Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun goes away at the end of the year. Boeing Chairman Larry Kellner steps down in May. Stan Deal, who runs the Boeing Commercial Airplanes division, is out as of today.
It’s a corporate management bloodbath for the troubled aviation giant.
“As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing,” Calhoun wrote in a letter to employees on Monday. “We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We also must inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.”
That commitment begins, as it should have long before today, with the figurative seppuku of the company’s top management.
It wasn’t just the blowout of a door plug on the Alaska Airlines flight in January that brought Boeing to today’s massive shakeup, of course. The company’s long-festering problems became undeniable in 2018 after a pair of deadly crashes led to certain versions of Boeing’s 737 MAX passenger jets being grounded worldwide.
Cost-cutting at the Seattle Chicago Washington, D.C.-area-based aircraft manufacturer, combined with what might be described as a go-along attitude at the FAA, resulted in a pair of nearly identical crashes that killed 346 people in all. The 737 MAX has flight characteristics different enough from earlier, non-MAX versions that, ordinarily, pilots would have had to receive additional training to fly the MAX.
Instead, a patch was approved called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS):
The design of the MCAS meant that it was repeatedly activated if it determined that there was a risk of a stall. This meant that the nose was continually pushed down, making it hard for pilots to keep altitude or climb. The system was also hard to override. In both cases, the flight crews were unable to override the MCAS, although other crews had successfully managed to do so in similar situation, and this contributed to the two accidents.
Making things worse, “Pilots claimed that initially they were not even told that MCAS existed.”
MCAS has since been fixed and pilots have received the additional training needed to fly the 737 MAX, but the corporate culture at Boeing hasn’t changed. We’ve read too many stories in recent months like these.
And then there’s that troubling mystery from a couple of weeks ago, where Boeing whistleblower John Barnett was found dead of a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound while visiting Charleston, S.C. to provide testimony about what he called safety issues “being ignored.”
Boeing has yet to name a new CEO to replace Calhoun next year, and shareholders will elect a new chair to replace Kellner in May. Commercial Airplanes division chief Deal is replaced by Boeing Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Pope.
Her background is in finance, not engineering, so it remains to be seen whether she’s the right person to correct complaints that the bean counters have hobbled a once-great engineering firm.
Recommended: For Biden & Harris, Politics STARTS at the Water’s Edge
P.S. Help PJ Media keep getting the truth out by becoming one of our VIP or VIP Gold supporters. You need independent news and analysis, and we need to keep the lights on. You can join here, and don’t forget our massive 50% off SAVEAMERICA promo code.