For the airline unit, revenues rose 8.9percentto to $1.7 billion.
Boeing derives 60percentt of its revenue from its commercial airline unit, down from 85percentt in the early 1990's.
Since 2007, the company has said several times that it was considering a sale or a spinoff of American Eagle, its regional airline unit.
The company, owned by the UAL Corporation, also wants to eliminate thousands of flight attendant jobs as it transfers 30percentt of flight capacity to a new low-cost airline unit, the union said.
The parent company of American Airlines, AMR, said yesterday that it planned to shed its American Eagle regional airline unit, after an investor group called on the company to bolster its stock price by getting rid of some operations.
The airline unit's operating profit was in line with last year, and the percentage of seats sold on each flight by Swissair, which flies internationally, and Crossair, its regional counterpart, were higher than the industry average.
SAirGroup's airline unit, which owns all of Swissair and parts of Crossair, Sabena, TAP, LOT and other carriers, lost 155 million Swiss francs ($86.4 million) in the first half of 2000.
Rick Paterson, an analyst at UBS Warburg, a Swiss bank, gives the Airborne purchase only an even chance of getting past the regulators.Under the terms of the deal, Deutsche Post will buy only Airborne's ground operations; its airline unit will be spun off as a stand-alone business.
"It is critical that we take these necessary steps now to size the commercial airplanes business to support the difficult and uncertain environment faced by our airline customers," Alan Mulally, the chief executive of the commercial airlines unit, said in the statement.
The F.A.A. ordered the airline, a unit of the Alaska Air Group in Seattle, and other airlines in this country to inspect the mechanism on MD-80 and similar jets.
