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When Dave Calhoun, chief executive of Boeing, addressed its employees this week about a brush with disaster on a 737 Max aircraft carrying 171 passengers, he choked up. “I got kids, I got grandkids and so do you. This stuff matters. Everything matters, every detail matters,” he told them.
I don’t doubt Calhoun’s sincerity but Boeing has made emotional pledges to improve its safety record before and those did not prevent this accident. No matter how hard it pulls at its internal controls to reform how it designs and builds aircraft, it has not fully changed course. The most famous aerospace company in the US has a big credibility problem.
The latest blow to its authority came last Friday when part of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 jet blew out at 16,000 feet, inducing a sudden decompression. No one on board was injured or died, but it could well have proved as fatal as the twin crashes of 737 Max 8 aircraft in 2018 and 2019 in which 346 people perished.
This accident was different in nature: it appears to have been caused by the failure to install properly (or perhaps at all) bolts that were designed to keep a door-shaped panel in place. The likely cause was an oversight in manufacturing or assembly, rather than the earlier, catastrophic design flaw in the 737 Max’s flight control software.
The failure may not have been entirely Boeing’s doing, despite Calhoun’s sensible acknowledgment of “our mistake”. The aircraft’s fuselage, including the unbolted panel, was built by its supplier Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas before being shipped to the company in Washington state for final assembly. Investigators have not said where the error happened.
But that is no comfort to the thousands of passengers who board 737s and other Boeing jets each day, given its near duopoly with Airbus in supplying large aircraft to commercial airlines. Boeing bears ultimate responsibility for assembling and delivering aircraft, as Calhoun told investors in 2022: “Safety dominates Boeing . . . We’ll never forget [the crashes] nor should we.”
The former pioneer of the 747 jumbo jet is now regarded dismally by many in its industry, including some of its own employees. Boeing has become bureaucratic and focused more on financial returns than engineering prowess. “Given what’s happened to its culture and senior management, we can expect more of the same,” remarks Richard Aboulafia, a veteran analyst.
I mistook the significance of the 737 Max crashes at the time. They were not just human tragedies, but showed a company that had underinvested in innovation and skimped on safety. That goes back to its unhappy 1996 merger with McDonnell Douglas, which broadened its scope from commercial aircraft into defence and unleashed the mantra of shareholder value.
Boeing saved money by updating the ageing 737 to the Max, rather than building a new aircraft to match Airbus’s A320neo, and it remains reluctant to bear the cost of a new model, at least until the 2030s. “Everybody thinks there’s a giant ticket out there somewhere . . . to do some fancy new airplane. It’s not going to happen,” Calhoun assured his cautious investors in 2022.
What pleases Wall Street goes down less well inside Boeing. “Is there any reason why a top engineer would want to work for a company whose CEO just said that?” Aboulafia asks. Many of its engineers pine for its glory days and its former willingness to bet the company on progress: there is more excitement at companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Now it faces a huge task simply to build its existing range safely and reliably. Airlines reported this week finding loose parts on their aircraft, and United Airlines said some bolts of the kind involved in the accident needed tightening. Spirit was already under scrutiny for having improperly installed two fittings on 737 Max fuselages and drilling other holes wrongly.
Calhoun has made some of the right noises since taking over as chief executive in 2020, pledging to cultivate its engineering pride and ensuring safety is its top priority. It has established a safety committee of its board, and its chief aerospace safety officer last year promised that it “continues to strengthen its safety practices and culture and bring lasting improvements”.
Pledges and committees are one thing; action is another. Boeing is very stodgy, with senior directors seen as remote figures who operate through layers of deputies headed by chiefs of staff. Its corporate values include a section headed “crush bureaucracy”, which has the air of being written more in hope than expectation.
Elaine Englehardt, professor of ethics at Utah Valley University, argues that the 737 Max crashes stemmed from “a toxic culture and a breach between management and engineering”. They should have led to a reset at Boeing, but this accident shows that it still cannot guarantee to meet safety standards.
Aircraft are tricky to make: there are 340,000 parts on an Airbus A320 and thousands of bolts and fasteners need to be fixed properly before a 737 Max leaves the factory. But the full price of a Max 9 is $130mn and passengers have the right to expect better, no matter how hard Boeing is to turn.