It’s a couple years too late, but Boeing CEO Phil Condit has resigned.

Under Condit, the once proud commercial aircraft giant lost its global leadership role in the passenger plane biz to Airbus, and became more heavily dependent on military contracts for its survival.

Condit decided he didn’t like to use his own products, so he set himself and his executive support staff up in a new Chicago head office; a move that also gave him the chance to tell Seattle to drop dead.

Condit turned a company known for its engineering and manufacturing leadership into just another stock-market listing that happened to own some factories. He gave away Boeing’s technological crown jewel, its wing technologies, to Japan.

He turned the new 7E7 program into a job-blackmail scheme, demanding ever bigger subsidies from local governments for the opportunity to host what will be a bare bones, robot-manned assembly plant.

And finally there was this little ethics scandal, with some of Condit’s underlings caught bribing fed officals over a tanker-plane deal.

Granted, the past two and a half years have been a perfect storm for the plane biz. Any Boeing CEO would’ve found trouble. But this particular one handled almost every crisis the wrong way, and created some needless crises of his own.

Boeing’s still an industrial giant and a huge factor in the local and national economies. The next CEO can get the firm back on track.

Step one: Move back to Seattle. Be a manufacturer again.