New York (AFP) – The head of Boeing acknowledged to lawmakers Wednesday that it made “serious missteps in recent years” while insisting the aviation giant has chalked up progress in winning back consumer and investor confidence. On the eve of this hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg sent a message to the company’s 160,000 employees saying his testimony would be key to restoring trust in the crisis-plagued manufacturer.
“Boeing made serious missteps in recent years, and it’s unacceptable,” Ortberg told the panel. But Ortberg, who was received cordially by the committee, said near the end of the two-hour hearing that the “progress we’ve made so far looks like we’re getting the results we want.” Boeing has suffered for several years from production quality problems, with the latest major incident coming in January of last year when an Alaska Airlines 737 saw a door part fly off in mid-flight. Prior to that, new Boeing 737 MAX planes were involved in fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 that together claimed 346 lives.
In January, it reported a loss of $3.9 billion as the company continued to experience a hit from a more than seven-week labor strike that shuttered two major assembly plants. Ortberg, who took over in August, said the company had made “sweeping changes” since the Alaska Airlines incident, committing to a series of key performance indicators monitored closely by the Federal Aviation Administration. These include reducing by 50 percent the “traveled” work in factories, referring to work performed out of sequence, which can elevate the risk of mistakes.
Ortberg said the company had made progress on these pursuits, but there was more work to do. More employees are utilizing a “speak up” program designed to encourage workers to flag worries about safety, said Ortberg, while maintaining that some workers still don’t feel comfortable doing this. “We still have culture work to do,” Ortberg said. “But we are seeing an improvement.”
Ortberg told the panel that the company was still not publicly releasing financial or plane production delivery targets, making those issues secondary to the company’s commitment to safety. Several lawmakers expressed hopes that Ortberg could turn around the fortunes at Boeing, which has fallen far behind archrival Airbus in the last few years as safety concerns have mounted. The hearing lacked some of the sharp jabs aimed at Ortberg’s predecessors Dennis Muilenburg and Dave Calhoun following major safety problems. But Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, pressed Ortberg on a decision not to include union representatives among company directors, telling the Boeing CEO that the board should be hearing from line workers “in every board meeting.”
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