Boeing has announced that Dennis Muilenberg has stepped down from his role as the CEO of the company just a little more than one year after the first of two fatal crashes involving the company’s 737 Max aircraft.
Though the company says Muilenburg resigned in its press release, it also says that the board directors deemed it necessary to have a change in leadership.
The ousted Muilenburg will be replaced by David L. Calhoun, who currently serves as the chairman of Boeing’s board of directors.
The Verge also reports that Calhoun will also become the company’s president and will retain his chairman post. There will be a “brief transition period” while Calhoun “exits his non-Boeing commitments,” during which the company’s chief financial officer Greg Smith will serve as interim CEO. Muilenburg will also lose his board seat.
The company in a statement said, “Boeing’s Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”
The company has faced fierce scrutiny following two calamitous 737 Max aircraft crashes in the five months (one in October 2018 and another in March 2019), which took the lives of 346 people.
The crashes were attributed to a piece of anti-stall software that Boeing had covertly installed on the planes. Boeing did not properly disclose the software to customers or pilots in an effort to reduce the amount of money and time required for re-training, all as the company tried to keep up with a new aircraft from rival Airbus. The 737 Max has been grounded worldwide since the March crash, and Boeing announced last week that it is indefinitely halting production of the aircraft starting in January.
Muilenburg spent much of 2019 trying to reassure the public of the 737 Max’s safety, while promising shareholders and industry partners that the plane would be back in the air by the end of the year — causing US airlines like Southwest, American, and United to repeatedly revise their predictions for when they’d be able to reintroduce the 737 Max to their respective fleets. But the Federal Aviation Administration has been methodical with the plane’s re-certification and has even found new safety issues during that process. The agency now isn’t expected to lift the flight ban until February at the earliest.
Muilenburg on several occasions had revealed he was considering stepping down but he persisted with the claim that since it “happened on his watch.” he felt obligated and responsible to “stay on it, work with the team to fix it, to see it through.”
He made it known he wanted to stay as CEO as long as the board allows even though there were several calls for his resignation.
Things got more complicated for Muilenburg in the last few days as Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft — which is designed to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station — suffered a major setback during an uncrewed test launch last week. While the spacecraft safely launched and landed, the automated system that was supposed to place it in the correct orbit suffered a glitch, ruining a planned rendezvous with the ISS.
