While the cause of the 12 June crash of an Air India Boeing 787-8 remains unclear, a leading Republican senator says everything he sees out of Boeing suggests the company is succeeding in turning itself around.
“Kelly Ortberg as the new CEO, as an engineer, has really brought Boeing to the point in which it’s focused upon the product as compared to the financials,” Senator Jerry Moran said on 16 June during the Paris air show. “I think Boeing has clearly… increased their focus on safety.”
Moran sits on the influential Senate appropriations and transportation committees and represents Kansas, home to Spirit AeroSystems, which supplies Airbus and Boeing with fuselage structures.
Boeing is now working to acquire Spirit under a deal that would see the latter’s Airbus work divested to the European airframer.
Boeing has said the planned acquisition, which is set to close this year, will enable it to better oversee long-struggling Spirit and to address Spirit’s quality issues.
“I’ve walked the floor at Spirit… I’ve certainly talked to the executives,” Moran says. “I’m reassured by the fact that the people who work there think that the approach and focus on the employees and the methodology by which they do their work lends itself to a good safe… product.”
Boeing, meanwhile, has been working to address its own production quality problems and to ramp up assembly rates. The company has faced criticism for focusing too closely in recent decades on financial returns at the expense of engineering excellence.
But the company’s new chief executive Kelly Ortberg, who took the helm last year, comes from an engineering background, a benefit some observers suggest will help Boeing right its ship.
The 12 June Air India crash, which killed 241 of 242 people aboard the jet, left a cloud over Boeing just as the company was showing improvement. The cause of the incident remains unclear but Boeing responded by tamping down its commercial aviation presence at the Paris show. CEO Kelly Ortberg and Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stephanie Pope decided against attending the exhibition, and Boeing has cancelled planned media events.
