Expertise is power. The people who own, control, and operate Boeing are... well... the ones who run Boeing. It's extremely difficult to clean house at the top w

Expertise is power. The people who own, control, and operate Boeing are... well... the ones who run Boeing. It's extremely difficult to clean house at the top without losing the entire structure. It's like how it's hard to fire the one IT guy who knows how everything is configured. Look for example at what happened to Venezuela's oil industry when the Chavez regime tried to eliminate its current heads and nationalize it. Oil production crashed. The new people running the system didn't know how to run it, and there is a substantial learning curve. This was part of what set the stage for Venezuela's current economic and political disaster. Corruption aside (and I do think corruption is a factor) this is the most likely rational explanation for this behavior.