Egy elég lehangoló cikk arról, hogyan hullott szét a Boeing, megmenthető-e, és milyen végjáték lehetséges...
Boeing, a pioneer of the jet age and one of the most strategically crucial companies to American economic success, has lost its way. Getting back on track will require a daunting campaign to win back the trust of travelers, airlines, regulators, investors and its own employees.
This year, a fuselage panel blew off one of its jets in midair. Its Starliner space capsule left two astronauts stranded in orbit. Its biggest union halted airplane production, worsening its cash drain. It is poised to plead guilty in a case tied to two fatal accidents, and its credit rating is flirting with junk status.
There are many potential villains here: a culture that put financial engineering before aerospace engineering, an outsourcing strategy that shifted work to lower-cost factories or suppliers, a pursuit of production goals over safety goals, and distant leadership removed from employees.
Whatever the cause, Boeing has reached a point where people are genuinely asking: Could Boeing fail? And what would an endgame look like in such a scenario involving a national icon?
After the crashes reduced the public’s trust in the company, regulators, under pressure from lawmakers, began scrutinizing Boeing more closely, slowing deliveries and approval of new airplane models.
Kelly Ortberg, who took over as Boeing’s chief executive barely three months ago, told investors and employees this past week: “The trust in our company has eroded.” Boeing declined to comment and referred to Ortberg’s comments this week.
“It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy, but with the right focus and culture, we can be an iconic company and aerospace leader once again,” he said. In a memo to staff, Ortberg said the company must repair a broken culture, shrink itself and improve execution.
To plug its cash drain, Ortberg has moved to slash 17,000 jobs and sell up to $25 billion in shares or debt. Boeing is exploring a sale of some of its space businesses. The new CEO has failed, however, to reach a deal with 33,000 machinists who walked out six weeks ago seeking higher pay and benefits. The strike is sapping $1 billion a month from Boeing’s thinning reserves.
The plane maker’s mounting problems, in many ways, trace back to the 737 MAX, the latest version of its decades-old narrow-body workhorse.
A focus on reducing training costs coincided with design mistakes that led to the fatal crash of Lion Air Flight 610 six years ago this month. Boeing’s subsequent failure to admit its mistakes and quickly address the plane’s safety problems set the stage for a second crash just a few months later in Ethiopia, squandering decades of trust the company had banked with regulators, airlines and the flying public.
After the first 737 MAX crash, on Oct. 29, 2018, in Indonesia, Boeing downplayed problems with a flawed flight-control system and instead pointed to missteps by the airline’s pilots and maintenance.
Then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg directed his communications team to remove from a draft press release any mention of work to fix a new cockpit feature that pushed the plane into a fatal nosedive, according to a settlement with securities regulators. The press release declared the MAX was “as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies.” Boeing and Muilenburg settled the case without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
There is debate inside and outside the company whether Boeing’s overemphasis on financial metrics has led to cultural decay. Critics place the beginning of the decline in the 1990s, when Boeing started adopting many of the management practices common at its supplier General Electric, including a focus on short-term profitability.
The merger with rival McDonnell Douglas in 1997 further cemented Boeing’s turn away from an engineering-led culture and toward more centralized corporate control. The decision to move its headquarters from its Seattle manufacturing hub to Chicago in 2001—and then to Virginia in 2022—exemplified this shift.
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What Went So Wrong With Boeing?
With trust gone and cash dwindling, questions swirl about potential endgames for a national icon