Its labour troubles are far from over, however. Last month, about 33,000 unionised Boeing employees went on strike, with labour representatives upset over stagnant wages and downsized benefits. Striking members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers have turned down an initial offer from Boeing for a 25% raise over four years.

Workers have angrily demanded higher pay and better retirement benefits, noting that the company has long prioritised executive compensation and stock buybacks, while ignoring safety concerns to rush assembly lines. Those complaints are hardly new. The firm, which began as a Seattle-based aircraft maker, was once a bastion of creative engineering with a proud company culture. Boeing reportedly designed the B-52 bombers over a single weekend. The 737 airline, originally produced in 1966, was such a marvel of engineering that it remains in production today.

The 1997 merger jolted the company culture, as other reporters have observed. Accountants and business school-trained executives replaced the aerospace engineer leaders of the firm’s earlier iterations. The new Boeing board of directors, as one analyst noted, “would rather have spent money on a walk-in humidor for shareholders than on a new plane”.

The size and financialisation of the firm may have also contributed to its downfall. The company now competes for an array of defence and space-related contracts, and its reliance on the government has made it a creature of Washington, DC.

Ethics disclosures show that 20 Trump administration officials hailed from or previously consulted for Boeing. Patrick Shanahan, Trump’s brief acting secretary of defense, was a senior executive at the firm, at one point managing its 787 Dreamliner division. Boeing lawyers have also passed just as rapidly through the revolving door into the Biden administration, with about a dozen current officials reporting ties to the firm.

Some of those political relationships may have provided some short-term financial benefit to the company. On Trump’s last day in office, the Justice Department signed a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing, letting it off the hook for faulty designs that resulted in crashes in 2018 and 2019 — and 346 deaths.

But the regulatory capture may have been so strong that it ultimately imperilled the future of the firm. Boeing reportedly won the ability to conduct self-inspections and implement other lax policies, contributing to a pattern of low standards. Revitalising the company from decades of poisoned culture will be no easy task.

Even after a series of scandals surrounding cracked airline parts and whistleblower exposes on safety issues with planes, the problems seem to never end. Earlier this year, the door of a 737 MAX Alaska Airlines flight flew off mid-flight, again raising concerns that the Boeing-made jet would need to be grounded.

Amid the praise for the 1997 merger that birthed the new Boeing giant, there were some shadows of doubt. A 2000 study from the RAND Corporation found that far from strengthening the American aerospace industry, the merger represented a form of consolidation that would likely result in less innovation. In a sober message to the workforce earlier this month, Kelly Ortberg, the new chief executive of the firm, noted the need to shrink the firm. Boeing, he wrote, must “focus our resources on performing and innovating in the areas that are core to who we are”. Boeing’s current state testifies to that.

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Lee Fang is an investigative journalist and Contributing Editor at UnHerd. Read his Substack here.

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