Embattled aircraft maker Boeing is grounding its senior management team — including its CEO — after a series of incidents with its signature 737 MAX jet.In a letter to employees announcing his impending departure at the end of the year, David Calhoun wrote the company is striving to return Boeing "to stability after the extraordinary challenges of the past five years, with safety and quality at the forefront of everything that we do."His departure is just one of a broad axe that cuts across Boeing’s executive suite..In addition to Calhoun, Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing's commercial airplanes unit, will ‘retire’ effective immediately. Chairman Larry Kellner has also said he won’t stand for re-election in May. To call the last five years ‘tumultuous’ would be an understatement after two crashes of its signature 737 MAX8 that killed 346 people in Malaysia and Ethiopia months after its — delayed — rollout in 2018 and 2019.Those resulted in the aircraft being grounded for almost two years. Since January there have been nine reported incidents with multiple models of its planes since a cabin door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines flight over Portland, OR, on January 5 — which is being investigated by the FBI as a possible criminal investigation.That’s notwithstanding multiple ongoing investigations by the Federal Aviation Authority.Those include flames shooting out of a MAX8 over Miami on January 18, days after a cracked cockpit window grounded a flight from Japan on January 13. On January 20 the front nose wheel fell off a 757 taxiing on the runway in Atlanta and rolled away..On March 7 a Boeing 777 bound from San Francisco to Japan was forced to reroute to Los Angeles immediately after takeoff when one of its wheels fell off, smashing a car in the parking lot below.On March 11 a 787 Dreamliner experienced a technical issue mid-flight bound from Sydney, Australia, that caused it to drop dozens of metres, injuring 50 people on board.Two days later, on March 13, a 777 was forced to turn around and land in Sydney — where it departed — after a fuel leak.The final straw came March 15 when a MAX8 bound from San Francisco landed in Medford, OR missing an exterior fuselage panel near the landing gear that mysteriously dislodged. Unlike the door panel that was found in the backyard of a Portland high school physics teacher, that one hasn’t been found..Some investors expressed concern that the management shake-up would not be enough to address long-standing safety issues that were the reason for Calhoun's ascendance to CEO in the first place in 2020.Several airlines, particularly United, have cancelled billions of dollars in back orders for the next generation 737, the MAX10 even before it’s been certified to fly.Calhoun insisted the decision to resign was his.“We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We also must inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company," he said.
