Boeing CEO Calhoun to step down at end of 2024
reuters.com
reuters.com
Construction Physics recently ran a great article on why companies don't design new aircraft from scratch (rather, you see 5 or 6 iterations of the 737) [1]. The gist of it is that it's extraordinarily expensive to design a new aircraft from the ground up and that changes to regulation or the global economy can have a huge impact on which planes are desirable (e.g., big vs small, fuel efficient vs fast), so any new plane is an enormous gamble. So I understand why the bean counters look at a build-from-scratch approach as a bad idea. At the same time, it is very hard to quantify the long term impact of losing the engineering culture that comes along with building new planes from scratch. There's a wealth of knowledge that you lose if you don't do it very often. You also get happier and better engineers when you give them tasks that are more interesting. This stuff doesn't show up on accounting statements, but it's hard to deny that there's a long term effect.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem like a return to engineering culture is what they are going to do. The head of their commercial business [2] resigned according to this statement, but his replacement will be Stephanie Pope, a woman with an accounting/MBA background who has risen through the ranks at Boeing in primarily financial positions (she may indeed be very talented, but certainly doesn't have an engineering background).
[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/a-cycle-of-misery-the...
[2] Boeing is divided into four divisions: defense, commercial, boeing capital and global services (I'm not really sure what this last one does, but the division that we primarily think of when we think Boeing is their commercial one).
Probably why many car "design centers" are not in Motown.
An engineering company run into the ground by accountants is going to be run by another accountant. Yeah Boeing is fucked.
I'd expect any incoming CEO to make some changes anyway.
If an F-15 has a wing disintegrate in flight, we might hear a blurb about it on the news and maybe a pilot and a few people on the ground die. Tragic, but it's not a blow to the confidence in air travel. If something happens with a 737, there's hundreds of deaths, the public won't get on that plane, the FAA and NTSB release extensive reports, and the backlog for aircraft gets even longer for airlines.
Another company sucked dry by business school vampires.
Is that really the case? I've never been given the ability to pick the aircraft when flying.
I traveled last month for a wedding and made it a point to book a flight scheduled for Airbus planes. Turns out the return trip was changed and I flew Boeing on the way back.
Delta didn't do anything wrong there, I just have no say in what plane I book a ticket for.
In extremis, yes. In practice, no–shave a nickel off the ticket price and you’ll replace those people.
The purchaser with power is the airline. And even they mostly lean into safety due to the financial cost of cancellations and grounding. Regulators, not markets, make flying safe.
While it's possible that's true, doing that is also gifting those customers to your competitors. So there's another dynamic there to consider as well. ;)
To zero practical extent, particularly when you weight for frequent fliers. Most consumers pick the cheapest ticket. Those who don’t go first on loyalty. Frequent fliers who fly based on non-standard factors are well studied and highly in-numerous in any single aspect.
If the concern of Boeing vs Airbus safety is really that low on the list for passengers we really shouldn't have anything else to talk about or regulate. The accidents and issues are well publicized, if people just don't care do we really need further investigations and/or regulation?
We care in aggregate. At the individual level, airline ticket demand is notoriously elastic.
Is your point that we care in principle but don't functionally care when faced with an actual decision?
Yes this is basically why the only thing capitalism can do is lower prices through squeezing everything, because while large groups of people are principled and care a lot, individual humans are largely irrational (especially when it comes to risk, because the humans who accurately analyzed risk on a population scale were eaten by tigers) and fairly flexible in morals, ideology, and priorities.
It can’t. Where is can is where individuals care a little but don’t want to explicitly bear the cost if it if distributed only across those willing to pay for it.
Most people agree cars should have seatbelts. Were seatbelts optional, and only those willing and able to pay for it could have them, far fewer people would pay for it. Which, in turn, increases the cost to each of them individually.
I personally want seatbelts in case someone hits me and causes an accident. I don't actually think they should be required though, especially if many people would choose not to use them if given the option.
If everyone pays, the fixed costs are amortised across everyone. (Also, it’s hidden in the purchase price.) That lowers the aggregate barrier to entry.
Think: toll roads versus roads paid for with taxes.
Lowering the barrier to entry is only really a benefit to those who would opt in anyway, it forces those who wouldn't want it to pay the cost of that.
In the original topic, my main point was that if consumers are made aware of the current safety issues Boeing has had and ultimately don't factor that in at all when flying then we really should be done here. The FAA doesn't need to do anything to protect the public if the public has shown that it just doesn't care, and people/media should stop talking about it as though its a controversy when consumers are just as willing to fly Boeing as they are Airbus.
That doesn't mean I'll never be shuffled to a flight run by another airline but most of the time I won't be on a Max. That said they do fly Boeing, they just don't fly the Max (or the renamed 737-8).
I do appreciate that Delta doesn't fly Max, and I also don't fault them for swapping planes from Airbus to Boeing on a particular flight. If I really care enough I'll have to just drive.
Get me through the airport, cram me in the fly box as quickly as possible, burn like hell for the destination, then disgorge me there.
Let's not try and pretend air travel is still fun and luxurious.
No company want's that kind of headlines. And YES, that ist part of the buy decision of an airline.
The recent Boeing crisis does seem unusual in that it seems the media focus has bypassed the airlines entirely and gone straight for Boeing, but I've not heard anyone in the real world actually change their ticket directly based on the aircraft involved. Personally, as a passenger, I'm more concerned about maintenance and pilot training, as that's far more likely to lead to my untimely death than Boeing.
Even with the 737 MAX crashes... don't get me wrong here, Boeing were absolutely at fault for how they handled the MCAS system, they deserve the backlash, and caused one of the holes in the Swiss cheese that led to the crashes. However. The crash investigation reports back up that poor training and safety culture at the airlines were also major factors. Runaway trim is something they should have been able to handle, and problems had been reported on previous flights on those planes, but they didn't want to take them out of service for financial reasons. Ethiopian Air and Lion Air already had terrible safety ratings before those incidents.
All this is to say, I think the bigger risk for Boeing is that good airlines will worry how their reputation would be affected by an incident, and ground or stop buying their planes. Any airline is probably two major fatal accidents in a short space of time away from bankruptcy.
Interesting that you went absolute here when my GP comment actually called out that I picked a flight specifically to avoid Boeing planes. I wasn't aware of the change after I booked so I didn't change my flight, but I did pay slightly more when to book on Airbus.
What I meant was that places like HN/Reddit don't tend to be very representative of the offline meatspace, and my experience in the latter is that few people would ever check which airliner they're flying on, let alone change a flight because of it.
Ethiopian Air actually has a great safety record, believe it or not, and Lion Air pushed Boeing for a MAX simulator, which Boeing pushed back on to wave attention away from the existence of MCAS by regulators. That's in spite of, yes, some serious quality related concerns with the airmanship culture that was loudly echoed by Langscheiss who should be ashamed of himself for such a display of Americanist chauvinism in the face of what was so clearly a fouled up attempt at rollout of a design by Boeing without the due care and communication involved with putting such machines under into the hands of unsuspecting pilots.
>Runaway trim is something they should have been able to handle...
Uh uh. No, bad MCAS does not present in the same manner as runaway trim. It is not a slow, steady, comtinuous, adjustment of trim, but a rapid, intermittent, escalating, and intensifying application thereof, with a 5 second reset every time you touch one of the electronic trim switches. Further, it was impossible to isolate the Flight Computer's trim circuit (which would solve the MCAS problem entirely) leaving the pilot's the electric switches they'd need to retrim fast enough because of a specific design choice to maintain type certification.
While Ethiopian's safety record isn't terrible, Lion Air's was/is, despite attempts to change matters. Ethiopian do have a number of ongoing issues though, and Ethopian Airlines, the ECAA, and the EAIB have some troubling tendencies to avoid introspection - perhaps since Ethiopian Airlines is a government-owned flag carrier. Consider their response [0] to the LCAA/NTSB/BEA's investigation of the Flight 409 crash: "biased, lacking evidence, incomplete and did not present the full account of the accident [..] Any characterization of our pilots contrary to the foregoing is pure fabrication that cannot stand any scrutiny". That being said, I would personally fly on Ethiopian, but I definitely have reservations about them.
With regard to both crashes, the NTSB/BEA/EAIB reports all identify crew performance as inadequate. The counter-argument is that since they hadn't seen this specific situation before, their inappropriate responses were due to a loss of situational awareness and task saturation, especially with the AOA causing an erroneous stick shaker and various confusing instrument readings. That said, in both cases, the weather was good and it was daytime, so the pilot responses are nevertheless surprising even given the erroneous instrumentation.
While it's true that MCAS doesn't resemble the most common causes of runaway trim, runaway trim can happen for lots of reasons, and not all present the same way. For example, intermittent shorts can cause rapid intermittent uncommanded trimming. In any case, the response is the same, which (paraphrased) are the memory items: disengage and do not re-engage the autopilot, disengage and do not re-engage the autothrottle, hit the trim cutout switches, hold the trim wheel, and trim manually, then follow the more detailed written procedures. Indeed, in previous flights on the Lion Air aircraft, MCAS issues had occurred and the pilots in those flights recovered using the runaway stabilizer procedure.
The reason they are memory items is because trim runaway can happen FAST and recovering a severely out-of-trim aircraft using the trim wheel is somewhere between difficult and impossible, even with light aircraft, so if the trim is ever doing something unexpected, the first instinct should be to disable AP and then stab trim cutout. The responses from the pilots in both crashes were not to do this, and indeed what they did do was strange and suggests poor CRM and insufficient training. Additionally, with Ethiopian, they hadn't properly disseminated Boeing's updated MCAS training to their pilots following the Lion Air crash.
I'm not trying to defend Boeing, as they massively fucked up, but my point is really that airline training and safety practices are very important, and for me personally, far outweigh the aircraft I'd be flying in (unless BA were trying to get me on a Tupolev). I'm also not American and have long preferred Airbus to Boeing, so I'm not saying any of this because I'm biased in favour of the US. The FAA also clearly hold some of the bag here for not properly regulating Boeing.
[0] https://corporate.ethiopianairlines.com/Press-release-open-p...
If you want to be guaranteed the plane you signed up for, we need new regulation. That is not a right anyone has currently.
Booking a ticket is just a commitment for them to get you to/from specific destinations on time, if possible. Showing the plane scheduled for the flight is helpful for picking seats but its definitely no guarantee.
My wife actually got stuck in DC over night once when they decided they wanted to use a smaller plane. No mechanical issues, I assume they just needed to move the plane for the first flight the next morning and they decided to bump a few passengers off the flight.
There's still quite a few brass in the US military who came of age in the immediate post-Vietnam era and remember the BUFFs being the core of the US bomber fleet, and will subconsciously favor Boeing over anything else. That means a better (though not guaranteed) likelihood of winning a contract.
The issue is, a lot of their offerings for things like tankers, AWACS, general transport, VIP transit, etc. are based on airliners.
As much as I sympathize with the notion that engineers make better CEOs, they're not immune to the same influences as everyone else.
I think they key point is: you can't competently make a tradeoff between two domains if you don't understand both of those domains.
Engineers want to make the best engineered thing, and have a harder time prioritizing costs. Accountants/business types want to make some money number go up this quarter, and will reject good engineering ideas to penny-pinch. Someone needs to be able to (competently) keep both groups aligned.
Another problem is the shortsightedness of "this quarter" can actually work for a long time, until it doesn't. People who kick the can down the road don't always realize what they're doing, because they never stuck around to pay the piper for that decision they made. Then problems are easy to excuse as the incompetence of the last guy(s), and the can-kicker can imagine themselves as some great business leader.
The only distinguishing feature of an accountant is that they care deeply that left column = right column. They care that you can track where your money goes, not that every budget is squeezed for profit. In truth, the right accountant might be a boon because she will listen to the engineers rather than think she knows better because she was an engineer decades ago.
She may end up being a terrible CEO, but let's consider our biases here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
Capitalism before the late 20th century had as its mantra "Build a quality product. Keep the customers and workers happy and the share price will take care of itself."
Around 1980 that changed to "Bump the share price and to hell with everything else."
For civilian aircraft manufacturing... Boeing (US), Airbus (EU), and Comac (China).
All of which have varying degrees of state capture.
Maybe that's the nature of highly-compled and -refined products? You only have meaningful competition at the internal level?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Cathay+Pacific+stock&oq=Cath...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/cathay-pa...
> Full year 2023 operating revenues were a record $26.1 billion, a 9.6 percent increase, year-over-year
> Full year net income of $498 million, or $0.81 per diluted share
I'll say again... They have _plenty_ of money (record-breaking, even!) to train their pilots on the differences between two aircraft models. It's not that they can't afford it, they'd just rather not spend the money unless absolutely forced to, because a better stock price is their primary goal/motivation.
[1] https://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/news-and-...
https://www.google.com/search?q=southwest+airline+profit&oq=...
Look at March 2023, they are way up until you hit the bottom : operating income is really down and they are bleeding cash like crazy.
I would guess Southwest's goal is more of a staff flexibility thing: if all their pilots are certified to fly all their planes, scheduling could be much easier and more effective. I don't know anything about airline management or pilot certification, but my guess is pilots are typically certified to only fly one kind of aircraft at a time, and don't typically maintain multiple certifications.
However, as much efficiency that strategy may have gained them over the last several decades, it's not one that's reasonable to maintain anymore.
>Guillaume's love of flying and aviation dates back to his childhood. He is a qualified light-aircraft pilot and helicopter flight-test engineer with 1,300 hours of flying experience.
What a contrast.
Oh, I doubt that. Their bribes to congress are paid in full and they have some of the juiciest government contracts with which to pad their profits with egregious cost overruns.
Finance and accounting are totally different professions, especially when it comes to the dispositions of the people at the top.
There are plenty of extremely strategic CFOs that began their careers as “bean counters.” The terms of all this discussion and theorizing are purely in-group out-group confirmation bias nonsense.
More broadly, I agree with you. Pretending everything would be better under a real engineer is a deluded combination of No True Scotsman and in-group signalling. As HN demonstrates, no group is immune to their siren calls.
Not that I’m a huge fan of hedge funds but I believe the OP’s point is very valid.
Engineering orgs are totally capable of giving up on engineering without any pressure from outside functions. You can’t build a clean sheet plane because MIT grads want to live in New York City? Is that serious thinking? No.
That is not to say there aren't some diamonds at second class orgs, but they are not empowered by the org; on the contrary, the org holds them back, leading to either value destruction or an anemic value creation trajectory as a whole.
Global services handles logistics/maintenance for airplanes, probably handles both defense and commercial which is why they spun their own division [1].
The problem with this is that to make it in the car industry in the long run it's not really about having the best core engineering in terms of product development, but actually having the best & most efficient manufacturing, and the best marketing and sales pipeline.
Not a critique of Tesla here, just that I don't think it magically holds what is stated here. Labour costs, proximity to shipping, proximity to supply chains, etc. are absolutely key. The auto industry is concentrated in the corridor from here (S. Ontario) down to Michigan, etc. for historical reasons, but also logistical ones. Great lakes / St Lawrence shipping, rail connections, cheaper nearby Canadian labour for some things, parts suppliers & other factories etc.
Big battery manufacturing plants are now being built across this whole region now, too.
What was the really big problem and a clearly (in hindsight) wrong decision was to try and get past requirements for a new type certificate requirement for the pilots.
Had they just stood firm and told the airlines that it's not safe to try and monkey-patch the thing to feel like the old one so no retraining however small would need to be made 346 people would not have been killed and the issues would be elsewhere.
I don't believe that is always true.
[1] https://www.toyota.com/usa/careers/research-development
[2] https://phmsociety.org/partner_profile/general-motors-global...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747
This was back in the 60’s, so they were probably using wind tunnels and scale models to do stuff that a modern computational fluid dynamics system can turn around in an hour.
I’m sure it was very expensive back then, and wouldn’t be surprised if today’s Boeing couldn’t pull it off, but I doubt it’s fundamentally hard or expensive to do design a 747-class airliner using modern technology.
> In 1963 [edit: 6 years before], the United States Air Force started a series of study projects on a very large strategic transport aircraft. Although the C-141 Starlifter was being introduced, officials believed that a much larger and more capable aircraft was needed, especially to carry cargo that would not fit in any existing aircraft
> In 1965, Lockheed's aircraft design and General Electric's engine design were selected for the new C-5 Galaxy transport, which was the largest military aircraft in the world at the time.[1] Boeing carried the nose door and raised cockpit concepts over to the design of the 747.
And from some other articles:
> At Boeing, Sutter worked on many commercial airplane projects, including the 367-80 "Dash 80", 707, 727 and 737. He eventually became a manager for the new jumbo-sized wide body airplane, the four-engine Boeing 747. [0]
My only point is they didn't go from zero to 747 in 3 years. They went from having an active culture of building jets, and doing R&D in this area, and having people that had successfully worked on other new jet design projects. They went from that to having a 747 in 3 years. Still incredibly impressive, but if we admit that culture is lacking now, it's entirely conceivable it'd take longer than 3 years to build a comparable jet today. (Look at how much slower north america builds rail now, or anything, compared to the 60s).
That goes double for trains in North America (but different companies and regulators are involved, of course).
Also, I'm convinced elevators and escalators are now more often broken than previously and always thought - what if that can be explained with loss of knowledge? Given how old this stuff is. There likely only ever is "innovation" in how to produce it for less cost and it results in mediocre technical "compromises".
America CAN still build stuff just fine, but everywhere you look, the upper management has stopped agreeing to pay for it.
It always seems like management is happier to pay $$ every year for ongoing support costs over $$$ one time and $ every year after for an investment of some sort into future production.
Well I guess there are some plane startups like Boom, companies working on green powered planes, and companies working on plane style drones but it’s a lot less common IMO
Pragmatic business decisions are often at odds with recruiting the best possible engineering talent which is probably not the best long term strategy…
Its sad.
Having followed this story for the past months, it does seem like Boeing started their troubles when appointing non-engineering business and accounting types like Calhoun as their leader.
Boeing had CEOs with an engineering degree recently and the result was the same or even worse.
The problem is much more deep than the CEO or the people immediately around him, by this point the whole house is rot. But there is an entire generation of managers who made most of their career feasting on Boeing, so not everything was lost... I guess.
> clash of corporate cultures, where Boeing's engineers and McDonnell Douglas's bean-counters went head-to-head
I do believe that leadership plays a role in the top and can have a general negative or positive sway on the culture in an org. Im rooting for Boeing to fix their problems. And appointing a person at the top to lead that change is going to speak louder than any press release/marketing effort to improve their image.
On the other foot, you have the 144,999 Boeing employees that are not the CEO. Their skills, attitudes, and day to day responsibilities will go largely unchanged.
I agree that the right CEO can have a huge impact, but there is so much inertia against change. It's more likely the board is establishing the next fall guy for the next major scandal in 3-7 years.
Why not replace the entire board if the CEO is a direct reflection of the board?
[0] https://www.boeing.com/content/dam/boeing/boeingdotcom/compa...
Also, it limits drama and backstabbing, as representatives should be accountable to other employees, and have to lead general assembly to talk about huge future changes, like a change of CEO. If a third of the board cannot backstab, and have to talk to literally everybody before making huge decisions, it limits drama _a lot_.
The workers have their own incentives, but in general, going against the leader’s perspectives is counterproductive. They could all start caring, but it’s in their better interest to care about what the boss cares about.
Granted the jury is still out on Intel (IMO) but it was certainly a signal of a culture shift.
He's been CEO for 3 years, considering the state of decay of Intel in 2021 that's not a lot of time to turn things around. AMD took ~6 years between Bulldozer and Zen 1 and you could even argue that Zen 2 is when it truly became competitive so that's 8 years.
I'm not saying he's the Intel messiah FWIW, just that the jury is probably still out on whether he will deliver or not.
He had that background, but was he really a "technical type."?
I've met plenty of trained software engineers who were gunning for management from day one, and they weren't great engineers.
I think what people are saying when they need an engineer at the top is they need someone who understands and will prioritize engineering. You can definitely have an ex-engineer who prioritizes MBA stuff over engineering once they got into management. You're very unlikely to find an accountant who will prioritize engineering.
I think when people talk about technical types they don't mean a programmer or something like that. They mean somebody who is in the actual field, not an accounting/MBA type. GE had a petrochemical division so Welch was technical in that sense.
>I've met plenty of trained software engineers who were gunning for management from day one, and they weren't great engineers.
I don't know enough about Welch to know if this is the case. Are you just hypothesising he could have been like this or are you stating a fact?
>I think what people are saying when they need an engineer at the top is they need someone who understands and will prioritize engineering. You can definitely have an ex-engineer who prioritizes MBA stuff over engineering once they got into management. You're very unlikely to find an accountant who will prioritize engineering.
I'm not sure if it is unlikely to find an accountant who prioritizes engineering. Just because they don't necessarily understand the technical details doesn't mean they can't understand the long term benefits to having quality products and innovation.
Do you have any stats on MBA vs engineering types and their prioritizations?
I'm talking about "types" not Welch.
Specifically I'm clarifying what I think people are asking for when they want an engineer leading Boeing, and amplifying the point about how one's degree or starting role doesn't capture what they're asking for.
> I'm not sure if it is unlikely to find an accountant who prioritizes engineering. Just because they don't necessarily understand the technical details doesn't mean they can't understand the long term benefits to having quality products and innovation.
Then you don't get my point, though some of that may be my fault. I meant something a little stronger than "prioritizes. " Maybe "identifies with engineering" is closer to what I was trying to communicate.
I don't think the problem with an accountant is "understand[ing] the long term benefits to having quality products and innovation," it's making the short term decisions about engineering vs. cost to get there. At a minimum, I'd think an accountant would likely require onerous and repeated explanations and business justifications that would discourage that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, we're scrambling for our non-aerospace customers who want projects completed in 12 weeks...
Let's see if the profit machine actually does get back to work longer term.
Making bad planes is terrible for PR and it's terrible for profits. You can have the most spineless, profit driven sociopath in the world at the helm of your organization but as long as they see problems as things to be solved, the problems will get fixed because it is the rational strategy. But if leadership does not consider the possibility that things could actually be better, they're going to be doing damage control until the end of time.
Um...so, why did you do that? As CFO, that was undoubtedly due to policies you pushed. So why aren't you taking your hat and leaving?
Why would Boeing, or anyone else, be different?
Of course they'll be bailed out.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39815536 (BBC)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39815315 (official PR)
First, is there something similar to a CTO at Boeing? (Like chief engineer?) If so, then I think he/she is ultimately responsible.
I've been an executive tech leader for a couple of years now. And when talking about technology, the bucket stops with me.
As I was learning to perform those roles, I got "pushed" by sales, finance, and business in general. Of course initially I yielded most of the time, but as I've grown I've learned that I can and MUST push back when executive technical decisions are being taken by policies cutting corners and the like.
So, the question in Boeing case is, if the engineering practices where sloppy, why didn't we have a couple of tech VPs resigning? before shit happened? Why didn't we have the CTO equivalent resigning? (Presumably after having pushed back with the executive team to stop the bad practices?
For me, that sounds as bad Technical executive leadership.
I've resigned from a startup CTO position because I ultimately disagreed with the return to office policy and couldn't find a middle ground with the CEO.
And I'm a nobody who had to put ads in LinkedIn to find a new job .
Surely engineering executives at Boeing would have no struggle finding a new project.
Robert A. Bradway Chairman and CEO, Amgen Inc.
David L. Calhoun President and CEO, The Boeing Company
Lynne M. Doughtie Former U.S. Chairman and CEO, KPMG
David L. Gitlin Chairman and CEO, Carrier Global Corporation
Lynn J. Good Chairman, President and CEO, Duke Energy Corporation
Stayce D. Harris Former United Airlines Pilot; Former Inspector General, U.S. Air Force
Akhil Johri Former Executive Vice President and CFO, United Technologies Corporation
David L. Joyce Former President and CEO, GE Aviation; Former Vice Chair, General Electric Company
Lawrence W. Kellner, Chair of the Board Former Chairman and CEO, Continental Airlines, Inc.
Steven M. Mollenkopf Former CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
John M. Richardson 31st Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy; Former Director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, U.S. Navy
Sabrina Soussan Chairman and CEO, SUEZ SA
Ronald A. Williams Former Chairman, President and CEO, Aetna Inc.
I guess it's to be expected that no one on this list is facing any consequences for pushing the company closer and closer to disaster?
> ARLINGTON, Va., March 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Boeing [NYSE: BA] President and CEO Dave Calhoun today announced his decision to step down as CEO at the end of 2024, and he will continue to lead Boeing through the year to complete the critical work underway to stabilize and position the company for the future.
* https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2024-03-25-Boeing-Announces-Boa...
I wonder if the amount of regulations are preventing something like Tesla to appear among plane manufacturers.
Bombardier, an established airplane company, couldn't find any customers for the C-Series (now the A220) until they gave away the plane to Airbus for free. Now it sells like hotcakes.
Companies simply were not willing to take a risk on a new plane without establishment backing.
No corporation would accept Tesla's "Full Self Driving" claims. Plenty of individuals think "good enough."
Startups have no clean slate advantage in an industry where every single part of your plane has to be approved and whose design stems from gigantic numbers of operations.
Designing commercial airliners requires insane amounts of money, time and know how.
Boeing and Airbus are in near-monopoly status where the only possible competitors can be state-sponsored .