Transport: Delight on the Duwamish

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In the peculiarly up & down profession of aviation, Boeing Aircraft Co. has had a particularly up & down career. Created by accident after a crash, it has climbed to some of the greatest heights, endured some of the dizziest falls of any concern in the business. Last week, true to form, after a long anxious glide Boeing was once more roaring upward with new gallons in the gas tank and prosperity at the joystick.

In 1913. rich, 32-year-old Yaleman William Edward Boeing tired of his family's lumber business in Seattle, hired Glenn Martin to teach him to fly. Two years later, Bill Boeing smashed his pontoons in landing. Unable to get a new pair at once, he set out to make them himself, ended up by building a whole new plane in a one-room factory with 30 employes. It turned out so well that the Army asked for some like it. Somewhat to his own surprise, Bill Boeing agreed to make them. When the Armistice abruptly killed all military contracts, the little enterprise would have died too had not resourceful Bill Boeing set his men to work making furniture.

In 1920 the ceiling lifted again when Boeing's friend Eddie Hubbard contracted to fly the mail from Seattle to Victoria. Boeing got into non-military aviation by furnishing a flying boat which became "the first U. S. plane in international mail service." Next year the company began to ride high as Boeing snagged an Army contract for 200 pursuit planes. Such jobs kept him thriving until 1927, when he again jumped into commercial aviation with what his competitors considered a suicidally low bid for the first Chicago-San Francisco air mail contract. Starting at scratch, he managed to get his planes in the air on time, made money, thus started what is now United Air Lines. This led to the formation of the first U. S. aviation trust—United Aircraft & Transport Corp.—which at once became the greatest power in the U. S. heavens. Meanwhile the Boeing plant continued to turn out top-notch planes, of which the finest was the famed 247-D—first twin-motored, low-wing, high-speed transport. Introduced in 1933, this ship outmoded the lumbering Fords and Fokkers, became standard with six U. S. lines, Deutsche Lufthansa and China's Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang.

Then disaster struck. United Aircraft & Transport, one of the chief butts of the celebrated Roosevelt-Farley air mail crackdown, was forced to split up. Bitterly attacked in Senate hearings after he displayed paper profits of $51,000,000 from an original investment of $487,119, Founder Bill Boeing was forced out of his job as chairman of United, did not return to the Boeing factory. At present he is a partner in the potent New York Stock Exchange firm of E. A. Pierce & Co. To succeed him in Boeing, the stockholders, no one of whom now owns more than 10% of the stock, chose shy Clairmont Leroy Egtvedt, 44, who entered the plant in 1917 as a draftsman.