Boeing may be unintentionally doing Airbus a big favour. The US group’s embarrassing difficulties and long delays in its 787 Dreamliner programme have exposed the risks and limits of aggressively outsourcing a large chunk of a complex project.

As Professor Philip Lawrence of Bristol’s Aerospace Research Centre wrote in a letter to the Financial Times last week, the lesson of the Boeing fiasco is clear – actions that appear to reduce financial risk through maximising outsourcing actually increase the risk of management and project failure.