This makes me nostalgic for the good ole days, lolSince the...

This makes me nostalgic for the good ole days, lol

Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” For a time, this served it well: An engineers’ company made planes to make its engineers proud, whatever the cost. Employees enjoyed watertight contracts, thanks to an assertive, family-like union, and an attitude to aviation that put design and quality above all else. In the process, it produced some of the world’s greatest planes. The 707, for instance, was the first commercially successful jet; the 727, launched in 1963, allowed airlines to reach airports in the developing world or with shorter runways. The company’s philosophy, as one close observer described it to researcher Edward Greenberg, was “go-for-it-and-damn-the expenses—but not damn the quality.”