Boeing ejected its pilot again. Good luck with a landing
The problems that led to this week’s ouster of Boeing’s chief executive were a long time coming, because in the aviation business, everything is. As First Boston analyst Wolfgang Demisch told the New York Times in 1985, an aviation company makes all the thousands of decisions that go into designing a new plane “every 10 years, give or take a few. You then have to live with the consequences for the next 50.”
I came across that quote in “Flying Blind,” Peter Robison’s 2021 chronicle of Boeing’s disastrous descent from industry leader and national champion to disgraced progenitor of the 737 Max, which killed 346 people before authorities worldwide finally grounded the plane in March 2019. It took almost two years, a change of CEOs and a harsh regulatory reckoning before the Federal Aviation Administration cleared it to fly again.
Fast-forward to this January and a new 737 Max fiasco: A gaping hole opened during an Alaska Airlines flight because, incredibly, four key bolts on a door plug were apparently missing when the plane left the Being factory. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured, and “bolt things on properly” is a very easy fix compared with the months it took Boeing to overhaul the computer systems that had caused crashes in 2018 and 2019. But by the same token, the latest lapse is actually more worrying: “Unanticipated computer issues” seem more understandable than “forgetting to fasten the plane together.”
Unfortunately, both problems are symptoms of the much deeper issues that Robison chronicles: a decades-long transformation from a quality-driven culture that boasted, “We hire engineers and other people,” into a finance-focused mediocrity that hasn’t undertaken to build a “clean sheet,” from-scratch airliner since 2003. Instead, it kept updating the half-century-old 737 – and as the years wore on, even that proved beyond the company’s capabilities. Safety issues and other problems turned our champion performer into an also-ran; last year, Airbus delivered 735 planes, while Boeing delivered 528. The company hasn’t turned a profit in five years.
I’m more sympathetic than Robison to the bean counters and deregulators cast as the central villains of his book. One Boeing engineer, recalling the 1990s, described “a very collegial, bloated, flaccid management structure.” Which is a good description of many of America’s industrial giants before the shareholder revolution that demanded Boeing and its ilk concentrate on the bottom line.
That said, there are good ways and bad ways to deliver shareholder value, and Boeing chose all the bad ones. Under a series of penny-pinching CEOs, the company prioritized short-term profitability in a business in which returns on investment are often measured in decades. They were outsourcing critical production and training functions and skimping on the research and development necessary for industry leadership, while management made imprudent layoffs and demands to ship inferior product that caused an exodus of talent. This myopia often ended up costing the company more money and risked destroying the biggest asset Boeing had: a reputation for safety that once had pilots saying “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.”
These mistakes are mostly not the fault of outgoing CEO Dave Calhoun, who emphasized his goal of ensuring safety when he took over in 2020. But the Alaska Airlines debacle demonstrates that he has failed to do so in his four years at the helm. And his assurances that Boeing won’t attempt to release a truly new plane this decade sound more like the risk-averse, bottom-line-focused mind-set that got Boeing to this point rather than the cultural revolution Boeing now needs. Letting Calhoun go is a necessary first step, if only to signal that the company is ready for a drastic change of direction.
Unfortunately, a company this size is like a battleship: harder to sink than a smaller ship but commensurately harder to turn. Because big companies can chug along on their past reputation for so long, it’s hard to generate the urgency needed to overcome the inertia – like resistant managers who are there precisely because they’re the sort of people who thrived in the old, bad system. And because there are so many of them, it’s hard to replace them all.
If nothing changes, of course, the hour of reckoning eventually arrives, and the declining legend is displaced by an upstart or acquired by a more nimble competitor. But even after a series of disasters like the 737 Max, that hour can take ages to arrive. And in Boeing’s case, the reckoning will be further delayed by the nature of its business – a problem not just for Boeing but for all Americans who would like to see us maintain a leading position in commercial aviation.
Boeing is unlikely to be overtaken anytime soon by an American upstart, because the industry’s barriers to entry are so high. Clearing them requires amassing a very rare combination of technical expertise, production management skill, massive capital investment and a long time horizon – all to enter a global market that can probably support only a few such behemoths. For the same reason, however, the pool of potential corporate buyers is limited, especially because the government is unlikely to allow a sale to rivals headquartered elsewhere.
Yet Boeing cannot go on as it is now, not least because it will be very difficult to attract and keep engineering talent at a company in such parlous shape. It’s hard to say exactly how this paradox will be resolved, but it’s safe to say it will happen slowly – and painfully.
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