(LibertySociety.com) – A corporate shakeup has ensued at Boeing following a January incident involving one of its aircraft. In a March 25 press release, the company announced that CEO Dave Calhoun would be resigning by the end of the year. The chair of the board of directors, Larry Kellner, will also step down. His replacement will be Steve Mollenkopf, who was once the CEO of Qualcomm, a semiconductor company.
Mollenkopf will head up the search for a new CEO after Calhoun’s departure. The third victim of the shakeup is Stan Deal, who currently leads the commercial aeroplane division at Boeing. The company said that his retirement was effective immediately. He will be replaced by Stephanie Pope, who is the current Chief Operating Officer.
Calhoun became CEO in 2020 when Dennis Muilenburg was axed after Boeing’s 737 Max 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 passengers and every crew member. In January, the company faced new scrutiny after a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 shortly after takeoff. The pilots made an emergency landing, and no one was seriously injured. However, the Department of Justice announced it had opened a criminal investigation into the matter in early March.
Shortly after the incident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reported that the door plug had been removed and reinstalled last September. Four bolts were missing following the reinstallation. Boeing publicly acknowledged in a letter to Congress that it could not find a record of the repair, which could have been because it had never been created. NTSB said that contractors from Spirit AeroSystems repaired the door plug, but that Boeing had not provided the names of the contractors to the board.
Despite his impending resignation, Calhoun said that the world was watching and that he knew that Boeing would “come through this moment a better company.” The stock market reacted positively to the news, with shares rising three percent before the market opened.
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