The company announced Monday that three senior Boeing executives, including its CEO, are resigning as the company continues to respond to the ongoing scandal surrounding the safety of its airliners.
CEO Dave Calhoun confirmed his departure in a statement. Stan Deal, CEO and president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, has resigned effective immediately. Larry Kellner, chairman of the company’s board of directors, will not stand for re-election at the company’s next annual meeting of stockholders. Kellner will be succeeded by Steve Mollenkopf, a member of Boeing’s board of directors and former CEO of Qualcomm.
“President and CEO Dave Calhoun today announced his decision to step down as CEO at the end of 2024. “He will continue to lead Boeing throughout the year as we complete this work,” Boeing said. In a statement.
Since a door panel exploded on a Boeing 737 Max plane operated by Alaska Airlines in January, the airline has been embroiled in a number of negative stories.
Even though Boeing has announced various measures to improve safety and is committed to cooperating with federal investigators, some passengers say they are nervous about flying on the company’s planes. ing.
In a letter to staff, boeing websiteMr. Calhoun acknowledged that the Alaska Airlines incident changed the company.
“As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 disaster was a turning point for Boeing,” he wrote. “We must continue to respond to this incident with humility and full transparency, and instill a strong commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.”
“The eyes of the world are on us,” he said, noting the company’s continued efforts to reassure both airline customers and the flying public that its aircraft are safe. ”
In an interview with CNBC after Monday’s announcement of his resignation, Calhoun acknowledged continued challenges at Boeing.
“We have these bad habits,” he said, adding that production pressures continued to weigh on performance. “When we finally move it, it sends a message to our compatriots that says, ‘Well, I guess the movement of the plane is more important than the initial quality of the product.'” And we want to make it more balanced. It is necessary to make it clear. There’s no doubt about it. ”
The fallout from that fateful flight shows no signs of stopping: The FBI notified passengers last week. They may be victims of a crime, and the Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating.
Calhoun said the company had faced “some of the most significant challenges our company and industry have ever faced in our 108-year history” over the past five years.
Calhoun was appointed CEO in 2020 following two other airline crashes that some experts blamed on Boeing’s failures. The Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed a total of 346 people, both involved failures in Boeing’s software system known as MCAS.
Mr. Calhoun, who has served on Boeing’s board since 2009 and was named non-executive chairman in 2019, promised in an interview with The New York Times at the time of his appointment that he would change Boeing’s internal culture.
“Honestly, it was more than I expected,” Calhoun said of the problems facing the plane maker at the time. “And that speaks to the weakness of our leadership.”
However, in the same interview, he seemed to imply that American pilots would not have reacted to failures in the MCAS system the way foreign-born pilots did.
Following a second crash in March 2019, the 737 Max was grounded worldwide and was not reauthorized for flight for nearly two years.
In 2021, Boeing agreed to pay a $2.5 billion fine Boeing admitted to “misleading” the FAA about the reliability of its MCAS system to resolve criminal charges accusing it of concealing information about its 737 Max aircraft.
Calhoun said at the time that the settlement “appropriately acknowledges how we fell short of our values and expectations.”
Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Michael Whitaker told NBC News in an interview last week that Boeing had no choice but to develop a plan to improve its culture and practices to meet the agency’s safety standards.
Whitaker said Boeing’s priority “is production, not safety or quality.”
In the wake of the Alaska Airlines incident in January, some Wall Street analysts said more fundamental changes were needed.
“How many times do we repeat, ‘This will never happen again?'” Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein said in a January report.
“Boeing also [Boeing parts supplier] spirit [AeroSystems] A fundamental cultural overhaul is needed. This cultural shift will not come about by FAA mandate, Congressional hearing, internal memo, or hour-long all-hands meeting. We believe Boeing and Spirit will need to fundamentally rethink the way they operate in order for culture to move from corporate jargon to being embodied in the habits and ethos of employees on both sides. ”
