How Boeing’s dream was grounded

The Dreamliner debacle is a reflection of how a gritty and innovative company lost its distinctive culture, writes Clive Irving

IT was 22 years ago, and I was looking for Boeing’s headquarters along a gray industrial strip with rusting railroad tracks alongside.

Halfway down the strip, next to an aging plant that in the Second World War had turned out the B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, I found it: a modest but handsome building with touches of a 1930s-era airline terminal.