It was the start of tangled reporting lines, conflicting priorities, and siloization of a segment of the Boeing workforce that knew perhaps better than any other how well—or how poorly—its far-flung customers actually flew the company’s airplanes. In fact, it was precisely the kind of messy corporate structure that Joe Sutter had discovered at NASA a decade prior in the wake of the Challenger disaster—the sort that, he had declared with so much confidence, would never come to Boeing.
