Members of Boeing’s biggest union sent a clear message this week: The aerospace giant’s executives have a long way to go before the company returns to stability.

By voting to extend their strike and refuse a contract offer with 35 percent raises over four years on Wednesday, the union representing Boeing’s machinists gave voice to a decade of pent-up anger over lost pensions and paltry pay increases.

Their defiance, as the strike enters its seventh week, compounds the difficulties facing new chief executive Kelly Ortberg as he seeks to refocus the company on its core mission of building airplanes. The company’s failure to reach a deal is keeping it from delivering new jetliners to customers, starving it of revenue and exacerbating its losses.

Hours before the failed contract vote, Ortberg evoked Boeing’s storied history as he promised to put the company on a stronger trajectory.

“This is a company that ushered in the new era of air travel and helped plan the first man on the moon,” Ortberg told Wall Street analysts. “Getting back to the values that help define this legacy is what will define our future.”

Boeing’s future should be bright. It is one of just two Western companies that build the large airliners that haul passengers across continents and over oceans. It plays a major role making military gear for the United States and its allies. In all, it is sitting on orders worth half a trillion dollars.

Yet the picture at present is one of almost unremitting gloom.

Boeing has lost money every year since 2019. It posted a $6.2 billion loss for the most recent quarter, weighed down by the strike and unfavorable defense contracts. Its stock price has been cut in half over the past five years. Weathering the strike could leave it needing to raise billions of dollars in new funds.

High-profile incidents have helped to underscore the depth of the company’s struggles.

Investigations and negative headlines have dominated the year’s agenda. While the company helped put men on the moon, this year it left astronauts stranded in space when its Starliner capsule suffered propulsion problems. Two deadly crashes and a terrifying door blowout involving its flagship 737 Max airliners battered its reputation for safety and manufacturing competence.

In another high-profile setback, a replacement for Air Force One that should have been delivered to the president this year is way behind schedule and costing Boeing billions it can scarcely afford to lose.

Boeing’s leaders have begun taking steps toward implementing Ortberg’s vision of streamlining the company. Most dramatically, Ortberg has announced a plan to cut 10 percent of its 170,000-strong workforce in an effort to save money and become more efficient. The 17,000 layoffs are expected to take effect early next year.

Before he arrived, the company agreed to acquire Spirit AeroSystems, a key supplier that had been part of Boeing before being spun out and becoming a source of manufacturing headaches. On Sunday, Boeing said it was selling a small unit in its defense business, a first move in what could become a broader effort to slim down that side of the company.

But there’s only so much he can do while the strike continues. Many of the workers, represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, have been girding for this fight for a decade, after they narrowly agreed to give up their pensions under pressure from the company.

“This membership has gone through a lot,” union president Jon Holden said following the vote. He cited past threats to move aircraft production out of the Seattle area, the loss of the pension and stagnant wages. “There are some deep wounds — takeaways and concessions, threats, job loss.”

As recently as 2018, the picture for the company looked dramatically different. The Max, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the venerable 737 had been launched. Boeing had bid aggressively to secure defense contracts to make a futuristic automated aircraft for the Navy and a new jet that would be used to train a generation of military pilots. The company posted more than $10 billion in profits.

But by 2020 the pandemic then brought global travel to a standstill, blunting the demand for new planes. The global crisis led to thousands of job losses at Boeing. Supply, labor and manufacturing problems meant big defense contracts, paid out at fixed prices in many cases, weighed on Boeing’s bottom line, rather than providing a cushion in bad times.

And in 2018 and 2019, tragedy struck with the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing 346 people. The company’s new aircraft was grounded worldwide. Production has slowed. Making matters worse after January’s Alaska Airlines midair fuselage panel blowout, the Federal Aviation Administration capped production of the planes at 38 a month. Boeing must show regulators that its quality control has improved before the FAA will agree to raise the number.

In 2018, the company’s commercial airplane division delivered more than 800 jets, the vast majority of them 737 Max planes. In more recent years, it hasn’t come close to that figure, delivering just 528 in 2023 and 291 through September of this year.

Boeing’s defense business faces competitive pressure, with Airbus pitching the military a tanker to rival Boeing’s offering. Boeing even lost out in a contest to build a replacement for the Air Force’s flying command center — the “Doomsday plane” — which is based on its own 747 Jumbo Jet.

Critics said a string of chief executives had put the emphasis on the company’s finances at the expense of engineering prowess, an approach congressional investigators tied to the Max crashes. When the pandemic led to layoffs, institutional knowledge walked out the door in ways that senior executives have said they didn’t fully grasp at first.

Sarah Moore, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Puget Sound who spent two decades interviewing Boeing workers, said Ortberg’s quest to restore the company’s culture will be difficult.

“People are going to be cynical,” Moore said “He will have to have very consistent actions that make clear his dedication to restoring a certain type of culture.”

Analysts say Boeing cannot afford to be complacent and needs to show that it can still come up with world-beating innovations. The company faces stiff competition from Europe’s Airbus and has not developed a brand-new aircraft since the 787 Dreamliner, which has itself been bedeviled with manufacturing problems since it launched in 2011. A second competitor could eventually emerge from China or Brazil.

Ron Epstein, an analyst at Bank of America, said airline executives are growing frustrated with Boeing’s ongoing problems and now talk more eagerly about having someone else to buy from.

“A third player will emerge,” Epstein said. “The market’s big enough.”