There is something crushing about the misfortunes of Boeing, that revealed serious issues with its 747-8 project this morning, that is written in blood and rust right across the US corporate landscape.

Its big car makers, its major white-goods makers, its shipyards, its steel mills, its textiles, have all been run down or closed or sent over the border, to where the gardeners, maids and menial labourers now come from.

Or to China or Japan where the debt comes from so that Americans can live in a service economy and service their debts through the savings of non-Americans.

Sure, I’m simplifying. I’m speaking the way I discuss these bewildering things with my much-loved folks in America.

I’m half American by birth. My mum came from the mid-west, stowed away pregnant on my dad’s new minesweeper and gave birth to me three weeks after it was delivered new in wartime Sydney.

When I was a young man making my first visit to the folks they had a whip around to buy me the tools I needed to rock up to Renton, the Boeing plant in Seattle, to get me a job on the 707 line.

But I chose to travel on, to work in the UK and France. Boeing was God in Washington state, or at least equal billing with big timber. It was a corporate deity. So what has happening to Boeing, and much of the prosperous, optimistic America that embraced me back then hurts so bad.

Boeing today is run by money men and spinners. I still talk to retired Boeing people, loyal, puzzled, hurt people, who have witnessed the sidelining of the design and engineering expertise by “game changing” buzz word-spouting wankers.

Specifically, I have chronicled the lies that accompanied the Sonic Cruiser and Dreamliner programs. These people will say anything about how mature the composite technology is, how wonderfully light it is, how easily it can be plugged together to make a jet airliner in only three days and so forth. But they won’t tell the truth.

It’s truth time. The models Boeing used to calculate the loading bearing behaviour of critical elements of the 787 design, were wrong when it came to the wing-body design. The production techniques were improperly described. The organisation of the outsourcing of the project was grotesquely negligent in its oversight of quality and integrity. And there is no mature, proven high composite or plastic materials technology for the use of thin, load bearing, flexible, high cycle components in airliners.

It is a miserable fantasy. Boeing is only just learning how to do it, instead of bringing something mature and predictable to the market.

And that’s the 787. This morning we learn that it can’t even get the materially less ambitious 747-8 into the skies as promised only recently, claiming problems with the “maturity” of the engineering of a jet that has been flying in one form or another for 40 years.

The awful truth about both these projects is that Boeing is no longer led by a management that appears capable of actually building new planes.

In many respects, Boeing is a metaphor for failed corporations, and the wider failings of modern US business managements to engage with the realities of design and production.