How Just One Mistake Destroyed America’s Greatest Plane Empire (Boeing)

Read the first chapter of How Britain Stopped Making Things free: https://mettlehistory.co.uk -------- If you boarded an airliner anywhere in the world in the 1990s, chances are the name on the nose said Boeing. It was the most trusted word in American industry: stamped on the bomber that won a war, on the jet that shrank the planet, on the plane you put your children on without a second thought. Now set that beside another number. Three hundred and forty-six. That is how many people two of Boeing's newest jets killed in the space of five months — flying themselves into the ground. Total collapse of the one thing an aircraft company cannot lose: trust. There is a simple story about how it happened — a rushed plane, a bad line of code. But the real story is older, and colder: a single decision, taken in a boardroom in the 1990s, about whether Boeing would answer to its engineers or to its shareholders. To understand what that decision cost, you have to go back to the company Boeing used to be — back when it built the impossible for a living.