Spirit AeroSystems

Spirit AeroSystems began in 2005 when Boeing sold its Wichita, Kansas manufacturing operations to the private equity firm Onex Corporation for roughly $1.2 billion. That Wichita plant has a much longer history, dating back to the Stearman Aircraft company founded in 1927, and the site has been building aircraft structures continuously for nearly a century under a series of different owners. Spirit spent almost two decades as an independent public company before Boeing agreed in mid-2024 to buy it back in an all-stock deal worth about $4.7 billion, a transaction that closed in December 2025, returning Spirit to Boeing ownership after roughly twenty years apart. Spirit's core business is building large aerostructures, fuselage sections, wings, and propulsion components, for aircraft designed by other manufacturers rather than assembling complete aircraft of its own.

On the Boeing side, Spirit produces the forward fuselage for the 737 along with structures for the 747, 767, 777, and 787 programs, work that makes it one of the most consequential suppliers in Boeing's commercial supply chain and a company whose own production problems have, at times, directly slowed Boeing's delivery rates. On the Airbus side, Spirit builds A220 wings, front wing spars, and fuselage sections for the A350, a relationship that continued even while Spirit was independently owned and that has required careful management now that its parent company is a direct Airbus competitor. Beyond the two major airframers, Spirit supplies wing structures for Gulfstream's large-cabin business jets, including the G280 and the G650/G700/G800 family, and it has a defense-facing arm, Spirit Defense, that handles military and government structural work separately from its commercial lines. Its Belfast, Northern Ireland operation, built on the site of the historic Short Brothers aircraft works, adds another defense and commercial structures capability outside the US, giving Spirit a European manufacturing footprint alongside its Kansas base.

Historically, the Wichita facility also produced structures for Boeing-era military bombers including the B-29, B-47, and B-52, a lineage that connects today's commercial-focused plant back to its wartime manufacturing roots. As a Boeing subsidiary, Spirit's future shape depends heavily on how its parent integrates the business, including how it manages the ongoing Airbus relationship inherited from Spirit's independent years. For now it remains organized around the same core capability that has defined it since 2005: large-scale aerostructure fabrication and assembly for airframes designed, marketed, and sold by someone else.