Last week a door blew off an almost new Boeing 737. The jet maker admits a 'mistake,' but is it time for an executive shakeup?

It has been almost five years since the second of two of Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger planes, in 2018 and 2019, which killed a total of 346 people. A near tragedy on Jan. 5 in which from a Boeing 737 Max 9 airliner operated by Alaska Airlines is more evidence that Boeing’s corporate culture remains deeply flawed.

That there were no fatalities when Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 shortly after takeoff almost 5,000 metres above Oregon was a lucky thing, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, told a news conference the day after the incident. By a stroke of good fortune, the seats closest to the blown out door were unoccupied.

And the plane was able to land safely at Portland. But Homendy described conditions on Flight 1282 after the blowout as consisting of “chaos and very loud (noise) between the air and everything going on around them (the 177 passengers and crew) and it was very violent.” The rapid decompression of the aircraft cabin caused turbulence in the cockpit, far forward of the blown out door.

The cockpit door burst open, and cockpit materials flew into the cabin, including a headset ripped away from the co pilot. U.S. regulators promptly grounded approximately 170 Max 9s in service in the U.S. The Alaska Airlines plane was brand new. Boeing delivered it to the airline last October. No Canadian airlines fly the Max 9 variant of the 737.

Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, the only U.S. carriers that fly the Max 9, have since reported finding “loose hardware” on their grounded planes. “We’re gonna approach this — No. 1 — acknowledging ,” Boeing CEO David Calhoun said a few days after the incident in an address to employees at Boeing’s 737 plant in Renton, Wash.

Calhoun did not say what the mistake was. National Transportation Safety Board inspectors have said the four bolts that hold the exit door in place are missing. The inspectors have not yet determined whether the bolts were even installed. Boeing has imposed greater accountability and safety protocols among its engineers since the Max 8 crisis.

But Calhoun, CEO of Boeing since early 2020, has resisted calls for a more thorough overhaul of Boeing’s deep rooted engineering and management culture. Meanwhile, manufacturing problems . They have forced Boeing to repeatedly delay deliveries of aircraft, including its cash cow 737 series planes and its marquee Dreamliner.

The problems have stemmed mostly from basic manufacturing issues rather than design flaws and include improperly drilled fastener holes and incorrectly installed fittings for tail assemblies. Boeing has lost $21.6 billion (U.S.) in the past four years. Archrival Airbus earned profits of almost $6 billion in that period.

Under Wall Street pressure to return to profitability this year, Boeing is hoping to deliver about 580 of its 737 series jetliners in 2024. That’s an ambitious 55 per cent surge from its 2023 deliveries of 737s. That ramped up delivery schedule should be cause for unease, given that Boeing was under similar production pressure in building the ill fated early editions of its 737 Max 8.

By mid 2022, Boeing’s manufacturing problems spurred CEOs of some Boeing airline customers to publicly demand a high level shakeup at Boeing. The Jan. 5 blowout has brought a resurgence of those concerns. Tim Clark, president of Dubai based Emirates, the biggest buyer of Boeing’s wide body aircraft, said this week that “(Boeing) has had quality control problems for a long time now, and this is just another manifestation of that.” Jeff Guzzetti, former accident investigation chief at the U.S.

Federal Aviation Administration, told Bloomberg this week that “We can’t help to not look at this recent event in the context of all the problems that Boeing has had with manufacturing quality deficiencies.” Boeing’s outsourcing practices are a factor in those deficiencies. Airbus has kept most of its manufacturing in house.

The fuselages of Max 8s, including the exit doors, are built by Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kansas, which Boeing spun off in 2005 in hopes of boosting profits, as it said at the time. But in recent years Spirit has been , coping with quality problems, labour strife and financial strains. In time, airline clients of the Boeing Airbus duopoly might turn to state owned Commercial Aircraft Corp.

of China (Comac). But while Comac aircraft are in service in China, certification in North America and Europe is still far off. Which might leave the task of hastening a cultural renaissance at Boeing to the activist investors who in recent years bought stakes in Canadian Pacific, Canadian National and Suncor Energy and successfully purged them of complacency.

Activist investors buy about five per cent of the stock in the companies at which they force improvement. That would require an activist investor to buy about $9.4 billion worth of Boeing stock. Maybe Boeing’s airline customers should pass the hat..