Four things beleaguered Boeing must do to pull out of its tailspin

In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 Max jetliners crashed soon after takeoff in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing all 346 people aboard the two planes.
Boeing Co. was plunged into a crisis with the worldwide grounding of all 737 Maxes, Boeing’s bestselling airliner. The crashes were traced to faulty software.
Four years later, Boeing is still in crisis.
Boeing has lost money in each of the past five years, totalling $23.8 billion (U.S.), including a $2.2 billion loss last year.
Credit rating agencies are poised to downgrade Boeing’s securities to junk status.
Development of Boeing’s long-range 777X and an upgraded Air Force One are years behind schedule.
A strike by 33,000 Boeing employees has entered its fourth week.
The strike has halted production of 737s, built in Washington State, and is costing Boeing an estimated $100 million a day in lost sales.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has capped Boeing’s output of 737s at just 38 planes per month until Boeing proves it has upgraded its quality and safety standards.
Boeing is expected to deliver only 400 planes this year, about half of its peak output in 2018.
Canadian air travellers are reliant on Boeing. Air Canada and WestJet Airlines together operate about 228 Boeing passenger jets.
The Canadian airlines, like their counterparts abroad, are hobbled in their expansion and decarbonization plans by Boeing’s inability to meet demand for its most fuel-efficient planes. 
Boeing archrival Airbus SE can’t fill the gap. The French company’s order backlog extends into the next decade.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who became Boeing’s third chief executive in five years in August, vows to lead a turnaround at Boeing.
“Our priority,” Ortberg said last month, “is to restore the trust of our customers and meet the high standards they expect of us.”
Rebuilding trust will be difficult after the January near-catastrophe of a door plug blowing off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max in mid-air.
And there have been more setbacks since.
Boeing has admitted to the FAA that it might have skipped mandatory inspections of wings of its 787 Dreamliners.
Last month, U.S. transportation authorities warned airlines of a possible rudder-control defect on some Boeing planes.
And Boeing’s money-losing defence and space unit stranded two NASA astronauts on the International Space Station when its Starliner spacecraft was stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks.
The ruinous degrading of Boeing’s engineering culture began more than two decades ago.
Harry Stonecipher, Boeing’s CEO in the early 2000s, boasted that “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
Restoring a once-admired Boeing culture of quality, safety, and bold bets on pioneering aircraft like the 747 jumbo jet won’t be easy.
But it must be done. Boeing’s work is essential to global aviation. 
Here are some first steps in building a new Boeing.
The bean-counters who dominate Boeing’s C-suite must give way to “AvGeeks,” as they are known at Airbus — top executives who love planes and revere engineering excellence.
For AvGeeks, profit margins are secondary to building great planes.
The 737 on which Boeing is overly reliant was first introduced in 1968. Today’s 737 Max is the latest of more than a dozen incremental changes to an original design that’s about 60 years old.
The world needs a zero-emission plane engineered from scratch. Committing to that project would boost morale at Boeing as the 747 and Boeing’s contributions to the Apollo space program did.
Boeing must take back from Airbus industry leadership in flex-fuel, hybrid-electric and hydrogen technologies in aviation.
Boeing has lost much of its quality control and safety-critical abilities by outsourcing to a multitude of subsidiaries and suppliers across 65 countries.
Boeing has begun to correct that false economy by buying back a troubled Spirit AeroSystems, which makes fuselages for the 737 and was spun off by Boeing in a 2005 cost reduction measure.
Boeing has suffered absentee leadership since moving its headquarters to Chicago in 2001, and more recently to Arlington County, Va.
In February, a congressionally mandated panel investigating the Max crashes said it “observed a disconnect between Boeing’s senior management and other members of the organization on safety culture.”
Boeing needs to return its head office to Seattle where Bill Boeing founded the company in 1916, and where it became one of the greatest engineering enterprises on Earth.
It’s no coincidence that at Toulouse-based Airbus, which has overtaken Boeing in aircraft deliveries, the CEO’s office and the boardroom overlook the runway where Airbus planes are tested.
Fixing Boeing might seem to be among the world’s toughest corporate jobs. But the measures above, generally agreed on by Boeing’s airline customers and regulators in the U.S. and abroad, are both imperative and doable.
In fact, they consist mostly of reversing past mistakes.