[wahern]

Fair point, but OTOH the 787 was financially engineered to put Boeing on the other side of fixed price contracting. If you're on the purchasing side of fixed price you can tell yourself you don't need experienced engineers, similar to when you're on the selling side of cost plus.

Plus, if you already have a little fiefdom of fixed price subcontractors, you can fool yourself into believing you can take fixed price contracts on novel work, passing the burden and risk onto subcontractors, taking a slice no matter what. And that's exactly what has happened with Starliner, right? AFAIU, these valves were designed and built by subcontractors. Boeing's biggest role seems to be project management, and maybe some assembly? Except now they're even failing at that.