Boeing spun off its fuselage plant in 2005 — it took 20 years and a near-crash to undo it

In June 2005 Boeing sold its Wichita, Kansas factory and two smaller plants in Oklahoma to the investment firm Onex Corporation for $900 million in cash plus $300 million in assumed debt, a total of $1.2 billion. The buyer renamed the operation Spirit AeroSystems and took it public the following year. The rationale was driven by CEO Harry Stonecipher, a former McDonnell Douglas executive focused on financial metrics: divesting the plants improved Boeing’s return on net assets, a measure Wall Street watched.

The spin-off turned a captive internal supplier into a publicly traded company with its own profit obligations. Boeing became Spirit’s largest customer, but the relationship shifted from direct production control to contract management. Over the following years Spirit accumulated quality problems: an employee class action lawsuit filed in 2023 alleged that workers were told to cover up defects, undercount failures, and falsify records. The same fuselage section that Spirit built for the 737 MAX would later become the subject of the most damaging quality investigation in Boeing’s history.

On January 5, 2024, the door plug on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 — built into the fuselage by Spirit and later unbolted at Boeing’s Renton factory for rivet repair — blew out at 14,830 feet. The NTSB investigation traced the root cause partly to Spirit’s removal of the plug without proper process documentation. Boeing announced in June 2024 that it would acquire Spirit in an all-stock deal worth $4.7 billion in equity — about $8.3 billion including Spirit’s debt — roughly seven times what it sold the same assets for. The acquisition closed in December 2025.