It is amazing that Boeing CEO W. James McNerney Jr. can keep his job. After years of problems of the assembly, testing, and commercial launch of the company’s flagship 787 Dreamliner, the project has been delayed again.
Boeing has not begun the in-flight certification process with the Federal Aviation Administration. The aerospace company has acknowledged that it has found additional problems with its new plane. According to The Wall Street Journal, one of these is “an in-flight engine shutdown that happened in late February on one of the test planes.” That is hardly a sign that the tests are going well.
The Dreamliner is now almost three years behind schedule and McNerney has been at the helm of the company for that entire period. There has been no public pressure put on McNerney by his board even though the delay have cost Boeing billions of dollars in lost revenue from carriers that would have taken delivery and begun to pay for the 787 in 2008.
The Boeing board is faced with a difficult and perhaps unsolvable problem. It could kick McNerney out as the tests on the 787 end, or it can keep him until completion and blame the delays on problems with other Boeing managers and a string of bad luck.
The board’s alternative is to replace McNerney with one of its own members and hope that the move signals that the 787 delays must end. But, whatever is broke non the plane at this point will not be helped by a boardroom coup. Boeing’s board would have had to change CEOs two years ago. It missed that window just like the 787 missed its.
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Douglas A. McIntyre
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