excellence, safety and ingenuity, treating those virtues as the route to profit, and was then taken over by people who decided that Wall Street was the end in itself.

Defenders of the merger note that consolidation was inevitable after the Cold War, that defence revenue has repeatedly stabilised the company through commercial downturns, and that the specific failures of the MAX programme have identifiable engineering and regulatory causes that do not require a cultural explanation.

Headquarters moves

Boeing moved its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, separating senior management from the engineering and manufacturing base by some two thousand miles. The decision was defended as giving leadership distance from any one business unit; critics have consistently treated it as the physical expression of the shift the merger began.

In 2018 the company opened its first European factory at Sheffield in the United Kingdom, supported by a research partnership with the University of Sheffield.

In May 2022 Boeing announced the transfer of its global headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia, citing proximity to its defence customers and stakeholders, and added a research and technology centre in northern Virginia. After the Alaska Airlines door plug accident of January 2024, a shareholder proposed returning the headquarters to the Seattle area so that engineering and quality teams would have direct access to decision makers. The board rejected the proposal.

Pandemic and contraction

In May 2020 Boeing cut more than 12,000 jobs as air travel collapsed, with plans for a total reduction of about ten per cent of its workforce, roughly 16,000 positions. In July 2020 it reported a 2.4 billion dollar loss attributable to the pandemic and the 737 MAX groundings. Further reductions were announced in August, and by 28 October nearly 30,000 employees had been laid off. In February 2023 the company announced approximately 2,000 further redundancies in finance and human resources.

In May 2023 Boeing acquired Wisk Aero, an autonomous electric vertical take-off and landing air taxi developer.

Reacquisition of Spirit AeroSystems

In June 2024 Boeing agreed to reacquire Spirit AeroSystems, its principal airframe supplier, which had been created in 2005 when Boeing sold its Wichita division to an investment firm. The transaction closed on 30 June at 4.7 billion dollars.

The reversal was an admission of strategic error. The original divestment had removed fuselage manufacture from Boeing's balance sheet and improved reported returns, but it placed the most safety-critical structural work outside the company's direct control, and quality problems at Spirit contributed materially to both the 737 MAX and 787 difficulties.

In December 2025 the Federal Trade Commission required Boeing to divest Spirit assets to resolve competition concerns, including the operations supplying Airbus and the Malaysian aerospace company Subang, which Airbus and Subang respectively agreed to buy. European regulators accepted that the remedy addressed their concerns fully.

Labour dispute of 2024

On 12 September 2024, 94.6 per cent of participating members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers rejected a contract offer that their own bargaining committee had endorsed, and 96 per cent voted to strike. Workers walked out at 12.01 am on 13 September, the first Boeing strike since 2008.

On 12 October the company announced 17,000 job cuts, about ten per cent of its global workforce, to align with its financial reality, delayed the first 777X deliveries by a further year and recorded five billion dollars of third-quarter losses. On 28 October it raised nearly 19 billion dollars through a share sale to address cash flow and avoid a downgrade to junk status.

On 1 November the union endorsed an improved offer providing a 38 per cent pay rise over four years, a 12,000 dollar ratification bonus and the restoration of an annual bonus scheme. Members accepted on 5 November, ending a seven-week stoppage.

Recent developments

On 20 May 2026 it was announced that China would purchase 200 aircraft following a bilateral meeting between China and the United States. The chief executive Kelly Ortberg said the company had had a very successful trip to China which included an initial commitment for 200 aircraft.

In September 2025 the Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing was planning a new single-aisle aircraft to succeed the 737 MAX, in an effort to recover market share lost to Airbus as a result of safety and quality problems.

Divisions

Boeing Commercial Airplanes builds the 737, 767, 777 and 787 together with freighter and business jet variants of most, and employs nearly 35,000 people, principally at Everett and Renton in Washington State and at North Charleston in South Carolina.

Boeing Defense, Space and Security builds military aircraft, rotorcraft and missiles, and space systems for commercial and military customers including satellites, spacecraft and launch vehicles. Its products include the F-15, F/A-18, KC-46 tanker, AH-64 Apache and CH-47 Chinook.

Boeing Global Services provides aftermarket support including maintenance, modification, training, parts and digital services to customers of Boeing equipment and of other manufacturers. It was created to capture a share of the aftermarket that had historically accrued to independent suppliers, and is the group's most consistently profitable division.

Commercial aircraft programmes

The commercial range in production comprises the 737 MAX family of narrow-bodies, the 767 in freighter and tanker form, the 777 and its 777X successor, and the 787 Dreamliner. Production of the 747 ended in January 2023 and of the 757 and the passenger 767 considerably earlier.

The 787 Dreamliner, launched in 2004 and first delivered in 2011 after more than three years of delay, introduced a carbon fibre composite primary structure, substantially electrical systems in place of pneumatics, and a globally distributed supply chain in which major structural sections were designed and built by partners and assembled by Boeing. The delays and cost overruns that resulted were widely attributed to that outsourcing model, and the aircraft was grounded in 2013 following lithium-ion battery fires before a redesigned containment system permitted a return to service.

The 777X, the largest twin-engined aircraft ever built, made its first flight on 25 January 2020. Following an incident during flight testing in 2021 its first delivery was deferred to 2024; further technical problems discovered in 2022 pushed it to 2025, and subsequent slippage extended it further, six or more years beyond the original schedule.

Competition with Airbus

Since the consolidation of the American industry, large commercial aviation has been a duopoly between Boeing and Airbus. Airbus overtook Boeing in annual deliveries from 2019, following the MAX grounding, and has held a substantial lead in the single-aisle segment where the A320neo family competes with the 737 MAX. The 2025 comparison was closer, with reporting that Boeing had outpaced its rival that year.

The commercial significance of the narrow-body contest is difficult to overstate: single-aisle aircraft account for the large majority of deliveries by unit and a substantial share of industry profit, and the 737's origins in a 1960s airframe constrain how far it can be updated, which is the underlying reason a successor programme is under consideration.

Safety crises

The 737 MAX crashes

Two 737 MAX narrow-body aircraft crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people with no survivors. Aviation regulators and airlines worldwide grounded the type, a total of 387 aircraft, in an unusually complete and prolonged loss of confidence in a current production airliner.

The proximate cause was the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, a flight control function added because larger engines mounted further forward changed the aircraft's handling. MCAS could command repeated nose-down trim on the basis of a single angle of attack sensor, without redundancy, and was not described in flight manuals or training materials. The commercial reason for this omission was that avoiding the need for simulator training was central to the aircraft's value proposition to airlines already operating earlier 737s.

Boeing's reputation, business and credit rating suffered severely, and its strategy, governance and emphasis on cost efficiency were widely questioned.

In June 2020 the Federal Aviation Administration identified several MAX defects that Boeing had deferred fixing in violation of regulations. In September 2020 the United States House of Representatives concluded its own investigation, citing repeated instances in which Boeing dismissed employee concerns about MCAS, prioritised schedule and budget over safety, and failed to disclose essential information to the FAA. The committee found that the assumption that simulator training would be unnecessary had diminished safety, minimised the value of pilot training and inhibited technical design improvements.

The inquiries also examined the FAA's Organization Designation Authorization arrangements, under which Boeing employees performed certification tasks on the regulator's behalf, and concluded that the delegation had left the agency without an independent view of the system that caused the accidents.

On 7 January 2021 Boeing agreed to pay more than 2.5 billion dollars to resolve a criminal fraud charge arising from its concealment of information from safety regulators: a criminal penalty of 243.6 million dollars, 1.77 billion dollars in compensation to airline customers and a 500 million dollar fund for crash victims' beneficiaries. In September 2022 it was ordered to pay a further 200 million dollars over charges of misleading investors about safety.

In March 2023 Boeing argued in court filings that the victims of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 had experienced no pain and suffering during the final six minutes of the nosedive, on the basis that impact at such speed would have been too quick to be painful. The claim was described as preposterous by HuffPost. The plaintiffs argued that passengers undeniably suffered horrific emotional distress, pain and suffering and physical impact while enduring extreme g-forces, bracing for impact, knowing the aircraft was malfunctioning and plummeting nose down at terrifying speed.

Alaska Airlines Flight 1282

On 5 January 2024 a door plug blew out of a 737 MAX 9 operating Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 shortly after the aircraft passed 16,000 feet, leaving a door-sized hole in the fuselage. The aircraft landed safely at Portland International Airport with several people injured, all subsequently medically cleared.

The FAA mandated immediate inspections of all 737 MAX 9 aircraft fitted with door plugs, grounding 171 of them. United Airlines found loose bolts on grounded aircraft, indicating a possible systemic problem. On 12 January the FAA announced a production audit of the MAX 9. On 6 February the National Transportation Safety Board issued a preliminary report finding that four bolts securing the panel had been removed at Boeing's Renton factory and appeared not to have been replaced.

The accident was significant precisely because it was not a design failure. A component had been removed during rework and reinstalled without the bolts that held it, and no record of the removal existed. It therefore pointed at manufacturing discipline and documentation rather than engineering judgement, and it undermined the assurance that the problems of the MAX programme had been confined to MCAS and resolved.

In March 2024 the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the blowout, and the chief executive Dave Calhoun and board chairman Larry Kellner announced that they would step down. In May 2024 prosecutors determined that Boeing had breached the terms of the 2021 deferred prosecution agreement, exposing it to prosecution on the original fraud charge. A subsequent plea arrangement was rejected by a federal judge, and the matter was ultimately resolved through a further agreement, an outcome criticised by families of the crash victims as insufficient.

787 quality concerns

Boeing halted 787 deliveries for extended periods in 2021 and 2022 over manufacturing defects including improper shimming and fuselage join gaps. In 2024 the engineer Sam Salehpour testified to a Senate subcommittee that sections of 787 fuselages had been forced together in ways that could shorten the airframe's fatigue life, allegations Boeing rejected, stating that extensive testing supported the structure's durability.

The former quality manager John Barnett, who had raised concerns about production standards at the North Charleston plant and was giving evidence in a whistleblower action, was found dead in March 2024 in what authorities determined was a suicide. His death drew wide attention to the treatment of employees who raise safety concerns, and successive inquiries have examined whether Boeing's internal reporting culture discouraged them.

Starliner

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, developed under NASA's Commercial Crew Program alongside SpaceX's Dragon, suffered software failures on its first uncrewed flight in 2019, a valve corrosion problem that delayed a second attempt to 2022, and helium leaks and thruster failures on its crewed flight test in June 2024. NASA judged the risk of a crewed return unacceptable and brought the vehicle back uncrewed, with the astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams remaining aboard the International Space Station until returning on a SpaceX vehicle. The programme has absorbed charges well in excess of two billion dollars against a fixed-price contract.

Corporate governance

The roles of chair of the board and chief executive were separated in October 2019 following the first MAX crashes. Dennis Muilenburg was removed as chief executive in December 2019 and succeeded by Dave Calhoun, previously a director, in January 2020.

In July 2024 Boeing announced Kelly Ortberg as chief executive. An engineer by training and formerly chief executive of Rockwell Collins, Ortberg met the FAA administrator Michael Whitaker on 8 August 2024 to discuss the company's direction, and moved his own office to the Seattle area, a symbolic reversal of the 2001 separation of leadership from manufacturing.

Shareholder pressure has focused on board aerospace expertise, on the resourcing of quality assurance, and on the balance between capital returns and investment in new products.

Financial history

Between 2010 and 2018 Boeing increased operating cash flow from three billion to 15.3 billion dollars, supporting its share price, by negotiating advance payments from customers and delaying payments to suppliers. The strategy is sustainable only while orders are strong and delivery rates rising, and it reversed sharply when both conditions failed.

From 2013 to 2019 the company spent more than 60 billion dollars on dividends and share buybacks, twice the development cost of the 787. That allocation, made in the years immediately before the MAX crisis, is the single most frequently cited item of evidence for the argument that capital was returned to shareholders rather than invested in replacing an ageing product line.

Second-quarter revenue fell to 11.8 billion dollars in 2020 during the pandemic, recovering 44 per cent to nearly 17 billion dollars in 2021. Revenue fell 15 per cent to 16.9 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2024 against the same period in 2023, with an operating loss of 1.39 billion dollars, a net loss of 1.43 billion dollars and deliveries down to 92 from 136.

Boeing delivered only 348 aircraft in 2024, its lowest output since the pandemic, ending the year with a backlog of 5,595 unfilled orders, a figure that illustrates the central feature of its position: demand for its products has not been the constraint, its ability to build them has.

Employment and labour

Approximately 1.5 per cent of Boeing employees belong to the Technical Fellowship programme, through which its most senior engineers and scientists set technical direction. The average salary was reported at 76,784 dollars in 2011.

Industrial relations have been contentious for decades. Machinists struck in 1995, 2005 and 2008 as well as 2024, and the decision to establish 787 production in South Carolina, a state without compulsory union membership, was widely understood as a response to that record. A National Labor Relations Board complaint over the South Carolina decision was withdrawn in 2011 following a settlement.

Environmental record

In 2006 the UCLA Center for Environmental Risk Reduction published a study showing that Boeing's Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a former Rocketdyne test site in the Simi Hills of Ventura County, California, had been contaminated with toxic and radioactive waste. Boeing agreed a cleanup arrangement with the Environmental Protection Agency in 2017, and clean-up studies and litigation continue.

Boeing has reported that each jet delivered in 2020 will add on average one million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere over its life, and that aircraft sold in 2020 will produce about 158 million tonnes in total. The company has committed to making its fleet capable of operating on sustainable aviation fuel by 2030 and to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and announced a renewed partnership with Mitsubishi on carbon-neutral solutions in July 2022.

Aviation accounts for about 11 per cent of greenhouse gases emitted by the American transportation sector, a share expected to grow as ground vehicles shift to alternative fuels. Boeing estimates that biofuels could reduce flight-related emissions by 60 to 80 per cent. It has collaborated with the Brazilian producer Tecbio, Aquaflow Bionomic of New Zealand and others, tested six fuels by 2007 and joined the Algal Biomass Organization in 2008. With Air New Zealand it researched jatropha, completing a two-hour test flight on 30 December 2008 using a 50-50 blend with Jet A-1 in a Rolls-Royce RB-211 on a 747-400, after which examination of the engine found no effect on performance.

Political activity and criticism

In 2007 and 2008 Boeing benefited from more than ten billion dollars in long-term loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, helping finance aircraft purchases in Brazil, Canada, Ireland and the United Arab Emirates, about 65 per cent of the bank's total guarantees in that period.

It was second on the list of top United States federal contractors in 2008 and 2009, with contracts of 22 billion and 23 billion dollars. Between 1995 and early 2021 the company agreed to pay 4.3 billion dollars to settle 84 instances of misconduct, including 615 million dollars in 2006 concerning the unlawful hiring of government officials and improper use of proprietary information.

Boeing spent 16.9 million dollars on lobbying in 2009. In the 2008 presidential election Barack Obama was by a wide margin the largest recipient of contributions from Boeing employees and executives, receiving 197,000 dollars, five times as much as John McCain and more than the top eight Republicans combined. The company secured the largest state-level tax breaks on record in 2013.

It is a member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a coalition of more than 400 companies and non-governmental organisations advocating a larger International Affairs Budget. Diplomatic cables have shown American diplomats and senior politicians intervening on Boeing's behalf to support its sales. During the administrations of Donald Trump, Paolo Zampolli described himself as Boeing's second-ranking salesperson in the world after the president, which the company did not confirm, and said he told foreign governments that if they wanted to make the president happy they should buy Boeing.

In March 2025 Boeing was awarded a contract worth more than 20 billion dollars to build the United States Air Force's Next Generation Air Dominance fighter.

Taxation and lobbying

In December 2011 the non-partisan organisation Public Campaign criticised Boeing for spending 52.29 million dollars on lobbying and paying no taxes between 2008 and 2010, instead receiving 178 million dollars in rebates, while making a profit of 9.7 billion dollars, laying off 14,862 workers since 2008 and increasing the pay of its top five executives by 31 per cent to 41.9 million dollars in 2010.

Boeing has also been accused of practices in violation of the Procurement Integrity Act in attempting to submit a revised bid to NASA for its lunar lander project.

Defence sales and conflict

The company has been criticised for supplying and profiting from armed conflict, including the war in Yemen, where its missiles were found to have been used in indiscriminate attacks that killed many civilians. In 2017 Boeing signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia covering military aircraft and guided missile systems. Research has estimated that Boeing earned between 50 and 100 billion dollars from Israeli weapons contracts between 2009 and 2022.

In 2023 it was reported that Boeing supplied 1,000 small diameter bombs for the first week of Israeli air attacks on Gaza, shipped from a United States Air Force base by the Israeli Air Force. During the Gaza war the company's share price rose on additional Israeli contracts, while demonstrations sought to disrupt defence supplier summits and block weapons shipments at Boeing facilities in St. Charles, Missouri, Tukwila, Washington and Gresham, Oregon, citing violations of international humanitarian law. Students at Florida State University, the University of Washington, Saint Louis University, the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Washington University in St. Louis called on their institutions to end partnerships with Boeing.

In 2024 students on hunger strike at Brown University named Boeing among companies from which they sought divestment. Five protesters were arrested on felony charges after blocking entrances to a Boeing facility in Heath, Ohio. The student union at Washington University in St. Louis passed a resolution calling for divestment. Israel has used the Boeing-manufactured GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb during the Gaza war, including in the bombing of a Rafah refugee tent camp, the Al-Sardi school and the Al-Tabaeen school.

Sanctions

In December 2025 China imposed sanctions on ten individuals and twenty United States defence companies including a Boeing manufacturing facility, freezing assets in China and prohibiting Chinese citizens and organisations from doing business with them. The measures followed the announcement of an 11.1 billion dollar American arms sale to Taiwan.

Corporate citizenship

Boeing operates a corporate citizenship programme concentrated on charitable contributions in education, health, human services, the environment, and the arts, culture and civic engagement. In February 2012 Boeing Global Corporate Citizenship partnered with the Insight Labs to develop a model for foundations to lead the sectors they serve more effectively.

References

External links

Official website