Before Boeing named Kelly Ortberg as CEO in August of 2024, the airplane-maker was an enterprise in crisis, and faith was fading that arguably the most iconic of American manufacturers would ever regain its lost luster.
Just as Boeing was slowly recovering from the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 passengers and crew, a Max door-plug blowout over Portland, Ore. in January of 2024 trained the spotlight on its manufacturing practices, which had increasingly put profits over quality. Federal regulators cracked down, freezing Max production at a third below its prior peak. Boeing’s defense and space division, meanwhile, was booking multi-billion losses on federal contracts spouting big cost overruns.
The laundry list of problems got longer: The challenge of integrating stricken Spirit AeroSystems, the fuselage supplier Boeing had sold two decades and just agreed to re-acquire, greatly upped its risk profile going forward. To make matters worse, Boeing was facing a potentially crippling strike from its powerful union of 33,000 machinists in the Puget Sound area, whose leaders claimed that since management couldn’t do it, the rank-in-file needed to “save Boeing from itself.”
