Boeing’s supposed unchallenged supremacy in the commercial aircraft market, particularly since its merger with McDonnell Douglas two years ago, has been steadily eroded by the European Airbus consortium. A price war between the two has been particularly detrimental to Boeing’s profit margins, not least because of many highly embarrassing production glitches. If that were not enough, Boeing’s bloated infrastructure - grown fat on managerial complacency and excessively rigid employment practices - has forced it to announce the loss of 48,000 of its 230,000-strong workforce over two years.

Add to those woes a narrowly and expensively averted strike over the new machine operators’ contract which takes effect this month, plus a potentially crippling racial discrimination suit that began with a handful of African-American employees and has now spread to the corridors of the Department of Labor in Washington. Lawsuits have also been filed by two former Boeing employees alleging that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company sacrificed safety and manufacturing quality to speed production - allegations that the company has robustly denied.

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