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Ever since a side panel on one of its 737 Max passenger jets blew out at nearly 15,000 feet in January 2024, news from aviation giant Boeing has been almost unrelentingly awful. At times it was so dire the very future of U.S. industry’s former crown jewel looked doubtful, amid revelations about its flippant attitude toward production safety, and customer threats to turn to European rival Airbus for new airframes Boeing struggled to deliver.
But now, 21 months after that Alaska Airlines incident terrified the 171 passengers aboard — and goaded the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) into ordering Boeing to entirely revamp its flawed assembly and safety inspection system — the company finally appears to be ascending back toward business success through an overhaul of its once famed culture of safety first. For starters, just this week Boeing announced it delivered 55 planes to customer airlines in September — the highest number for the month since 2018. That wasn’t all.
The company also said it’s looking to increase output of its best-selling 737 Max to 42 aircraft per month, up from the 38 monthly rate allowed under the production cap the FAA imposed after the Alaska Airlines incident. That’s part of Boeing’s wider return to manufacturing form, which it confirmed today with the additional news it delivered a total of 440 commercial planes to customers during the first nine months of 2025. It also inked gross orders for 96 planes in September, bringing its running total for 2025 to 870 craft.
That’s the result of an ongoing Boeing workplace revolution of culture, employee attitudes, and manufacturing procedures. That required the company to revamp its assembly and safety inspection processes, and also forced executives to regain the trust of floor workers. Many of those employees were subjected to scorn, retaliation, and even dismissal for alerting superiors to production flaws they’d seen in planes, or reporting dangerously shoddy assembly practices.
That continuing reform effort is feeding the new, virtuous cycle of business activity Boeing reported this week. It’s also generating cash the company badly needs after losing nearly $12 billion since 2024 — and a whopping $36 billion since 2019. It also appears to have halted the succession of what appeared to be near-death developments following the 2024 Alaska Airlines side panel blowout.
A critical moment in the turnaround drive came in August 2024, when the Boeing board tapped aviation industry veteran Kelly Ortberg to take controls of the nosediving company. In doing so, Ortberg focused on restoring the manufacturing giant’s former culture of industrial and safety excellence that had been lost in recent decades.
That occurred as C-suite executives prioritized profitability and shareholder dividends over other considerations — including spending the time and money to fix aircraft flaws employees had reported. It also involved selling off suppliers of essential aircraft components that had long been integrated into Boeing’s manufacturing and assembly operation.
The new signs that Ortberg’s internal reform campaign is bearing fruit comes at a critical time for the wider airline industry, too. Many carriers complain of having to pare back or delay expansion plans because of a shortage of new planes.
Indeed, about the only good news Boeing had received since the 737 Max side panel blowout was Airbus’s inability to fully capitalize on the turbulence rocking its American competitor. Enduring post-pandemic disruptions in the European consortium’s supply chain limited its production capabilities, even as Boeing’s own output was reduced by the FAA cap.
But despite the continued improvements, Boeing still has a way to go before returning to top form.
Its 440 plane deliveries so far this year are still lower than the 568 aircraft it handed off to customers during the same period in 2018 — when the company’s real problems began. That year the crash of one of its 737 Max planes killed 189 people aboard, and sparked investigations that revealed the manufacturer’s shocking disregard for reported safety lapses.
Then, in 2019, a second 737 Max operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed, resulting in 157 deaths. Additional fallout and damning revelations that arose after that accident continued battering Boeing’s reputation for safety, and fueled increasingly miserable financial results. With the 2024 Alaska Airlines incident looking like it could become the coup de grâce, the company’s board replaced the management veteran it appointed in 2020 with the trained engineer and aviation sector executive Ortberg.
The turnaround at Boeing since Ortberg’s arrival has been dramatic. But the key to keeping that progress going will be convincing the FAA that the company’s internal safety revamp has advanced enough to increase the 737 Max production cap to 42 jets per month. During comments made at a Morgan Stanley investor conference last month, Ortberg seemed confident getting the regulator’s approval was within reach soon.
“I think we’re pretty aligned,” Ortberg said, according to CNBC. “We’ve got to get this final metric stabilized … (and we’re) planning to be producing at 42 a month by the end of the year.”
Awaiting that, Boeing got still more good news this week — this time from Europe.
In another step forward in the company’s reform drive, European Union regulators approved the company’s planned $4.7 billion reacquisition of fuselage manufacturer Spirit AeroSystems, which was previously an integrated part of Boeing’s business and manufacturing structure.
But the unit was sold off in 2005 under the drive by executives at that time to generate cash and reduce costs by outsourcing production. They then applied relentless pressure on those newly independent suppliers to speed output and reduce prices eating into Boeing’s bottom line.
Ortberg clearly viewed that decision as a bad move in both industrial and strategic terms. As a result, even as it struggles to return to profitability, Boeing is now corralling considerable finances to reintegrate Spirit AeroSystems — and promising doing so will both streamline production and improve quality control.
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Bruce Crumley
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