Boeing Highlights Year of Restoring Customer Trust

“Boeing has been making quite a few changes,” said Stephanie Pope, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA), during a briefing on the eve of the Dubai Airshow. “We have new leadership. We reset with our labor, we reset with our financials and our balance sheet, and then, obviously, we reset how we build airplanes.”

During this “reset,” the company has endeavored to restore its reputation after a series of accidents that called into question its long-standing quality and credibility. “We’ve also underpinned all that with focus on restoring trust, with our customers, with our suppliers, with our employees, and with our regulator,” she said. “That was all driven by changing our culture, and we rolled out new values and behaviors, and have been focused on culture change at BCA.”

At the beginning of the year, BCA focused on three priorities: executing its safety and quality plan, delivering safe and high-quality airplanes to customers on time, and executing development programs. “[This was] all underwritten on a foundation of culture change and driving our new values and behaviors,” Pope explained.

While there’s still work to be done, she said, “the safety and quality plan teams have done a phenomenal job. We were defining the plan last year with the FAA, so this year’s all been about execution. We’ll continue to go into next year focused on execution, but we are transitioning into what I’ll call a continuous improvement phase. How do we go from putting new initiatives in to getting more predictive and proactive around safety and quality?”

A positive step has been the resumption of FAA delegation for Boeing’s in-house designees for two programs. The company lost the delegation on the 737 Max in 2019 and on the 787 in 2022. “That talks to the results that our regulator was seeing from the investment in the safety and quality plan,” she said.

That plan covers four “big elements.” These include training and increasing employee proficiency, especially with the many post-Covid new-hires; simplifying procedures and processes; eliminating defects; and elevating Boeing’s safety and quality culture.

An example of one of these elements includes rewriting work instructions on the shop floor, and testing those instructions on newly hired mechanics as well as more experienced mechanics, and assessing their feedback. “It’s all about simplification and making it easier for the mechanic,” she said. “We’re getting really, really good feedback there.”

Much of this work went into Spirit AeroSystems, a company that builds major components and that Boeing is acquiring. “This is also around our move-ready criteria, and taking the safety management system [SMS] down to the floor,” she said. “We put criteria from every position, what work has to be done to move the airplane to the next condition, and focusing on making sure our teammates do the work in position. We’ve done thousands of those new assessments using the SMS, and it’s driving a change in how we build airplanes and a much better quality product.”

Spirit has had significant quality escapes identified by at least one whistleblower, and Boeing has been addressing these issues even before the acquisition goes through. Fuselages made at Spirit’s operation in Wichita would normally start work at Boeing’s Renton, Washington facility at position one. But due to the quality problems, Boeing created a position zero at Renton, Pope explained, “which was all about inspecting the Spirit fuselage to find all of the defects…and then we would fix those as they went through our factory.”

After an Alaska Airlines 737 lost a door plug after takeoff from Portland International Airport in Oregon on Jan. 5, 2024, change became imperative. “We pretty quickly, in the year after the door-plug incident, moved position zero to Spirit so that when their fuselages come off their line, they are inspected by Boeing. [Then] that work is completed at Spirit, with the experts that do that work before anything is shipped to Seattle or to Renton. We’ve seen a 75% improvement in the quality coming out of Spirit.

“We also have hundreds of Boeing experts, engineers, supply-chain leaders, quality inspectors, hand-in-glove with Spirit as they created their own safety and quality plan…which has also helped in improving their defects. It is paying off significantly, both in the defect reduction [and] the sentiment of the employees,” she said, adding that morale has improved.

“There’s a lot of work to be done,” Pope acknowledged, “but many of our customers have noted getting airplanes early, for the first time in years. The improved quality is the most important to me.”

She also appreciates the FAA’s support. “We did two rate increases on the 787 this year, and then we got the rate-38 cap lifted on the 737. We’re going to rate 42. I think that’s a testament on the FAA confidence in what we’re doing and how the airplanes are coming out of the factory and how the team is performing on the KPIs that we set forth to manage rate increases with the safety management system.”

Boeing has received approval for type inspection authorization phase 3 test flying, Pope said, adding that the team is beginning for-credit certification tests this week. “The airplane is performing very, very well. What I tell my team all the time: the FAA has the lead and the authority to certify airplanes, and our job is to make sure that we’re clearly ahead, so we have all our work done on time with first-pass quality to give to the regulator, and that we look to minimize or eliminate risk wherever possible.

“Progress is being made. From a culture change perspective, there’s a lot of work when you go to change your culture. You have to do things at the enterprise BCA level [and] at the team and functional level. Where I think you really get the excitement is the groundswell that comes from the employees themselves. You can feel the momentum. There is a lot of work to be done, but it’s a totally different environment if you were inside our buildings and our factories a year ago. I’m proud of what weve accomplished in a year, and we have a lot more work to do going forward.”