LONDON — When the CEOs of Boeing’s three divisions — Commercial Airplanes, Defense and Services — appeared before the press Sunday on the eve of the Farnborough Air Show, they stuck to a tight script confined to a single important message: They are all focused exclusively on improving safety and quality.
They waved off questions about potential strategic moves, including moving the headquarters back to Seattle or assuring Washington employees that they will build Boeing’s next all-new jet.
A couple of hours later at a different hotel in central London, the top Airbus leadership held its press event and took questions about the European aerospace champion’s ongoing struggle with jet delivery delays and losses in its space business.
Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury noted the problems and responded to each. He also pointed to several positive milestones, including on Friday the European aviation regulator certifying the new A321XLR extra-long-range model to fly passengers.
Faury’s delight in that achievement turned into a dig at Boeing. When the XLR was launched in 2019, Boeing was still considering designing an all-new aircraft in that large, long-range single-aisle market, known variously as the New Small Airplane or the Middle of the Market airplane.
But Boeing shelved that plan. “Some have been speaking about the Middle of the Market for decades,” Faury said. “Airbus did it.”
Boeing in transition
New Commercial Airplanes chief Stephanie Pope, who is four months into the job, said she is focused 24/7 on Boeing’s recovery: “developing and executing our safety and quality plan [and] stabilizing our factories.”
“This is transformational change,” she said. “We’ve slowed down our factories pretty significantly to execute that change.”
“And I’m very clear with my team, this isn’t about safety and quality-versus-schedule,” she added. “We have to do safety, we have to do quality, we have to meet our commitments with a predictable schedule. … These are not competing priorities.”
And despite all the bad news this year and worries about Boeing’s trajectory, she insisted its airplanes are performing well and that, with orders sold out through this decade, “we are a stable company.”
Pope declined to answer if she’s interested in the top job, replacing Dave Calhoun who is retiring as CEO of Boeing later this year.
And she wouldn’t be drawn out on what have been two much-discussed options in the aviation world: sending a message of real culture shift to the Boeing workforce by moving the headquarters back to Seattle, and by affirming to employees in the Puget Sound region that they will get to build Boeing’s next new airplane.
These are questions industry experts and important Boeing customers are contemplating.
In an interview days before the Farnborough Air Show starts Monday, John Plueger, CEO of Air Lease Corporation, a major jet leasing company and an influential customer to Boeing and Airbus, said moving the Boeing headquarters back to Seattle would be “a welcome move” not only to Puget Sound employees but to the entire aviation world as a gesture indicating Boeing is serious about returning to its roots and its former glory.
“I can hardly think of anyone in the industry, the airline industry, or the lessor community, those of us that buy new commercial aircraft, that would not applaud that,” Plueger said.
Plueger added that for Boeing to regain its position in the industry, the next CEO must “put the focus on the engineering side of the house, to be able to take a lead in a new single-aisle aircraft.”
With the workhorse single-aisle jet market tilted about 40% to Boeing’s 737 MAX and 60% to the Airbus A320 jet family, Plueger said Boeing should move first to launch a new jet in that segment.
Boeing “does have an opportunity to put something out there that would help restore a 50/50 balance in the marketplace,” Plueger added.
Also interviewed just before the air show, Adam Pilarski, veteran aviation analyst with consulting firm Avitas, said moving the headquarters back to Seattle from Arlington, Va., would mean only a few hundred employees relocating, but would be important symbolically.
“It shows that, yes, we want to retain our tradition. This is where we come from,” Pilarski said.
But in London, Pope demurred, focused her response on what is already in Seattle and declined to address potential future moves.
“The headquarters of our Boeing Commercial Airplanes [division] is in Seattle, and it’s always been in Seattle, as well as many of our enterprise leaders, including the head of engineering for the company, who resides in Seattle,” she said. “The Pacific Northwest has a deep heritage around aviation excellence and innovation, and that will continue.”
The press briefing served to underline how Boeing’s public messaging is paralyzed while it awaits the transition to a new CEO, the timing of which is unknown beyond that it should be this year.
Interviewed in London on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, ranking member of the House Transportation Committee’s aviation subcommittee, said the extended transition period to replace Calhoun is “excruciating for the region.”
“I don’t like the region to be in that position where we’re kind of waiting for Godot,” he said.
In the Samuel Beckett play, Godot never comes, Larsen said, whereas a new Boeing CEO will have to be appointed sometime this year. But in the meantime, he said “the uncertainty is unnerving for the employees. It’s unnerving for the community of Everett.”
And Larsen — who said he came for a quick official visit ahead of the air show to assess “how the industry is changing globally and what that means for U.S. aviation” — made clear the issue of who will build that next all-new plane is a huge looming question both for Boeing employees and for the Pacific Northwest economy.
Boeing’s assembly line workers “are the ones who are feeling the big brunt of the pain the company is going through. … They have been carrying the burden of decisions that go back 20 years,” Larsen said. “Boeing needs to show a commitment that these workers are valued.”
“I want it in the Northwest,” he said.
In London, Boeing isn’t providing any clarity on that question. For now, its single-minded focus is stabilizing production and reorganizing training and the airplane assembly process to avoid any more quality lapses.
Getting production steady enough to ramp up safely will take time.
Boeing reports its second quarter earnings next week. Given the low jet-delivery-rate the result will inevitably be another large loss and a multibillion dollar cash outflow.
At the London press session, Boeing defense chief Ted Colbert said the financial results will also include large write-offs for more losses on large fixed-price military and government contracts, including the Air Force One program that’s providing two new heavily modified 747-8 jumbo jets for the U.S. president.
Airbus on Boeing’s precipitous fall
The Airbus executives were more upbeat and confident of their position.
Asked about the threat from the Chinese aviation industry, which has launched the COMAC C919 single-aisle jet, Airbus Commercial CEO Christian Scherer said he regards COMAC as a serious competitor with a built-in home market.
However, he noted that the C919 is just a copy of western aircraft, nothing new. In contrast, he pointed out that when Airbus started out 50 years ago as a nascent competitor it “brought something new to the market”: the first twin-engine widebody, the A300, a standard that eventually replaced all four-engine planes.
“The C919 is effectively an A320neo,” Scherer said. “There is no new value being brought to the market.
And far from gloating at Boeing’s fallen position, Scherer indicated Airbus is taking it as a lesson.
“It is not good news for our industry as a whole when one of the players loses its way” he said. What has happened at Boeing “is, at best, a healthy reminder to us about things that you don’t take your eyes off.”
“We’re focused on what we have to do at Airbus,” he said. “Our trajectory is clear, our goals are clear, our standards are clear and we want to uphold those.”
After the Boeing news conference, which was held in a windowless basement ballroom at a stately old London hotel, Pope left immediately without taking questions.
The Airbus event was at a sunny upper floor bar of a more modern hotel.
When it was over, the entire Airbus management team stayed behind, moved out to a large balcony area and huddled with groups of journalists, answering questions freely and easily while waiters made the rounds offering glasses of Champagne and rich canapés.
These were rival leadership teams facing very different realities.
