To understand why, you need to go back to 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. Technically, Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. But, as Richard Aboulafia, a noted industry analyst with the Teal Group, told me, "McDonnell Douglas in effect acquired Boeing with Boeing's money." McDonnell Douglas executives became key players in the new company, and the McDonnell Douglas culture, averse to risk and obsessed with cost-cutting, weakened Boeing's historical commitment to making big investments in new products. Aboulafia says, "After the merger, there was a real battle over the future of the company, between the engineers and the finance and sales guys." The nerds may have been running the show in Silicon Valley, but at Boeing they were increasingly marginalized by the bean counters.

Electrical problems and fuel leaks have plagued the new Boeing plane model recently. On Monday, an empty Japan Airlines 787 in Boston caught fire. On Tuesday, a fuel leak forced a different Japan Airlines 787 to cancel takeoff and return to the gate before ultimately completing its trip to Tokyo. "We're getting to a tipping point, where they go from needing to rectify problems to doing major damage control to the image of the company and the plane," said Richard Aboulafia, a defense and aerospace analyst with Teal Group, a consulting firm based in Fairfax, Va. "While they delivered a large and unexpected number of 787s last year, it's possible that they should have instead focused on identifying glitches and flaws, rather than pushing ahead with volume production."

U.S. fleets are among the oldest in the world, said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. “I’m not really sure that people should read that much into that,” Aboulafia said. “From a safety standpoint, a lot of the older planes were built tougher and with proper maintenance, there’s no reason why a plane can’t stay safe for 25 to 30 years.” The U.S. and most of the developed world have superb standards and maintenance regulations, the result of decades of experience that have made the system incredibly safe, Aboulafia said.