I've heard that when they merged with McDonnell Douglas their new (McDonnell) management pushed out the good engineering culture and dropped their quality standards in a chase for more profit, leading to engineering experiencing the dead sea effect.
(I'm not talking about self-congratulatory conceits, like "raising the bar" and "fire fast", since the companies that first come to mind as saying those things tend to produce a large quantity of often poor quality, in very visible ways. Do we have concepts or terms lately for a place where most everyone does great work, and people who don't rise to that don't remain there?)
Is any part of the capitalist system "well functioning" anymore?
Capitalism is literally defined by the ability to invest capital to accumulate more of it by way of profit. The logical end of this process is straightforwardly monopoly.
The aerospace industry is not a good example of capitalism. What we have with Boeing is basically a government sanctioned monopoly. It’s basically a weak form of nationalization, without the stigma.
That's wrong. In reality, the mere theoretical potential for competition has always been more than enough to call it capitalism from any perspective. The facts are that actual competition is not a requirement.
Source?
Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production, no? Maybe the definition changed in the US?
Boeing seems to have created a political and regulatory environment for itself where its better for it to design and build planes poorly, than it is for it to design and build planes well.
Hence there's always going to be a tug of war between the FAA and the industry. The FAA never wants to approve anything, and industry goes out of business if the FAA doesn't approve it.
You'll see the same forces in action with the FDA.
BTW, as is abundantly clear from history, a fatal design mistake can and has destroyed several airframe companies. Boeing's finances were punished severely after the MAX crashes. Boeing does not win by making an unsafe design. When I worked at Boeing, I didn't know any engineer who was willing to sign his name to a faulty design. Yes, the engineer responsible for a piece of work gets his name on the drawings. It's career suicide for him if he signed off on a bad design.
America looks like it's speed running the soviet union and south africa.