When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in December 1996, it seemed clear who the winner was. The enlarged US aerospace and defence giant would be called Boeing. Its headquarters would be in Boeing’s home town of Seattle. Philip Condit, Boeing’s chief executive, would head the merged company. Harry Stonecipher, McDonnell Douglas’s head, would take the more junior role of president and chief operating officer. Two-thirds of the board would be Boeing executives. Billed as a merger of equals, it was anything but. My article, as the FT’s then-aerospace correspondent, was headlined “Boeing the boss despite brave faces”.

In Flying Blind, Peter Robison, a journalist with Bloomberg News, argues that the opposite happened. McDonnell Douglas executives, headed by Stonecipher, introduced a cost-cutting, profit-at-all-costs, shareholder-pleasing mentality. That led, under subsequent Boeing leaders, to a disregard for passenger safety that culminated in the most catastrophic events in Boeing’s more than century-long history: two crashes, in 2018 and 2019, of new Boeing 737 Max aircraft, flown by Lion Air of Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines respectively, resulting in the deaths of 346 people.

Boeing was disgraced by the subsequent investigations. In its determination to get the 737 Max out of the factory door at the lowest cost, it had ignored warnings that the plane wasn’t safe. In the presence of the bereaved relatives, US legislators from both sides of the aisle united during hearings to castigate a one-time beacon of American industry.