Boeing
American global aerospace and defense corporation

The Boeing Company ( BO-ing) is an American multinational corporation that designs and manufactures airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support services. Boeing is among the largest global aerospace manufacturers; it is the fourth-largest defense contractor in the world based on 2022 revenue and is 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 result of the Boeing acquisition of McDonnell Douglas on August 1, 1997.
The Boeing Company's corporate headquarters is located in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, DC. The company is organized into three primary divisions: Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA), Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS), and Boeing Global Services (BGS). In 2021, Boeing recorded $62.3 billion in sales. Boeing is ranked 54th on the Fortune 500 list (2020), and ranked 121st on the Fortune Global 500 list (2020).
History
Origins
The Boeing Company started in 1916, when American lumber industrialist William E. Boeing founded Pacific Aero Products Company in Seattle, Washington. Shortly before doing so, he and Conrad Westervelt created the "B&W" seaplane.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Boeing” is american global aerospace and defense corporation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Boeing, American and global, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q66. VIAF identifies the subject as 135371434. The Library of Congress control number is n79134057. 6 of 8 selected statements include explicit references; 6 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2022, 1916, 1997 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boeing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.