The Unraveling of Boeing | Landing the Plane | 5
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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all four episodes of Business Wars: The Unraveling of Boeing early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars. By the end of the 2010s, Boeing was in a tailspin. A flawed computer system in their new 737 MAX plane caused not one but two fatal crashes,

346 people died. The tragedy spurred federal investigations that revealed a problematic company culture that was years in the making. It proved that Boeing had shifted its focus from safety to shareholders. 2024 wasn't much better for the company. A door blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 plane, factory workers went on strike, and two astronauts got stranded by the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.

You could say the aerospace industry is experiencing some heavy turbulence right now. We're speaking with journalist Sharon Turlip to hear more about what the future could hold. She covers Boeing and global aerospace for the Wall Street Journal. Her recent reporting shines a light on how current and former Boeing employees see a way forward following the corroded company culture and unsafe manufacturing strategies. But first, we're speaking with Ed Pearson.

In 2015, Ed was a senior manager at Boeing working on the 737 MAX project. By 2018, he says he and his team were extremely overworked. Ed even recommended that leadership shut down production, saying that for the first time in his life, he was hesitant about putting his family on a Boeing plane. Business continued as usual, and Ed resigned in August 2018.

In the months that followed, Boeing 737 MAX planes were responsible for two fatal crashes. Now, Ed is a self-identified whistleblower who has dedicated his life to aviation safety. He's also the executive director at the Foundation for Aviation Safety. And today, he's sharing more from his time at Boeing and what needs to happen to create a safer aviation industry. All that's coming up.

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Ed Pearson, welcome to Business Wars. Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the invitation, Dave. Ed, before joining Boeing, you had 30 years of service with the U.S. Navy under your belt. What pulled you toward Boeing? How did you get involved over there? Well, you know, I actually have family that worked at Boeing. My wife's dad worked at Boeing. He also got out of the Navy active duty and then went

right into Boeing. And I've always thought highly of the company. You know, I live in the Seattle area, so you know about Boeing and there's a lot of pride in the region. You know, I would equate it to kind of like if you imagine a small steel mill town where everybody knows somebody that works at the steel mill and there's a lot of pride in what they do. And it's like that on kind of a large grand scale. Well, what was your role with the 737 MAX project? What part of the project did you oversee?

Well, I was a senior manager. I had two teams that I had responsibility for. And so really I had one team that was responsible for kind of planning how the build should work. And then another team that was kind of responsible when things went bad and what needed to get done. So I had a kind of a unique...

position and really professional individuals that I had a chance to work with. I was very proud to work with them. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a real dynamic position since you're moving from what we want to see to what's actually happening and then trying to address those things in real time. You joined the MAX team around what, 2015 at a time when Boeing was really laser focused on outperforming the newest plane from its rival Airbus. Yeah.

Could you say a little bit more about the goal of the 737 MAX in terms of competing with Airbus?

So the 737 MAX was the result of years of experience and analysis in trying to determine how the company could best compete against the A321neo. A lot of people, including myself, had hoped for a new plane, a brand new plane. But the decision was made to basically take these next generation model and try to improve upon it. And obviously there's been some real downsides to that decision.

As we look back now, everything was rushed. The design and development was rushed, the certification and the production of the planes, all of it. And it's unfortunately still being rushed. Yeah. Did you feel at the time, did you feel the pressure on? I'm wondering if you could say something more about the company culture at the time. A lot of people ask about

you know, kind of my perspective on the culture. So again, I'm just one person, but I think that when I got to the factory, I had just come out of the flight test organization. And then I got to the factory and it's such a gigantic complex. It's so, it's such a big, gigantic, complicated site.

that, you know, people there been there 20 years are still learning. And so I came in that first year, it was just kind of how to get to meeting, you know, one, the meeting two without getting lost on the factory floor. And then, yeah. But then in my second year, which would have been like 2016, 17, we started to see a lot of pressure from,

As the MAX plane was beginning to be produced and as that was ramping up, you were seeing signs of communication breakdowns happening. And then it just became really a chaotic mess in 2018. Really, really. When you say chaotic mess, could you feel it? You could feel it, that chaotic mess.

Well, let me just give you an example. So in a factory, in a modern factory, they put a lot of effort in lean management, you know, try to be as efficient as you can with the resources. And we did it at the factory in Renton, Washington, where the 737 Max is made. And we had small teams that would come together. We had three shifts of people, you know, a day shift, a swing shift and a graveyard shift.

And you had thousands of people rolling in and out of the factory. And these small teams would work together that would meet and talk and, hey, this is what's wrong and we got to fix this and what happened last shift, et cetera. And then in 2018, a decision was made to cancel the small team meetings and have this one big giant meeting where you had people

Over 100 people, you had the first line managers all the way up to the head of the program. And it ended up becoming really a pressure cooker because people would stand up and say, hey, my team is 100 jobs behind schedule. I need these parts. I need this. I need that. Tomorrow, I'll be lucky if I'm only 200 jobs behind schedule.

And this went on and it became this really uncomfortable and awkward leadership communication.

communication effort and people were feeling berated and pressured. And what happens when people feel publicly humiliated and pressured? They stop talking. They stop talking. You talk about this pressure from a meta standpoint. Where was that pressure coming from? The sales office or from the very top? The fact that you'd be standing there and sort of having to call yourself out and face all of your coworkers? Yeah.

Yeah, the pressure was very clearly coming from headquarters. So at the time, Boeing's headquarters was in Chicago. Now it's in Arlington, Virginia, but the new CEO has moved back to Seattle. But at the time, it was clearly coming from the CEO all the way down the company. So all you saw in the CEO and the board of directors and all the senior executives we're talking about is

how many planes are going to make. And all the discussion was how many are we going to produce, you know, and how that affected our wall street, you know, the stock, et cetera. You had an email exchange with your manager in June, 2018, describing your warning bells from the 737 max project. I think you even said something like for the first time in my life, I'm sorry to say that I'm hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.

What were you flagging in those emails? And by the way, where did that leave you with your manager? Well, at that time, it was kind of the peak of what I would consider just dysfunctional manufacturing and chaos. We would go to these meetings, these large meetings I was describing, and

And you just listen to people and it was just miscommunication after miscommunication. And actually that day I wrote that email was a Saturday, I believe. And I had gone into work on Saturday and, you know, managers don't get overtime, obviously, but I went in cause I had some employees, a large number of my employees were working and I went in to kind of just check on things. And, um,

I drove right past the main exit to the factory. And when I realized where I was at, it was in Bellevue, which was this next city up,

Route 405. And I realized, wow, I'm really tired. And I'm nowhere near as tired as the employees. Like I'm getting a lot more rest than they are because they're being mandatory overtime. And, you know, what would happen is at the end of their shift, they'd go, you know, I still have these jobs to complete. Their managers will say, well, I'm going to designate you. You're going to have to stay late now for a couple hours. You can imagine what chaos that plays on people's families, right? With their schedules, with their kids and picking them up to school and, you know, and

And so I went back to my office and it just came to a head in my mind like, oh my God, we are taking really unnecessary chances here and risking the safety of the public. And people are so tired, they're fatigued. Every possible thing you can imagine was going wrong. And I'm like, I've got to suppress this. And so I jumped people in the chain. I wanted to go right to the senior person. Oh yeah, I was very concerned.

So, what happened? Well, we met, myself and the senior general manager of the program. And before I even sat down, we kind of got in an argument. And I always respected this guy. He always seemed like he was really genuine. And as I'm standing there before we sat down, he said, why are you here? And I said, well, I'm here because of what I said in my email. I'm really worried about the safety of these airplanes and the employees also. I'm worried about them getting hurt as they're building it because we had a bunch of safety incidents.

occupational safety incidents, but I was primarily concerned about the safety of the planes. And he's like, well, Ed, I can't really do anything about it. And I said, my opinion is you really need to shut down. And he said, we can't shut down. And that's when I said, well, look, I've seen operations in the military shut down for lesser concerns.

And this was how the meeting started. Like this was, and we sat down, you know, after we kind of calmed down for a second, we sat down and he listened and I, I did my best. I gave him example after example. I'm like, we're seeing these kinds of failures in our functional systems testing, like electrical and flight control testing. And the quality data was all messed up and, and,

Uh, I lost a lot of respect for this man at this meeting in that hour, hour and a half. Cause you know, clearly he had the authority. He could have just said, okay, we're stopping right now. Let's stop everything. Let's give everybody a chance to get, you know, get caught up on their rest and let's do this right. But instead what did happen? Well, the meeting ended. He asked me at the end of the meeting, he said, Ed, you know, can you, you know,

pay close attention and let me know in about a month, how's it going? I said, well, first of all, you shouldn't wait a month to figure out what's going on. It's bad right now. But I said, I couldn't do it because I'm actually retiring. And I said, I'd already made a decision to retire.

So I won't be here in a month, but I want you to know this is really serious. And I shared that information with my colleagues that I had the meeting with them and he promised that he was going to look at the quality data. I said, you really need to let the customers know if any planes have left this factory, if you find any... Because I think there was plenty of evidence that we had a lot of manufacturing defects going on, a wide range of stuff. And

I expected him to do that and look at the information and talk to the engineering and quality people. And as I understand, really nothing happened. And I retired. And then a month later, the Lion Air crash occurred. I have to ask about MCAS, which we focused on earlier in our series. This was the feature that would ultimately cause the plane to fail while in flight. And I know there were a lot of attempts to try to

work around it. But it was later revealed that the team working on this feature knew it was flawed, but felt that they had to charge ahead regardless to make deadlines to meet demands. Were you aware of that at the time? No, actually, we didn't know anything about MCAS in the factory. But I want to say that everybody in the world has heard about the MCAS software and the lack of pilot training, both of which were major contributing factors to the crashes.

But what people don't know and what I've been spending the last five or six years trying to point out is that the reason that those systems failed was because of electrical manufacturing defects in the airplanes. The angle of attack sensors failed.

fed faulty data to the computer where the MCAS software resided. And what I always wondered is why did those sensors fail? And it's been about a five or six year kind of ongoing investigation. And over the last five or six years, what I've been able to piece together with the help of some other people is that both of those airplanes had electrical defects. It's called an electrical wiring interconnect system or EWIS, which is like the electrical infrastructure of the plane. Mm-hmm.

And as recently, just to give you an example, as recently as this summer, after I testified to the Senate in April, right after that, I received some documents and I hand delivered these to the NTSB on July 29th. And these documents that I have are actual production records.

for the Ethiopian plane that crashed. These were the records, one of many production records that I know that are produced for every single plane. My team used to manage that record. They were the administrator for those. And so I knew they existed, but I'd never seen them. So I get this file with like eight or nine of these records and it clearly shows that while they were building that plane, they were having electrical installation issues. They had parts that were mislabeled, parts that were not working.

And then the second set of documents that I found was the same week that the plane was being built in Renton, Washington, up north at the Everett site, we have an electrical center up there that builds a lot of the electrical components for the planes, like junction boxes and power panels and...

wiring harnesses and wire bundles. And these wire bundles are like a big spaghetti network of wires. You don't see this when you're on an airplane. Well, the same week that the plane was having difficulty being built in Renton, Washington at the factory, the FAA conducts an investigation, a whistleblower investigation of two whistleblowers who had

separately reported that this electrical center was basically making defective parts and they lost control, their quality control, and employees were being told they had one minute to do inspections on these complicated parts. FAA goes in, again, the same week the Ethiopian plane is being built.

goes in and validates and substantiates every single complaint that these employees made. And the third set of document is probably the most damning of all. And when I testified to the Senate committee, I mentioned during the committee that...

that we've seen recent reports of MAX airplanes flying along straight and level and has an uncommanded role, and the pilots have to react to it. And the FAA and the Boeing have determined that it has to do with electrical wire bundle that was improperly installed. Well, I get a report sent to me

And it's a copy when the Ethiopian plane was one month old, the plane was coming into land and it had an uncommanded roll at a thousand feet, which is not good at any altitude, much less down low. Ethiopian airlines sent a request to Boeing and said, hey, we just had this, you know, this incident and we're concerned about it. Can you help us troubleshoot?

And Boeing gives them some basic troubleshooting guidance. And then finally tells them, hey, send us the flight data recorder information. Boeing analyzes the data and comes back and says, we suspect that this is an intermittent electrical fault in the wiring, in the EWIS. And that information was never passed. None of those three documents, those three sets of documents that I just mentioned to you, that all came out in the last six months that we've seen, none of those were shared with the accident investigators.

And I know this because we're in touch with the accident investigators in Ethiopia. We have to take a quick break. Our guest is Ed Pearson, former Boeing senior manager and current head of the Foundation for Aviation Safety. We're going to be talking about what's being done to improve air travel safety, both at Boeing and beyond. Stay with us. You know, peak performance in business often starts with personal confidence.

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Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. Ed Pearson is a former Boeing senior manager and the host of the podcast Warning Bells, where he covers the latest in safety-related news in the aviation industry. Ed, you've been a member of the podcast for a long time.

You've said you intentionally avoid flights on a 737 MAX. I understand you even walked off a plane when you found out it was a MAX. Tell us about that. Yes. Myself and members of our foundation and people that we interact with don't feel like these planes are safe. We're confident in saying that, and we'll back it up. But

What happened was I fly regularly. My family flies regularly. I schedule myself on a non-max plane, and I think this has happened. We hear about this all the time from people. And it got switched at the last minute, and I didn't know it until I got on it. When I sat down, I looked and saw the emergency card, and I was like, what am I going to do? So I immediately got up, and I couldn't fly. I started to walk off the plane. The flight attendant was closing the front door, and

And I said, excuse me, I need to get off. And she's doing her job. She's like, why are you getting off? And I said, well, I wasn't supposed to fly a MAX. And she said, well, why not? What do you know about the MAX? And I said, well, I unfortunately don't have time to tell you, but I just want you to know I don't think the plane's safe and I need to get off. And so-

I spent the night at the USO for the next flight. Wow. We're talking in early 2025. Even after all of the attention that this has received, you're still concerned about flying on a MAX? Absolutely. In fact, I tell my friends and my family not to do it. We've been collecting this information for the last couple of years, and it's just this

stunning list of known defects. These are all considered unsafe conditions by the FAA. And what's really startling about it is there's this whole program, just like when your car, you get a recall notice to come in and get your car serviced if there's something serious. They have a similar process than this in the airline industry, and it's called the Continued Operational Safety Act.

And basically, the FAA is supposed to work with the manufacturer to get any kind of defect fixed as soon as possible. And what we're seeing is the FAA has given Boeing like...

in some cases, to fix these problems. And these are known defects that are hazardous, and this is supposed to be a new plane that shouldn't have these kinds of problems. And in January 2024, Boeing made headlines again when the door blew off an Alaska Airlines flight. This was also a 737 MAX plane. I'm curious, what is the key to fixing this? Where does it stop? I do...

I do have fears and concerns about the safety of that airplane. The company has exasperated the problem because they've removed thousands of quality control inspections on individual airplanes. This was testified to at the Alaska hearing, at the NTSB hearing in August, last August.

The company is so determined to increase their production that they have removed longstanding inspections. And during that testimony, the individual mentioned that the Ethiopian plane had 3,200 less inspections. So the problem here is that the talk is not translating to what you would think is appropriate actual steps. And

So what you ask what needs to happen from my vantage point, it's a leadership issue all the way from the top of the company, from the board of directors, all the way down to the floor. Even that frontline brand new mechanic sees something that's not right, needs to be, you know, courageous enough to speak up. Shouldn't have to be courageous. It should be normal business. You know, you get these different individuals at different, very key positions that, that

push the pressure down and then you get these employees at the front lines who

They're human. They make mistakes. You know, they're tired, they're fatigued, they need proper training. So when you ask the question, like, what is it going to take? And it's a reasonable question. My response is going to take ongoing improvements in leadership at all levels. And you're currently working with a foundation for aviation safety. Can you say a little bit more about that and what you're working on there? I had a group of friends that I either served with in the military or I crossed paths with, and we realized that

nobody's really shining a light and informing the public about these issues, right? You don't hear the Boeing company put out press releases and say, hey, we have another defect on the MAX, right? But the guy who really...

kind of spurred this on. His name is Paul Jirogi, and Paul is a Toronto native. He grew up in Kenya, and he lost his three kids and his wife and his mother-in-law on the Ethiopian plane. And we had him on a podcast a while back, and he just expressed how

how he was devastated and he felt responsible because he bought the tickets. And he just wasn't informed. He said, had I known that that plane had problems, I never would have put my family on it. But when we decided to put the foundation together, we realized that there was a large number of people that had reached out to us who said, hey, I was uninformed. I didn't know either that this stuff was happening. And so we've made it our mission to

to try to put a light on some of the stuff that people don't know about the commercial aviation industry. And we wanted to do it to help improve it. We're not trying to tear it down, but we want to be honest about it. And you have to be honest with these issues. Ed, blue sky this for me. I mean, I think a lot of people want to believe that things are going to get better. And you wouldn't be doing this if you didn't think it was possible, I would imagine. Do you see the solution? And does Boeing fly through this? So...

A couple things need to happen. There needs to be legal accountability is what I'm speaking to. There needs to really be legal accountability because until individuals are held accountable, they'll just keep doing it. Another thing is I believe in the Boeing employees. I believe in the FAA employees and DOT and all those agencies. I've worked with those people before. I know they're great people.

but they need and deserve much greater leadership. And so these individuals who are still applying undue pressure on people need to go. They need to be weeded out because we need high quality planes that last 30 years. We don't need just to hit a Wall Street estimate, you know? And I believe that this can be turned around. I really do. I am an optimist at heart, but I think it's going to take a lot of pressure on our government agencies to do a much, much better job

in overseeing Boeing, and it's going to put pressure on individuals at all different levels that need to do the right thing. And either we're going to figure this out or we're going to have another crash. Ed Pearson is a former senior manager at Boeing and the executive director at the Foundation for Aviation Safety. You can hear his podcast, Warning Bells, wherever you get your podcasts. Ed, thanks so much for joining us on Business Wars.

Hey, thanks for having me, David. I appreciate it. Coming up, Wall Street Journal aerospace reporter Sharon Turlip joins us to answer the billion-dollar question, can Boeing really bounce back? Stay with us. You know, everyone's path to wellness is different, but one thing's for sure, hydration is key. And the best way to stay hydrated is with Liquid IV, powered by Live Hydroscience.

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Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. Boeing's bumpy ride is far from over. In 2024, a door blew off a plane. Workers went on strike and their Starliner craft left two astronauts stranded in space. Meanwhile, Boeing's biggest competition, Airbus, has run into production bottlenecks that are delaying deliveries until at least 2031.

Between safety and supply chain issues across the board, the industry has a long way to go before it can get back to its glory days of the 1990s. To find out what this means for Boeing and air travel as a whole, we're speaking with Sharon Turlip, a reporter covering aerospace for The Wall Street Journal. She joins us now to discuss Boeing's next steps and what it's going to take for the aviation giant to land this plane. Sharon Turlip, welcome to Business Wars. Thanks for having me. Give us a snapshot of how Boeing's doing financially right now.

Sure. I mean, Boeing financially is not doing well. They're in a lot of pain in that regard. They are losing billions of dollars. They haven't turned a profit. And the CEO, Kelly Ortberg, who took over in August, he told employees that the key to turning this around is ramping up production of the 737, its most important plane. And so they have yet to do that. Well, by October of 2024, Boeing had already racked up a backlog of orders totaling something like $1.

500 billion dollars. I mean, that's a number so high, it's hard to even comprehend it for a lot of people. How did it get to this point? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge number. And backlogs are a reality to start with because planes are incredibly expensive and they take a long time, a long time, both of which are understatements. So but, you know, unlike a company that makes

food or even really cars. They can't make a bunch of planes and hope somebody buys them. So the nature of the business is that, you know, they have to have orders and they have to have commitments from customers, from airlines and lessors. So there are always going to be backlogs.

But in this case, two things happened. There were big production snarls and stoppages, both from COVID and the grounding of the MAX planes. So that slowed down production. And then demands, travel demand for flyers picked up much more quickly than the industry expected. So on the heels of this production slowdown came a lot of demands. And those things...

combined to create this just really bloated backlog. Of course, the 737 MAX wouldn't be what it is were it not for what Airbus was doing, its main competitor in this space. And

Apparently, they're not doing that much better. I gather their waiting lists have been pushed out to 2031 for their planes. Give us an update where they're at. A lot of the things Boeing is struggling with, Airbus is struggling. It's just not quite as pronounced. But Airbus is struggling with two of the big things that have hampered Boeing, and that is

A problematic supply chain. So a supply chain that has really struggled to get back on its feet after the pandemic and that has really struggled to keep up and difficulty finding enough labor to to build the planes. And then additionally, because Boeing is having so much trouble, there's a lot of demand for Airbus planes as well. So and Airbus also is dealing with this big increase in demand.

Well, another hit for Boeing in October, they had something like a weeks-long workers' strike, right? That stopped a lot of production. How did the strike affect the company overall, from what you can tell? Yeah, I mean, the strike costs, they haven't said, and they...

They will say likely how much the strike cost as far as the balance sheet, but it halted production and not just for the duration of the strike, which was a couple months, but it took many weeks to then restart production. And they still have not returned to the production levels that they were at before the strike. So shutting down an airplane factory is a really big deal. And two plus lost months of production is quite detrimental. Right.

How do you think these backlogs are going to affect airlines and air travelers? I mean, do you have any sense of what this means in terms of pricing and availability of flights? How does that trickle down to travelers?

Yeah. I mean, airline executives have said, you know, it makes scheduling more complicated. It makes flights less available. So certainly it is having an impact and there's a lot of frustration. And, you know, it affects travelers as far as, you know, what flights are available, the cost. So there really is a big trickle down effect of these production problems. You know, there are obviously only so many players in this aerospace manufacturing world. And it seems like,

From the sound of it, they're all struggling one way or another, especially in commercial aviation. Do the airlines purchasing these planes have any other options, or does it really kind of come down to a duopoly here?

It really is a duopoly for these kinds of mass transit, big commercial airliners. I mean, the major airlines operate smaller planes, if you think about Embraers, but that's an entirely different class. It's different routes. So they really can choose between Boeing and Airbus right now. Yeah, yeah. Well, now I know Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg took the reins in August of 2024, and

Why does Boeing seem to think he's the best person to turn the company around, do you think? Kelly Ortberg, he's a well-known executive. He comes from a very big supplier. He worked with Boeing. He knows the industry. He knows factory work. He knows engineering. So he really checked a lot of boxes for Boeing. And also there were people they hoped would be candidates that

wouldn't take the job. They had talked to Larry Culp, who is the CEO of GE Aerospace and who has a phenomenal reputation. So, you know, it's a job that's really hard and they needed somebody they could feel would do it. And it's a job that is daunting and not the easiest job to fill. Not the easiest job to fill. That's an understatement, it sounds to me. I mean, you know, I know Ortberg has emphasized the need for an improved company culture. I believe we have a clip from a CNBC interview from last fall. Let's listen.

We're reevaluating the values in the company, and we really need to embark on a culture change

That is something more than just a poster on the wall. It's really going to guide how the company behaves day in, day out. More than a poster on the wall. What does it mean to have a kind of culture change that Ortberg envisions? Have you been able to sort of glimpse what he's specifically referring to there? Yeah, I mean, I think we he spoke recently to employees at an all employee meeting and was pretty blunt there.

And he talked a lot about, you know, this Boeing is a culture of blaming. He said, you know, we blame each other instead of taking responsibility. That needs to stop. We need to just focus on the job. He talked about all the mistakes that are made and all the, you know, enormous time and resources Boeing spends fixing things that it didn't get right the first time. His goal is to, you know, get a lot of the personality issues and a lot of the accountability issues out of the way and focus on

What the company needs to do and what each individual needs to do to do the job right and do it right the first time. Now, I know that you've spoken with a lot of current and former Boeing employees on what they thought could be done to turn the company around and also had a lot to say about this company culture aspect. You see him delivering on this pledge. What were they telling you?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of them, you know, it's interesting because I think most people agree that the culture is the problem and is the thing that needs to be fixed and that the main thing that needs to be fixed is putting safety first over speed and profits.

How to do that, I think people have, you know, just a wide range of views. Some people say you need to really come back to where the engineers are running things and running the company. Others, it's about slowing down. Others, it's about the processes in place, whether it's standardized processes

Yeah, yeah.

We've talked a little bit about how Boeing is involved in the space race, but you've reported that Boeing is trying to get out. Why? Kelly Ortberg has talked about needing to really focus Boeing and focus Boeing on the core things and the things that they're good at and the things that they do well.

The time has passed for them to hold on to things for image reasons or emotional reasons. And they're really looking at getting to the core. And they've struggled with some of their space programs. So I think many people followed the ordeal of the astronauts who were

went to the International Space Station on the Starliner. NASA didn't feel confident returning them on the Starliner and instead is sending Elon Musk's SpaceX to retrieve them. So Boeing is considering, you know, do we, you know, does it make sense to be in the space business in this way? And then it remains to be seen whether they would find a buyer for those assets if they ultimately decide to sell them. But that's what they're looking at. Hmm.

Now, based on your reporting, what are Boeing's next steps on this road to recovery? Yeah, I think they're really focused right now on getting commercial jet production back up and back up without glitches or problems or issues. So they've...

poured a lot of time and money into additional training. Things that sound kind of boring and pedestrian, but make a big difference. Simpler instructions for how to build the 787, new training protocols, more quality inspections of fuselages that are coming from a supplier that has had a lot of problems.

So they're laser focused on getting production back up, but getting it back up where they're not going to have problems. And I think that's the main thing. There's been some big executive departures. So one would have to imagine that that Mr. Ortberg is, you know, working on on filling in his executive team. And then we wrote a story where they're working on their Air Force One program, which is delayed for years and quarantined.

You know, it's one thing, though, to emerge as a survivor. It's quite another to reclaim past glory and perhaps its future and its prospects. Any new planes on the horizon in anything that sort of suggests that there will be blue skies for Boeing ahead?

Well, new planes are most likely quite a long ways off. Kelly Ortberg, he said when he spoke to employees that it's not the time now that they need to get their legs under them. They need to work out some things and it's just not the time for a new plane program. And when they

start down that path, it can be, you know, many years before you actually see even a prototype of something. So that's a ways off, you know, and in some ways air travel, when you think about the glory days of Boeing, you know, in the 50s and the 60s, air travel itself was exciting. So I think just the nature of aerospace, a lot of the excitement has shifted to when you think of Blue Origin or SpaceX or some of these space companies or, you know, all these startups. And

And so the question is, can Boeing find something that really captures the imagination? It's probably not where their head is at right now. It's probably not the top priority. But do they get back to a point where they're doing new types of technologies and, you know, whether it's in sustainability or whether it's defense or space where it's really they come up with something new and exciting? Given all these changes in policies and procedures and personnel, is it your sense

based on your reporting that Boeing can bounce back? I mean, I guess this is the multi-billion dollar question, literally. Yeah, it really is. And I think, you know, there's so much that people point to that say it's just, you know, irreversibly messed up and it's mired and it's best, you know, you hear that a lot. But at the same time, there aren't many companies that can say they provide something that

absolutely essential to their country, the world, the military, and they're only one of two companies in the world that can do it. So, I mean, they have, they certainly have that going for them that you can't just replace an aerospace giant. Somebody else can't just come in and do it. I mean,

I used to cover the auto industry. It took decades for Toyota to come in and displace American automakers. So you just take that and multiply it by, you know, many factors. So they have this position and I think they really have that going for them. Sharon Turlip is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering the aerospace industry with a focus on Boeing. You can read her reporting at WSJ.com.

Sharon Turlip, thanks so much for joining us. Sure, thank you. Coming up, TikTok faces off against the U.S. government in our new series as we explore whether the social media giant is a legitimate national security threat or a political pawn in a new Cold War.

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