Boeing CEO Calhoun to press safety message at all-hands meeting

Chief Executive Officer Dave Calhoun will call on Boeing Co. workers to focus on safety as the top priority at an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, as senior leaders stress the need for staff to work to a high standard following last week’s fuselage blowout on a 737 Max 9 aircraft. 

The meeting, set for noon local time at Boeing’s Renton, Washington, factory where the 737 is assembled, will be webcast to employees at other locations. US regulators have grounded most Max 9 aircraft and ordered inspections after a door panel suddenly flew off as Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 climbed away from Portland, Oregon, with 177 passengers and crew onboard.

Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal, tasked with raising production while also maintaining quality at Boeing’s largest unit, will join Calhoun at the presentation, as will Chief Safety Officer Mike Delaney. His senior executive role was created during a previous crisis involving the US planemaker’s cash-cow Max jet: a global grounding after two fatal crashes killed a combined 346 people nearly five years ago. 

“We will spend time together Tuesday talking about our company’s response to this accident, and reinforcing our focus on and our commitment to safety, quality, integrity and transparency,” Calhoun said in a companywide message on Sunday. “While we’ve made progress in strengthening our safety management and quality control systems and processes in the last few years, situations like this are a reminder that we must remain focused on continuing to improve every day.” 

Much is at stake for Calhoun and for Boeing after a series of quality issues tripped up production of Boeing’s most important aircraft last year. The accident last week complicates the CEO’s work to rebuild Boeing’s image after the crashes and a prolonged grounding of the 737 Max. 

Alaska Air and United Airlines Holdings Inc. have both discovered other 737 Max 9 jets with loose bolts after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Max 9 and ordered carriers to inspect the planes. Formal inspections have yet to start — the agency said Tuesday that Boeing is revising instructions for the checks after receiving feedback, and the 171 planes will remain idled until the regulator deems them safe.  

“It seems to be a bit of a moving target,” Savanthi Syth, a Raymond James analyst, said of final instructions for the inspection process. “I can appreciate the FAA’s perspective on this with the other Max issues, where they were a little too quick to say, ‘This is fine.’ They’re really trying to cross the T’s and dot the I’s on this one.”

A chorus of airline chiefs, including two of Boeing’s biggest customers — Ryanair Holdings Plc’s Michael O’Leary and Emirates’ Tim Clark in Dubai — have spoken publicly of the need for Boeing to raise quality standards. 

“They’ve had quality control problems for a long time now, and this is just another manifestation of that,” Clark said in an interview this week in Dubai. “I think they’re getting their act together now, but this doesn’t help.”

National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said Monday that her agency would consider broadening the probe. Such a move would bring deeper scrutiny for Boeing and its manufacturing processes, and magnify issue as the US planemaker seeks to get the aircraft back into service. 

Calhoun, 66, took over as CEO of Boeing at the start of 2020 after the board ousted then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg for mishandling the grounding crisis. He canceled an annual offsite retreat for senior executives that was planned for this week in response to the Alaska incident.

The panel that broke loose from Flight 1282 covered an opening on the Max 9 that can be used for emergency exits. Some airlines, including United and Alaska, cover them up because the doors aren’t needed for lower-density seat configurations.

“We do see the latest incident as eroding the fragile confidence that has been built around the 737 Max franchise,” Ron Epstein, an analyst with Bank of America, told clients over the weekend. “In our view, Boeing needs to tread carefully and cautiously through this potential reputational minefield.”