Blue Bird was founded in the United States of America in 1927. They became the leading producer of school buses in the Americas. In the 1960s the also started making motor coaches, and in the 1990s commercial buses.
Many of the Blue Bird buses originally designed for North American school bus use became the common inter-city bus in much of Latin America.
Until 1992 Blue Bird was a private family-owned company. Blue Bird has been owned by the British Henlys Group PLC since 1999.
Blue Bird's factory in Iowa was closed in 2002. It continues to run factories in Indonesia [and other places?].