Boeing, once one of the most successful companies in the world and a symbol of American manufacturing excellence, has fallen on hard times in recent decades following a string of fatal accidents and alarming near-misses.
Now, the company is looking for a new CEO to replace the outgoing Dave Calhoun. Among the contenders are Kelly Ortberg, once the chief executive of Rockwell Collins, another aerospace manufacturer; Stephanie Pope, who is already CEO of the company’s commercial plane division; Spirit Aerosystems CEO Pat Shanahan, and the current chairman of the Boeing board, Steve Mollenkopf.
If the name Spirit Aerosystems sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the closely-related company Boeing has used to make parts for its planes, including parts that have dramatically failed. Boeing used to own Spirit, and announced at the end of June that it planned to reacquire the company. Critics say that Boeing’s practice of outsourcing work to other companies is part of the decline in safety and quality assurance and Boeing appears to agree.
The most recent blow to public confidence in Boeing aircraft came on January 5 of this year when a “door plug” blew out on a Boeing 737 Max 9, causing the plane to depressurize and terrify passengers at 16,000 feet. The incident occurred when the Alaska Airlines plane was cruising over Oregon. While the plane was able to safely descend and land, and no one was seriously injured or killed, the horrifying incident drew public and Congressional attention to the string of serious failures occurring on Boeing commercial planes.
Any successful candidate for the chief executive position will be inheriting responsibility for a troubled company trying to live down anger and resentment from the flying public and regulators. The recent track record for Boeing planes is ugly and alarming, and many of the problems come from the company’s most popular and wildly successful 737.
First introduced in 1967, the 737 can’t really be said to be the same aircraft today as the original models that bore the designation. The plane started as, and remains, a single-aisle passenger jet designed for short and medium-haul routes. Over the decades Boeing has made incremental improvements and changes to engines, wings, wing tips, and more. For pilots the most dramatic change was the switch from analog gauges and dials (pilots call these “steam gauges”) to what’s known as a “glass cockpit.” This is a control system of computer displays and alert screens instead of physical instrument displays.
The plane has been stretched several times to become bigger and longer to carry more passengers. The latest version of the veteran aircraft is the 737 Max, and that’s the one that has thrown fear into the heart of the flying public. A 737 Max operated by Lionair of Indonesia crashed in October 2018, followed by an Ethiopian Airlines crash in March of 2019, also a 737 Max. A total of 346 people were killed.
Technological upgrades were part of the problem— or more nearly, bad communication to pilots about the plane’s new software system. Modern planes like the 737 Max are run largely by computers that have built-in safety features. What Max pilots were not told was that the plane’s safety system designed to keep the nose up and prevent crashes could conflict with pilot commands. This led to pilots fighting the plane’s automation while the plane slowed and lost lift, stalling and falling out of the sky.
