Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 passengers receive FBI letter identifying them as the victims of a possible crime
A door panel on the Alaska Airlines jet carrying 177 people blew out midair on its way from Oregon to California on Jan. 5.
Incidente mid-air per un 737 Max 9 di Alaska Air
- Autore Discussione 13900
- Data d'inizio
- 1 Febbraio 2012
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Le compagnie aeree giustamente iniziano ad innervosirsi.
nypost.com
Airline CEOs request meeting with Boeing in wake of 737 MAX blowout: report
Major US airline CEOS have reportedly requested a meeting with Boeing’s board to express concerns over production problems following near-disastrous fuselage blowout.
nypost.com
ilverococco
Utente Registrato
So di commettere peccato ad abbassare notevolmente il livello di questo forum e per questo vi chiedo scusa in anticipo…ma questo video mi ha fatto molto ridere
www.instagram.com
Busy creating shareholder value on Instagram: "And that’s why they’re the best in the business - #boeing #737max #737 #747 #boeing747 #boeing777 #aviation #finance #shortselling #bearmarket #equity #stocks #stocktrading #stocktrader #airbus #option #optiontrading #putoptions #investmentbanking #investmentbank #engineerlife #engineerproblems"
616K likes, 3,594 comments - afinancebro on March 17, 2024: "And that’s why they’re the best in the business - #boeing #737max #737 #747 #boeing747 #boeing777 #aviation #finance #shortselling #bearmarket #equity #stocks #stocktrading #stocktrader #airbus #option #optiontrading #putoptions...
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Curiosità, ma in questi ultimi anni il management è cambiato?
Inviato dal mio Pixel 8 utilizzando Tapatalk
Inviato dal mio Pixel 8 utilizzando Tapatalk
Il management e' cambiato da un po', diciamo che i ragionieri hanno preso il posto degli ingegneri. Fra l'altro la sede legale non e' piu' a Seattle ma a Chicago.
East End Ave
Utente Registrato
E Boeing non è l’unica realtà che segue la dinamica dell’instant profit, anzi!
- 1 Febbraio 2012
- 12,489
- 2,629
Lo shortermismo è una malattia molto seria e contagiosa, vissuta da me dal vivo più volte in aziende anche molto diverse tra loro e non solo italiane.
Short term gain, (pretending to ignore the) long term pain.
Se ci pensate bene, tutta la questione del Max è frutto di questa malattia.
Solo che questa malattia è terribile perché all'insorgere della prima pustola, per cercare di guarire, in realtà favorisci l'insorgere di altre pustole, commettendo gli stessi errori in una mortale sequenza del tipo "oddio, sto perdendo soldi --> troviamo un'altra soluzione che mi permetta di sopravvivere a breve termine --> oddio, ora perdo ancora più soldi di prima".
In questi casi, o arriva l'equivalente del dottor Barnard (a trovarlo, ovviamente), o il paziente muore.
La sede non è nemmeno piu a Chicago, adesso è ad Arlington, a due passi dal pentagono.
Questo ha senso, visto che le forze armate USA saranno la via per il salvataggio finanziario di Boeing.
- 1 Febbraio 2012
- 12,489
- 2,629
Interessantissimo (e scioccante) articolo del WSJ sul caos in casa Boeing.
Questi devono chiudere e ripartire da zero.
The Disarray Inside Boeing’s 737 Factory Before the Door Plug Blowout
Last year, work inside Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory stalled on a future 737 MAX jet then known as Line No. 8789. Pressure was building.
More than two weeks had passed since workers on Sept. 1 flagged damaged rivets on a fuselage that needed fixing. The section had been assembled by supplier Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kan., and shipped by train to Boeing’s plant.
Targets for completion came and went before employees escalated the situation to “Tier 3” priority, a move intended to get high-level attention at the factory, according to an internal Boeing log of employees’ push to finish the jet—the same one that would later lose its door plug panel in a near tragedy in flight just months later.
Punctuating how the situation was escalating with dollar signs, an internal message read: “$$TIER-CHG: 2 – 3 $$,” according to a Sept. 17 entry in the Shipside Action Tracker, or SAT, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The SAT is like a factory Slack channel for fixing a production problem.
The communications of the Boeing employees working on the door plug, previously unreported, help illuminate why it blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan 5. The factory was in disarray. Crews were unable to keep a schedule and apparently didn’t follow procedures, and production pressure mounted as delays piled up, according to entries in the SAT, people who have reviewed the logs and interviews with Boeing employees who worked on the plane.
In their logs, workers extended 50 times the estimated time for completing work on the damaged rivets around the frame of the door plug. The delays ranged from a half-hour to days. The work was finally signed off on and officially completed by the morning shift on Sept. 20, after a final quality check was requested the previous day, the records show.
The production breakdown had stunning consequences: The jet’s door plug blew off in flight, triggering an explosive loss of cabin pressure that risked the lives of passengers who could have been sucked out midair. It has sparked federal probes, including a criminal investigation, and hastened the exit of senior leaders including Chief Executive David Calhoun, who had vowed to improve Boeing’s safety and quality.
A Boeing spokesman said the company is prohibited by federal rules from discussing the investigation and referred to recent remarks by executives that they will slow down the factories to focus on quality and will take new steps to prevent problems from being pushed down assembly lines. The company is in talks with Spirit to acquire the company in an effort to rein in the supplier’s quality issues and also recently changed its bonus plan for 100,000 workers to emphasize quality and safety over meeting financial targets.
“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right,” Brian West, Boeing’s finance chief, said at a recent investor conference. “That’s got to change. The leadership team got it in the immediate aftermath of January 5.”
The SAT logs show that a fix for the damaged rivets was in the works for days, and that workers had to wade through layers of management to get the problem addressed. That task required opening or removing the door plug, which was installed in place of an unused emergency exit.
The workers discussed what documentation was required if they opened or removed the plug. “If removal needed, a removal needs to be written first,” one staffer wrote on Sept. 17. Altering airplane parts requires documentation in the heavily regulated and safety-focused world of aerospace manufacturing.
No such documentation appears to exist, however, Boeing has told U.S. lawmakers and accident investigators who have since been probing why the door plug blew off. The National Transportation Safety Board has said workers appear to have failed to replace four critical bolts needed to keep the panel in place.
The SAT records show a manager communicated that a mechanic was opening the door plug, however.
The NTSB has said investigators haven’t been able to interview the manager who oversees the team of Renton employees responsible for door work. The safety board has said the manager is out on medical leave.
Starts and Stops
When Calhoun, a Boeing director and former GE executive, took over as Boeing’s CEO in January 2020, he promised change by improving safety and engineering. “It’s going to last for a long time, and it’s going to be healthy,” he told reporters at the time. Two 737 MAX jets had crashed, taking 346 lives and grounding hundreds of Boeing planes for 20 months.
Then the pandemic grounded flights and halted factories at Boeing, rival Airbus and suppliers such as Spirit. By 2022, they were straining to meet a surge in demand for new jets as travel boomed. Boeing hired thousands of new staff and steadily increased 737 MAX production, and Calhoun issued financial targets that relied on plans for higher output.
Last year, the factories were still running with stops and starts as the company worked to return to production levels seen before the MAX crashes. Boeing delivered 580 737s in 2018, the year of the first crash.
Calhoun was promising to deliver as many as 450 737s for 2023. Through August, Boeing had only delivered 271 of the jets. Airlines were frustrated and cutting schedules since they didn’t get expected planes.
“Is there pressure? Yes and no. We’re still there to do a job,” said one Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug on Line No. 8789. “I have a deadline every day, my team has a deadline every day, so if it gets behind schedule you have to get it on schedule.”
Behind the scenes, regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration and leaders of its factory workers’ union tussled with Boeing over its practices. The FAA and union pushed Boeing to add back second-party quality inspections that had been cut.
In September, while the Renton team was working on Line No. 8789, Boeing’s output of 737 jets had fallen to the lowest levels in two years. Boeing delivered just 15 new 737s to the world’s airlines that month. Executives had been telling airlines and investors that it wanted to produce about 38 a month.
The culprit was a separate issue from the rivets involved in the door plug. A defect in the rear of 737 fuselages supplied by Spirit had been discovered by Boeing the month before. Fixing the issue required inspecting and correcting misdrilled fastener holes in a key structural part. It had snarled production at Spirit, which in turn had delayed Boeing’s factories.
To keep things moving, Boeing kept accepting flawed fuselages from Spirit, including Line No. 8789. And the plane maker allowed unfinished tasks to flow through its factory—knocking production out of sequence in a practice called “traveled work,” which can increase the risk of slip-ups.
“Years ago, we weren’t going this fast,” said the Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug on Line No. 8789. “I’m not saying fast caused the problem. Something happened. I don’t know what it was.”
A second Boeing employee who was also involved with the same Alaska 737 MAX said he has never felt pressured to move too quickly. The company’s attention to quality and safety has improved significantly in recent years, and the mishap with Line No. 8789 has been weighing on the Renton workforce.
“It’s a failure on all of us,” he said. “We all feel it.”
FAA officials have criticized what they have found upon closer inspection of Boeing’s Renton factory since the blowout. They have described an operation that appears to prize production schedules over safety and quality.
FAA chief Mike Whitaker was particularly troubled he didn’t receive a safety briefing upon starting a tour of the factory, people familiar with the matter said. Such briefings are typical in manufacturing settings.
‘Just painted over’
When Boeing’s production system works according to plan, it typically takes a week or two for a 737 to make its way through final assembly at the Renton plant.
The rivet flaw was flagged the day after Line No. 8789 arrived at Renton. After that it took 18 days, 12 hours and nine minutes to fix the damaged rivets and officially resolve the issue.
The SAT entries suggest an at times dysfunctional production environment complicated by delays in getting parts and red tape with Spirit, the error-prone supplier that Boeing once owned and is in talks to acquire.
Spirit workers were on site at Renton and tasked with resolving the rivet issue.
Six days after workers flagged the damaged rivets on Spirit’s fuselage, an entry read: CONDITION STILL EXIST. RIVETS WERE JUST PAINTED OVER.
Boeing wanted new rivets. Days went by, with Boeing workers noting difficulties spurring the Spirit personnel into action. “Damaged rivets are not acceptable and need to be removed and replaced,” read one Sept. 11 entry.
Two days later: “No Spirit work in progress,” read another entry, suggesting another extension. Then, on Sept. 14, Boeing employees escalated the situation to a higher level of attention for greater visibility.
Workers removed the door plug’s bolts to open it, which allowed access to the rivets. But there is no entry in the SAT log calling for the door plug’s reinstallation.
The absence of documentation has shocked current and former Boeing employees. An official “removal” process would have prompted Boeing’s quality-assurance team to check that the door plug had been properly reinstalled—with the bolts to keep the panel in place, they said.
“I was, like, ‘What the hell?’ Boeing does a great job especially on documentation,” said the Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug. “If you take something out, you’ve got to write a removal.”
Thousands of people work in the Renton facility on three production lines where half-built planes move between stations every evening. Risers lift workers to the body of the 40-foot-tall planes, where crews use specialized tools to complete hundreds of tasks. Below, workers sit in rows at computers tracking the progress. Boeing’s plan to add a fourth line has been put on hold by the FAA in the wake of the blowout.
The team that works on doors and door plugs in Renton fluctuates between 20 and 30 workers. Some have spent decades at Boeing, others just a few months or years. They generally are split between two 8-hour shifts and can work on several planes a day.
Factory workers eventually secured new rivets for Line No. 8789, and by Sept. 19 a final target arrived. “Per Spirit management, this job is committed to be done today,” a SAT entry read.
A Boeing quality manager was to assign a final inspection. The rivet problem was on track for review, and the issue was closed on Sept. 20. The jet continued to be worked on and inspected for another month.
On Oct. 25, Boeing reported financial results. It booked a $1.64 billion third-quarter loss and lowered its 737 delivery goals for the year. It now expected to finish 375 to 400 of the jets, instead of as many as 450. Even that goal required the Renton factory to significantly ramp up production in the final weeks of the year.
Calhoun sent a memo to employees that day, rebutting criticism of its production numbers. He told them that improved quality procedures and a culture that rewarded speaking up about problems meant the company was finding more things in need of repair.
“I have heard those outside our company wondering if we’ve lost a step,” Calhoun wrote. “I view it as quite the opposite.”
Boeing delivered the jet known as Line No. 8789 to Alaska on Oct. 31. Eleven days later, the plane started flying passengers.
Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Tangel at andrew.tangel@wsj.com and Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com
Questi devono chiudere e ripartire da zero.
The Disarray Inside Boeing’s 737 Factory Before the Door Plug Blowout
Last year, work inside Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory stalled on a future 737 MAX jet then known as Line No. 8789. Pressure was building.
More than two weeks had passed since workers on Sept. 1 flagged damaged rivets on a fuselage that needed fixing. The section had been assembled by supplier Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kan., and shipped by train to Boeing’s plant.
Targets for completion came and went before employees escalated the situation to “Tier 3” priority, a move intended to get high-level attention at the factory, according to an internal Boeing log of employees’ push to finish the jet—the same one that would later lose its door plug panel in a near tragedy in flight just months later.
Punctuating how the situation was escalating with dollar signs, an internal message read: “$$TIER-CHG: 2 – 3 $$,” according to a Sept. 17 entry in the Shipside Action Tracker, or SAT, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The SAT is like a factory Slack channel for fixing a production problem.
The communications of the Boeing employees working on the door plug, previously unreported, help illuminate why it blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan 5. The factory was in disarray. Crews were unable to keep a schedule and apparently didn’t follow procedures, and production pressure mounted as delays piled up, according to entries in the SAT, people who have reviewed the logs and interviews with Boeing employees who worked on the plane.
In their logs, workers extended 50 times the estimated time for completing work on the damaged rivets around the frame of the door plug. The delays ranged from a half-hour to days. The work was finally signed off on and officially completed by the morning shift on Sept. 20, after a final quality check was requested the previous day, the records show.
The production breakdown had stunning consequences: The jet’s door plug blew off in flight, triggering an explosive loss of cabin pressure that risked the lives of passengers who could have been sucked out midair. It has sparked federal probes, including a criminal investigation, and hastened the exit of senior leaders including Chief Executive David Calhoun, who had vowed to improve Boeing’s safety and quality.
A Boeing spokesman said the company is prohibited by federal rules from discussing the investigation and referred to recent remarks by executives that they will slow down the factories to focus on quality and will take new steps to prevent problems from being pushed down assembly lines. The company is in talks with Spirit to acquire the company in an effort to rein in the supplier’s quality issues and also recently changed its bonus plan for 100,000 workers to emphasize quality and safety over meeting financial targets.
“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right,” Brian West, Boeing’s finance chief, said at a recent investor conference. “That’s got to change. The leadership team got it in the immediate aftermath of January 5.”
The SAT logs show that a fix for the damaged rivets was in the works for days, and that workers had to wade through layers of management to get the problem addressed. That task required opening or removing the door plug, which was installed in place of an unused emergency exit.
The workers discussed what documentation was required if they opened or removed the plug. “If removal needed, a removal needs to be written first,” one staffer wrote on Sept. 17. Altering airplane parts requires documentation in the heavily regulated and safety-focused world of aerospace manufacturing.
No such documentation appears to exist, however, Boeing has told U.S. lawmakers and accident investigators who have since been probing why the door plug blew off. The National Transportation Safety Board has said workers appear to have failed to replace four critical bolts needed to keep the panel in place.
The SAT records show a manager communicated that a mechanic was opening the door plug, however.
The NTSB has said investigators haven’t been able to interview the manager who oversees the team of Renton employees responsible for door work. The safety board has said the manager is out on medical leave.
Starts and Stops
When Calhoun, a Boeing director and former GE executive, took over as Boeing’s CEO in January 2020, he promised change by improving safety and engineering. “It’s going to last for a long time, and it’s going to be healthy,” he told reporters at the time. Two 737 MAX jets had crashed, taking 346 lives and grounding hundreds of Boeing planes for 20 months.
Then the pandemic grounded flights and halted factories at Boeing, rival Airbus and suppliers such as Spirit. By 2022, they were straining to meet a surge in demand for new jets as travel boomed. Boeing hired thousands of new staff and steadily increased 737 MAX production, and Calhoun issued financial targets that relied on plans for higher output.
Last year, the factories were still running with stops and starts as the company worked to return to production levels seen before the MAX crashes. Boeing delivered 580 737s in 2018, the year of the first crash.
Calhoun was promising to deliver as many as 450 737s for 2023. Through August, Boeing had only delivered 271 of the jets. Airlines were frustrated and cutting schedules since they didn’t get expected planes.
“Is there pressure? Yes and no. We’re still there to do a job,” said one Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug on Line No. 8789. “I have a deadline every day, my team has a deadline every day, so if it gets behind schedule you have to get it on schedule.”
Behind the scenes, regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration and leaders of its factory workers’ union tussled with Boeing over its practices. The FAA and union pushed Boeing to add back second-party quality inspections that had been cut.
In September, while the Renton team was working on Line No. 8789, Boeing’s output of 737 jets had fallen to the lowest levels in two years. Boeing delivered just 15 new 737s to the world’s airlines that month. Executives had been telling airlines and investors that it wanted to produce about 38 a month.
The culprit was a separate issue from the rivets involved in the door plug. A defect in the rear of 737 fuselages supplied by Spirit had been discovered by Boeing the month before. Fixing the issue required inspecting and correcting misdrilled fastener holes in a key structural part. It had snarled production at Spirit, which in turn had delayed Boeing’s factories.
To keep things moving, Boeing kept accepting flawed fuselages from Spirit, including Line No. 8789. And the plane maker allowed unfinished tasks to flow through its factory—knocking production out of sequence in a practice called “traveled work,” which can increase the risk of slip-ups.
“Years ago, we weren’t going this fast,” said the Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug on Line No. 8789. “I’m not saying fast caused the problem. Something happened. I don’t know what it was.”
A second Boeing employee who was also involved with the same Alaska 737 MAX said he has never felt pressured to move too quickly. The company’s attention to quality and safety has improved significantly in recent years, and the mishap with Line No. 8789 has been weighing on the Renton workforce.
“It’s a failure on all of us,” he said. “We all feel it.”
FAA officials have criticized what they have found upon closer inspection of Boeing’s Renton factory since the blowout. They have described an operation that appears to prize production schedules over safety and quality.
FAA chief Mike Whitaker was particularly troubled he didn’t receive a safety briefing upon starting a tour of the factory, people familiar with the matter said. Such briefings are typical in manufacturing settings.
‘Just painted over’
When Boeing’s production system works according to plan, it typically takes a week or two for a 737 to make its way through final assembly at the Renton plant.
The rivet flaw was flagged the day after Line No. 8789 arrived at Renton. After that it took 18 days, 12 hours and nine minutes to fix the damaged rivets and officially resolve the issue.
The SAT entries suggest an at times dysfunctional production environment complicated by delays in getting parts and red tape with Spirit, the error-prone supplier that Boeing once owned and is in talks to acquire.
Spirit workers were on site at Renton and tasked with resolving the rivet issue.
Six days after workers flagged the damaged rivets on Spirit’s fuselage, an entry read: CONDITION STILL EXIST. RIVETS WERE JUST PAINTED OVER.
Boeing wanted new rivets. Days went by, with Boeing workers noting difficulties spurring the Spirit personnel into action. “Damaged rivets are not acceptable and need to be removed and replaced,” read one Sept. 11 entry.
Two days later: “No Spirit work in progress,” read another entry, suggesting another extension. Then, on Sept. 14, Boeing employees escalated the situation to a higher level of attention for greater visibility.
Workers removed the door plug’s bolts to open it, which allowed access to the rivets. But there is no entry in the SAT log calling for the door plug’s reinstallation.
The absence of documentation has shocked current and former Boeing employees. An official “removal” process would have prompted Boeing’s quality-assurance team to check that the door plug had been properly reinstalled—with the bolts to keep the panel in place, they said.
“I was, like, ‘What the hell?’ Boeing does a great job especially on documentation,” said the Boeing veteran who was involved with work related to the door plug. “If you take something out, you’ve got to write a removal.”
Thousands of people work in the Renton facility on three production lines where half-built planes move between stations every evening. Risers lift workers to the body of the 40-foot-tall planes, where crews use specialized tools to complete hundreds of tasks. Below, workers sit in rows at computers tracking the progress. Boeing’s plan to add a fourth line has been put on hold by the FAA in the wake of the blowout.
The team that works on doors and door plugs in Renton fluctuates between 20 and 30 workers. Some have spent decades at Boeing, others just a few months or years. They generally are split between two 8-hour shifts and can work on several planes a day.
Factory workers eventually secured new rivets for Line No. 8789, and by Sept. 19 a final target arrived. “Per Spirit management, this job is committed to be done today,” a SAT entry read.
A Boeing quality manager was to assign a final inspection. The rivet problem was on track for review, and the issue was closed on Sept. 20. The jet continued to be worked on and inspected for another month.
On Oct. 25, Boeing reported financial results. It booked a $1.64 billion third-quarter loss and lowered its 737 delivery goals for the year. It now expected to finish 375 to 400 of the jets, instead of as many as 450. Even that goal required the Renton factory to significantly ramp up production in the final weeks of the year.
Calhoun sent a memo to employees that day, rebutting criticism of its production numbers. He told them that improved quality procedures and a culture that rewarded speaking up about problems meant the company was finding more things in need of repair.
“I have heard those outside our company wondering if we’ve lost a step,” Calhoun wrote. “I view it as quite the opposite.”
Boeing delivered the jet known as Line No. 8789 to Alaska on Oct. 31. Eleven days later, the plane started flying passengers.
Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Tangel at andrew.tangel@wsj.com and Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com
Ultima modifica:
Altro articolo interessante
aviationweek.com
This was not part of the plan. When David Calhoun cemented his long-term position as Boeing CEO in April 2021 at age 64, the board of directors raised the corporate retirement age cap for the CEO to 70 from 65. The company also announced the departure of Chief Financial Officer Greg Smith after a decade in the job. The changes ensured that the corner office—then overlooking the Chicago River in the Windy City—was Calhoun’s to lose.
Calhoun, who joined Boeing’s board in 2009, had unexpectedly become CEO in January 2020. Until April 2021, however, questions lingered. How long would he stay? Who would lead the next set of strategic decisions? The April moves cleared the way for Calhoun to reshape Boeing for up to six more years.
Smith’s departure was one of Calhoun’s many moves in recasting the executive leadership to his liking, culminating in Stephanie Pope’s recent promotion to chief operating officer (AW&ST Dec. 25, 2023-Jan. 14, 2024, p. 12).
He also helped set ambitious targets. In November 2022, Calhoun and Chief Financial Officer Brian West announced a target of $10 billion in free cash flow and a monthly 737 production rate of 50 by 2025-26. Those targets remained even as Boeing faced an onslaught of doubts from Wall Street and Washington in the wake of the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines 737-9 door plug accident (AW&ST Feb. 12-25, p. 16).
But the manufacturing giant’s plans are changing—all of them.
The first three months of 2024 will be remembered as the quarter when Boeing broke. On March 25, the company revealed that Calhoun will step down by year-end and board chair Lawrence Kellner will not seek reelection at an upcoming shareholder meeting. In addition, Pope immediately replaced Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) CEO Stan Deal. Calhoun is now a caretaker—ideally for as short a time as possible.
“The calendar is too full of items that will influence Boeing’s commercial strategy this year to leave it all to an outgoing CEO,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts George Ferguson and Melissa Balzano wrote in a recent report.
Among those items are the potential purchase of key supplier Spirit AeroSystems, negotiations with the OEM’s largest union in the Seattle area for a new contract due in September, enacting manufacturing quality standards agreed upon with the FAA and certifying the 737-7, 737-10 and 777-9 (AW&ST March 11-24, p. 14).
Then there is the rest of the business. Boeing Defense and Space (BDS) accounted for 32% of overall sales in 2023 but faces a rocky path ahead. It can expect continued domestic and international orders for its decades-old stalwarts—the F-15EX fighter, KC-46A tanker and CH-47F and AH-64E helicopters—into the 2030s. But at least one of these decades-old fighter, mobility and rotorcraft platforms could cease production.
Prospects for winning new platforms—including next-generation fighters, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and tankers—loom on the near and distant horizons. Securing these only makes business sense if Boeing can deliver higher levels of performance for a U.S. Air Force determined to impose fixed-price production terms on the defense industry.
Recent history is not reassuring. In 2018, Boeing won the Air Force contract to develop and build the T-7A Red Hawk advanced jet trainer. The franchise victory requires Boeing and fuselage supplier Saab to deliver 351 jets, making the T-7A a leading candidate for U.S. Navy and international needs.
But the Red Hawk also has exposed Boeing’s inability to profit from its contract victories. The program has reported more than $1.41 billion in reach-forward losses—a fraction of the more than $13 billion in BDS charges since 2014 spanning five programs with fixed-price terms. More losses could be in store as Boeing works to solve problems that have delayed the T-7A’s service entry by at least four years.
The scenario places the defense prime in a difficult position. In a decade when the future of BDS may depend on winning deals to deliver next-generation aircraft, its leaders must be especially motivated to break a cycle of overpromising and underdelivering.
Nestled within BDS is Boeing’s small but high-profile human space program, which includes engineering and support services to NASA for the 25-year-old International Space Station (ISS). In 2014, the company also won a milestone-based, fixed-price contract—worth $4.2 billion at the time—to develop, test and operate a service to transport astronauts to and from the orbital outpost. SpaceX was hired to build and operate a second crewed transportation system under a separate contract initially worth $2.6 billion. For a while, Goliath and David were neck-and-neck in their efforts to restore human spaceflight to the U.S. following the space shuttle’s retirement.
A series of technical issues ultimately stymied Boeing’s offering, the CST-100 Starliner. On its first flight test in December 2019, software problems and a communications glitch left the uncrewed Starliner unable to reach the ISS. A repeat flight was delayed until May 2022 after the discovery of corrosion inside valves that impeded function of the service module’s propulsion system.
Most recently, Starliner’s crewed flight test was delayed so that the capsule’s parachutes could be redesigned and certified after the discovery of a contractor’s test error made early in the program. Boeing also found potential flammability issues with the P-213 tape covering wire harnesses throughout the capsule.
Boeing now aims to launch the crewed mission as early as May 6. The Starliner capsule will launch aboard an Atlas V rocket built and operated by Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s United Launch Alliance.
Meanwhile, SpaceX completed uncrewed and crewed flight tests of its Dragon capsule in 2019 and 2020, respectively, and is currently operating its eighth crewed NASA mission aboard the ISS.
“Boeing has great belief in this endeavor, and it isn’t about the money,” Starliner Deputy Program Manager LeRoy Cain tells Aviation Week. “If you look at the company and its heritage, it’s always been important to be involved in the leading edge and doing the things that are hard and providing capabilities that are difficult but that give the nation—in this case, NASA—the capability it needs to be able to achieve its mission.”
While BDS merits attention, Boeing’s most acute issues remain within BCA. The next CEO will almost certainly scrap financial projections and aircraft build rate targets issued under Calhoun’s tenure. The new leader also will help answer two key questions: What kind of company should Boeing be, and how should it allocate its precious resources?
Calhoun says his successor must focus on continuing efforts to “steady the ship” and rebaseline production expectations around lower delivery numbers—at least until the FAA is confident Boeing and its supply chain can be trusted to boost output. The new CEO will also take on BCA’s most urgent need: a new single-aisle design to succeed the 737.
“Our next leader is going to develop and call out the next airplane for the Boeing Co.,” Calhoun told CNBC. “It will be a $50 billion investment.”
The price for the all-new design is more than double previous estimates. That could indicate acceptance of the higher—and more realistic—levels of investment required for the project both from a technological and industrial perspective. The two are intrinsically linked, particularly if Boeing adopts a design with a majority-composite fuselage.
The big question about composites for major single-aisle aircraft structures is whether they can be produced at the rate and costs that match today’s predominantly metallic designs. Boeing hopes the answers will emerge from its involvement in research efforts such as NASA’s Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing (HiCAM) project, which is studying the use of next-generation thermosets as well as resin-infused and thermoplastic composites. HiCAM is targeted at raising the technology readiness level to enable a fourfold or sixfold production rate increase without ramping up costs.
While the aerodynamics and configurations of new designs are traditionally the most guarded aspects of any advanced product development project, Boeing publicly appears to be targeting design technology from the X-66A, NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator (AW&ST Jan. 29-Feb. 11, p. 52). The testbed is a modified MD-90 with a high-aspect-ratio, low-drag wing. Dubbed the transonic truss-braced wing (TTBW), the concept is being backed as the leading candidate for a sustainable 737 replacement design after being under evaluation for 14 years.
Aside from its sustainability credentials, the TTBW appeals to Boeing for at least three reasons. As the concept is already in development, it will have a valuable head start toward defining a production version later this decade if the design works as hoped. This makes it even more attractive to a cash-strapped company facing a massive development bill.
Although wing aerodynamics will be part of the puzzle for a more sustainable design, propulsion will drive the lion’s share of the aircraft’s step change in performance. Here again the high-wing TTBW configuration holds an advantage, as it provides ample room for any of the three main propulsion candidates under initial development for the next-generation single-aisle aircraft. These include the GE Aerospace-Safran CFM International joint venture’s Revolutionary Innovation for Sustainable Engines open fan program, an advanced version of Pratt & Whitney’s PW1000G geared turbofan and smaller versions of Rolls-Royce’s very-high-bypass Ultrafan.
Third, the all-new design gives Boeing its first opportunity to increase the cabin cross-section since its failed attempt at launching the 7J7, a 727/737 replacement evaluated in the 1980s featuring propfans and a 188-in.-dia. fuselage. The change would enable Boeing to explore twin-aisle narrowbody concepts and escape the confines of the 737 fuselage’s 139-in. internal diameter, which dates back more than 60 years to the origins of the 707.
The path forward is daunting for company executives and shareholders.
“Overall, we believe Boeing is headed for, and in need of, a multiyear restructuring,” Melius Research analysts Robert Spingarn and Scott Mikus say. In a recent report to investor clients, they detail why Boeing’s turnaround could take the rest of the decade and likely will disappoint shareholders in the interim.
For starters, the analysts recommend that Boeing focus on stabilizing its core operations in lieu of reaching the $10 billion free cash flow target or pre-pandemic financial results. The manufacturer is unlikely to achieve pre-pandemic production levels before 2026, they say, and they doubt it can ever again achieve the 2017-18 high-watermark levels of profitability and cash flow.
“In fact, we would argue that what helped drive Boeing’s cash flow growth in the 2010s was unsustainable, as the company was overearning in that time frame,” the report says. Over the past 30 years, Boeing typically converted free cash flow at about 6% of sales. Most years over the last decade, the rate never fell below 7% and even hit 13% in 2019.
Next, the analysts recommend Boeing reprioritize product development to stay competitive with Airbus. Since its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, the only clean-sheet aircraft program the OEM delivered was the 787—and that was plagued by a new approach to a globalized supply chain.
At the same time, Boeing returned more than $68 billion to shareholders in 2010-19 through stock buybacks in dividends, the Melius analysts note. “That amount of capital probably would have been more than enough to fund two clean-sheet programs to replace the 737 and put Boeing in a stronger competitive position against Airbus,” they say.
Capital Alpha Partners analyst Byron Callan believes Boeing will want to keep its commercial and military aircraft businesses. “There is still technology to pull from either, which benefits the other, specifically in advanced materials and manufacturing processes,” he says. While commercial remains the largest market, he stresses that defense can be a hedge to aviation cycles.
Of course, the next CEO will decide this and more—including who else will have a seat at the table as the top brass plots a new path. As with any dramatic CEO departure from a blue-chip industrial giant, even more leadership changes are likely at Boeing. Just as Calhoun remade the board and executive ranks, his successor could do the same.
“The new CEO will be coming into a Boeing [that] has been playing a reactionary defense for quite some time,” Bank of America analyst Ron Epstein notes. “This may be the first real chance in a long time Boeing has had to clean house and reset their own narrative.”
The Quarter When Boeing Broke | Aviation Week Network
Boeing’s new leadership in Commercial Airplanes and at the top are likely just the beginning of major changes at the manufacturing giant.
aviationweek.com
This was not part of the plan. When David Calhoun cemented his long-term position as Boeing CEO in April 2021 at age 64, the board of directors raised the corporate retirement age cap for the CEO to 70 from 65. The company also announced the departure of Chief Financial Officer Greg Smith after a decade in the job. The changes ensured that the corner office—then overlooking the Chicago River in the Windy City—was Calhoun’s to lose.
Calhoun, who joined Boeing’s board in 2009, had unexpectedly become CEO in January 2020. Until April 2021, however, questions lingered. How long would he stay? Who would lead the next set of strategic decisions? The April moves cleared the way for Calhoun to reshape Boeing for up to six more years.
Smith’s departure was one of Calhoun’s many moves in recasting the executive leadership to his liking, culminating in Stephanie Pope’s recent promotion to chief operating officer (AW&ST Dec. 25, 2023-Jan. 14, 2024, p. 12).
He also helped set ambitious targets. In November 2022, Calhoun and Chief Financial Officer Brian West announced a target of $10 billion in free cash flow and a monthly 737 production rate of 50 by 2025-26. Those targets remained even as Boeing faced an onslaught of doubts from Wall Street and Washington in the wake of the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines 737-9 door plug accident (AW&ST Feb. 12-25, p. 16).
But the manufacturing giant’s plans are changing—all of them.
The first three months of 2024 will be remembered as the quarter when Boeing broke. On March 25, the company revealed that Calhoun will step down by year-end and board chair Lawrence Kellner will not seek reelection at an upcoming shareholder meeting. In addition, Pope immediately replaced Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) CEO Stan Deal. Calhoun is now a caretaker—ideally for as short a time as possible.
“The calendar is too full of items that will influence Boeing’s commercial strategy this year to leave it all to an outgoing CEO,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts George Ferguson and Melissa Balzano wrote in a recent report.
Among those items are the potential purchase of key supplier Spirit AeroSystems, negotiations with the OEM’s largest union in the Seattle area for a new contract due in September, enacting manufacturing quality standards agreed upon with the FAA and certifying the 737-7, 737-10 and 777-9 (AW&ST March 11-24, p. 14).
Then there is the rest of the business. Boeing Defense and Space (BDS) accounted for 32% of overall sales in 2023 but faces a rocky path ahead. It can expect continued domestic and international orders for its decades-old stalwarts—the F-15EX fighter, KC-46A tanker and CH-47F and AH-64E helicopters—into the 2030s. But at least one of these decades-old fighter, mobility and rotorcraft platforms could cease production.
Prospects for winning new platforms—including next-generation fighters, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and tankers—loom on the near and distant horizons. Securing these only makes business sense if Boeing can deliver higher levels of performance for a U.S. Air Force determined to impose fixed-price production terms on the defense industry.
Recent history is not reassuring. In 2018, Boeing won the Air Force contract to develop and build the T-7A Red Hawk advanced jet trainer. The franchise victory requires Boeing and fuselage supplier Saab to deliver 351 jets, making the T-7A a leading candidate for U.S. Navy and international needs.
But the Red Hawk also has exposed Boeing’s inability to profit from its contract victories. The program has reported more than $1.41 billion in reach-forward losses—a fraction of the more than $13 billion in BDS charges since 2014 spanning five programs with fixed-price terms. More losses could be in store as Boeing works to solve problems that have delayed the T-7A’s service entry by at least four years.
The scenario places the defense prime in a difficult position. In a decade when the future of BDS may depend on winning deals to deliver next-generation aircraft, its leaders must be especially motivated to break a cycle of overpromising and underdelivering.
Nestled within BDS is Boeing’s small but high-profile human space program, which includes engineering and support services to NASA for the 25-year-old International Space Station (ISS). In 2014, the company also won a milestone-based, fixed-price contract—worth $4.2 billion at the time—to develop, test and operate a service to transport astronauts to and from the orbital outpost. SpaceX was hired to build and operate a second crewed transportation system under a separate contract initially worth $2.6 billion. For a while, Goliath and David were neck-and-neck in their efforts to restore human spaceflight to the U.S. following the space shuttle’s retirement.
A series of technical issues ultimately stymied Boeing’s offering, the CST-100 Starliner. On its first flight test in December 2019, software problems and a communications glitch left the uncrewed Starliner unable to reach the ISS. A repeat flight was delayed until May 2022 after the discovery of corrosion inside valves that impeded function of the service module’s propulsion system.
Most recently, Starliner’s crewed flight test was delayed so that the capsule’s parachutes could be redesigned and certified after the discovery of a contractor’s test error made early in the program. Boeing also found potential flammability issues with the P-213 tape covering wire harnesses throughout the capsule.
Boeing now aims to launch the crewed mission as early as May 6. The Starliner capsule will launch aboard an Atlas V rocket built and operated by Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s United Launch Alliance.
Meanwhile, SpaceX completed uncrewed and crewed flight tests of its Dragon capsule in 2019 and 2020, respectively, and is currently operating its eighth crewed NASA mission aboard the ISS.
“Boeing has great belief in this endeavor, and it isn’t about the money,” Starliner Deputy Program Manager LeRoy Cain tells Aviation Week. “If you look at the company and its heritage, it’s always been important to be involved in the leading edge and doing the things that are hard and providing capabilities that are difficult but that give the nation—in this case, NASA—the capability it needs to be able to achieve its mission.”
While BDS merits attention, Boeing’s most acute issues remain within BCA. The next CEO will almost certainly scrap financial projections and aircraft build rate targets issued under Calhoun’s tenure. The new leader also will help answer two key questions: What kind of company should Boeing be, and how should it allocate its precious resources?
Calhoun says his successor must focus on continuing efforts to “steady the ship” and rebaseline production expectations around lower delivery numbers—at least until the FAA is confident Boeing and its supply chain can be trusted to boost output. The new CEO will also take on BCA’s most urgent need: a new single-aisle design to succeed the 737.
“Our next leader is going to develop and call out the next airplane for the Boeing Co.,” Calhoun told CNBC. “It will be a $50 billion investment.”
The price for the all-new design is more than double previous estimates. That could indicate acceptance of the higher—and more realistic—levels of investment required for the project both from a technological and industrial perspective. The two are intrinsically linked, particularly if Boeing adopts a design with a majority-composite fuselage.
The big question about composites for major single-aisle aircraft structures is whether they can be produced at the rate and costs that match today’s predominantly metallic designs. Boeing hopes the answers will emerge from its involvement in research efforts such as NASA’s Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing (HiCAM) project, which is studying the use of next-generation thermosets as well as resin-infused and thermoplastic composites. HiCAM is targeted at raising the technology readiness level to enable a fourfold or sixfold production rate increase without ramping up costs.
While the aerodynamics and configurations of new designs are traditionally the most guarded aspects of any advanced product development project, Boeing publicly appears to be targeting design technology from the X-66A, NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator (AW&ST Jan. 29-Feb. 11, p. 52). The testbed is a modified MD-90 with a high-aspect-ratio, low-drag wing. Dubbed the transonic truss-braced wing (TTBW), the concept is being backed as the leading candidate for a sustainable 737 replacement design after being under evaluation for 14 years.
Aside from its sustainability credentials, the TTBW appeals to Boeing for at least three reasons. As the concept is already in development, it will have a valuable head start toward defining a production version later this decade if the design works as hoped. This makes it even more attractive to a cash-strapped company facing a massive development bill.
Although wing aerodynamics will be part of the puzzle for a more sustainable design, propulsion will drive the lion’s share of the aircraft’s step change in performance. Here again the high-wing TTBW configuration holds an advantage, as it provides ample room for any of the three main propulsion candidates under initial development for the next-generation single-aisle aircraft. These include the GE Aerospace-Safran CFM International joint venture’s Revolutionary Innovation for Sustainable Engines open fan program, an advanced version of Pratt & Whitney’s PW1000G geared turbofan and smaller versions of Rolls-Royce’s very-high-bypass Ultrafan.
Third, the all-new design gives Boeing its first opportunity to increase the cabin cross-section since its failed attempt at launching the 7J7, a 727/737 replacement evaluated in the 1980s featuring propfans and a 188-in.-dia. fuselage. The change would enable Boeing to explore twin-aisle narrowbody concepts and escape the confines of the 737 fuselage’s 139-in. internal diameter, which dates back more than 60 years to the origins of the 707.
The path forward is daunting for company executives and shareholders.
“Overall, we believe Boeing is headed for, and in need of, a multiyear restructuring,” Melius Research analysts Robert Spingarn and Scott Mikus say. In a recent report to investor clients, they detail why Boeing’s turnaround could take the rest of the decade and likely will disappoint shareholders in the interim.
For starters, the analysts recommend that Boeing focus on stabilizing its core operations in lieu of reaching the $10 billion free cash flow target or pre-pandemic financial results. The manufacturer is unlikely to achieve pre-pandemic production levels before 2026, they say, and they doubt it can ever again achieve the 2017-18 high-watermark levels of profitability and cash flow.
“In fact, we would argue that what helped drive Boeing’s cash flow growth in the 2010s was unsustainable, as the company was overearning in that time frame,” the report says. Over the past 30 years, Boeing typically converted free cash flow at about 6% of sales. Most years over the last decade, the rate never fell below 7% and even hit 13% in 2019.
Next, the analysts recommend Boeing reprioritize product development to stay competitive with Airbus. Since its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, the only clean-sheet aircraft program the OEM delivered was the 787—and that was plagued by a new approach to a globalized supply chain.
At the same time, Boeing returned more than $68 billion to shareholders in 2010-19 through stock buybacks in dividends, the Melius analysts note. “That amount of capital probably would have been more than enough to fund two clean-sheet programs to replace the 737 and put Boeing in a stronger competitive position against Airbus,” they say.
Capital Alpha Partners analyst Byron Callan believes Boeing will want to keep its commercial and military aircraft businesses. “There is still technology to pull from either, which benefits the other, specifically in advanced materials and manufacturing processes,” he says. While commercial remains the largest market, he stresses that defense can be a hedge to aviation cycles.
Of course, the next CEO will decide this and more—including who else will have a seat at the table as the top brass plots a new path. As with any dramatic CEO departure from a blue-chip industrial giant, even more leadership changes are likely at Boeing. Just as Calhoun remade the board and executive ranks, his successor could do the same.
“The new CEO will be coming into a Boeing [that] has been playing a reactionary defense for quite some time,” Bank of America analyst Ron Epstein notes. “This may be the first real chance in a long time Boeing has had to clean house and reset their own narrative.”
@vipero
L'articolo che hai postato rafforza la mia opinione. I ragionieri non solo hanno fatto perdere alla Boeing una leadership tecnologica, ma non erano poi cosi' bravi nemmeno nella contabilita' di progetto. Meglio gli ingegneri, purtroppo credo che i nuovi entranti al vertice della boeing non siano ingegneri.
L'articolo che hai postato rafforza la mia opinione. I ragionieri non solo hanno fatto perdere alla Boeing una leadership tecnologica, ma non erano poi cosi' bravi nemmeno nella contabilita' di progetto. Meglio gli ingegneri, purtroppo credo che i nuovi entranti al vertice della boeing non siano ingegneri.
Senator queries crew’s unawareness of 737-9 cockpit feature
A US Senator has described it as “chilling” that pilots were kept unaware that a Boeing 737-9 cockpit door would rip open during rapid decompression.
www.aerotime.aero
East End Ave
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Non so se gia' postato altrove...
Boeing, nel 2023 guadagni da capogiro per il ceo uscente David Calhoun
Oltre 30 milioni di dollari. Questa la somma da capogiro incassata dal ceo uscente di Boeing, David Calhoun, nel 2023. Nell’anno in cui il costruttore ha attraversato uno dei periodi più critici della sua storia, l’a.d. ha guadagnato il 45% in più rispetto al 2022, arrivando alla cifra di 32,8 milioni di dollari, pari a 30,2 milioni di euro.
La somma incassata da Calhoun - alla quale si è aggiunto un cospicuo bonus azionario - avrebbe potuto raggiungere livelli più alti se, si apprende dalle colonne di Italia Oggi, il Cda non avesse richiesto al manager di rinunciare all’incentivo sulla performance di 2,8 milioni, in seguito alle problematiche rilevate sul controllo d
www.ttgitalia.com
Boeing, nel 2023 guadagni da capogiro per il ceo uscente David Calhoun
Oltre 30 milioni di dollari. Questa la somma da capogiro incassata dal ceo uscente di Boeing, David Calhoun, nel 2023. Nell’anno in cui il costruttore ha attraversato uno dei periodi più critici della sua storia, l’a.d. ha guadagnato il 45% in più rispetto al 2022, arrivando alla cifra di 32,8 milioni di dollari, pari a 30,2 milioni di euro.
La somma incassata da Calhoun - alla quale si è aggiunto un cospicuo bonus azionario - avrebbe potuto raggiungere livelli più alti se, si apprende dalle colonne di Italia Oggi, il Cda non avesse richiesto al manager di rinunciare all’incentivo sulla performance di 2,8 milioni, in seguito alle problematiche rilevate sul controllo d
Boeing, nel 2023 guadagni da capogiro per il ceo uscente David Calhoun
www.ttgitalia.com
Boeing whistleblower raises concerns over 787 and 777 jets
Boeing’s troubles have deepened after a whistleblower raised serious concerns about processes adopted on the 787 and 777 assembly line.
www.aerotime.aero