In the immediate aftermath of the fuselage blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight earlier this month, Margaret O’Mara noticed something that would’ve once been unthinkable in Seattle. The University of Washington history professor observed that locals were correctly tying the safety debacle to the city’s own corporate sphere. 

But it wasn’t Boeing, the company that manufactured the faulty 737 MAX 9 plane and fueled the city’s growth once upon a time, that people were talking about. “Alaska was the center,” O’Mara says.

Conversations online and in real life are anecdotal, the researcher stresses. And, as Boeing’s role in the mishap has come under greater scrutiny from the Federal Aviation Administration and others, that initial sentiment has perhaps shifted. But Seattle’s reaction to the company’s latest public failure illuminates an undeniable—and some might say healthy—truth about the city’s relationship to the company since it moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001 and was supplanted by Amazon as the state’s largest private employer. 

“Greater Seattle's fortunes no longer hang on the fortunes of the Boeing Company in the way that they did,” O’Mara says.

Boeing is still a force locally, both in influence and sheer numbers. The company still receives very generous tax benefits from Washington, O’Mara notes, and beyond Amazon, no other private company—not even Microsoft—has surpassed its headcount in the state. Yet its presence in the region isn’t top-of-mind for many anymore, especially among the hundreds of thousands who’ve flocked here this century for tech jobs. 

“When you ask someone under the age of 45, ‘When you think of Seattle, what do you think of?’ They say tech and Starbucks, and maybe Costco and Nordstrom,” says O’Mara, “But you think coffee and computers and—oh, yeah, airplanes.”

Ahmad Corner, the founder of YP Communities, believes that shift was cemented somewhere between 2010 and 2013. The networking organization, which started in 2011 under the name Young Professionals of Seattle, has found that about 60 percent of its engaged members were people who’d lived in the area for less than five years, with most uprooting to the region for the University of Washington’s computer science program or a job at Amazon, Microsoft, Tableau, or another tech company. While “older” young professionals might understand Boeing as a major player in the history of Jet City, some newcomers today “don’t even know Boeing is a Seattle company,” Corner says.

“Everybody is so enamored with tech,” he says. “The general sentiment is: There are tech companies, and then there's other companies, and Boeing kind of falls in that other, which I guess would include anybody that's an employee at Boeing, even if they are doing effectively the same job as somebody at a tech company.”

It wasn’t that long ago that Boeing was the company in Seattle. Tech and otherwise.

“It might be hard to find another example in the United States of a community that is as closely entwined and historically connected with a single company as the relationship between Seattle and Boeing,” says Leonard Garfield, executive director of the Museum of History and Industry.

In the 20th century, as Boeing’s military contracts and the Jet Age brought tens of thousands of jobs to the area, Seattle became a “city of engineers,” Garfield says—a city of makers and problem-solvers who transferred their mindset on assembly lines to civic life. “There's a sense in Seattle that things can actually get done,” Garfield says. “There’s sometimes a belabored Seattle Process where everybody has to be around the table, but generally speaking, it's a community that has kind of rolled up its sleeves to work together and try to tackle problems.”

Its unionized workforce was more company-friendly than others, O’Mara says, in part because Boeing was “an employer where people with high school degrees could go and have a really great career and buy a bungalow and buy a boat and kind of live the Pacific Northwest dream.” Even when the 1971 cancellation of Boeing supersonic transport deal capped the Boeing Bust, a period with 60,000 layoffs, the company was “sort of seen as the victim rather than the catalyst.”

That sentiment started to shift in the late 1990s, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas and, in many accounts, transitioned from being an engineer-run company to one driven by the bottom line. Bert Goldstein, who worked at Boeing for 21 years before retiring in 1995, said many of its leaders bought into what others call “the cult of Jack Welch,” the General Electric CEO known for slashing costs. It affected how the company manufactured later models of planes.

“They did not properly monitor the contracts and made some decisions that I think were cost-saving,” Goldstein says of his former company. “In other words, they emphasized the interest of the Boeing stockholders. That was Jack Welch's big push.”

Still, it wasn’t until the company moved its headquarters away from Seattle that the city started to realize its relationship wasn’t so symbiotic. The announcement of its departure in March of 2001 registered “a near-10 on the Puget Sound angst scale,” the Seattle Times reported in the aftermath.

“It was a tough pill,” Garfield says.

The tragic 737 MAX 8 crashes that killed 346 people and the more recent door plug fiasco on the 737 MAX 9 have “reinforced a narrative of, the old values of the old Boeing, they’d changed,” O’Mara says. “Boeing was not the company it once was.”

Garfield, however, isn’t sure that’s the prevailing sentiment in a state that still touts so many Boeing workers. “I think it’s still seen as a company that has huge impact here, that makes great products that, like every complicated product faces their challenges, and that Boeing has been an incredible force for positive things in our community.”

What’s shifted, he says, is that Boeing isn’t alone in its corporate influence, sharing the region with Amazon, Starbucks, and Microsoft, among others. Still, those other companies will never have a hold on the city quite like Boeing did. And that’s a good thing, O’Mara says.

 “I think that this region discovered the downsides of being so dependent on the fortunes of one company.”