Another Delay From Boeing (BA) As Company Loses Credibility

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 20, 5:00AM EDT

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No wonder the Air Force rewarded its tanker contract to Northrop Grumman (NOC) and EADS instead of Boeing (BA). The US airplane maker can’t deliver products on time. According to the FT Boeing said that "it would have to redesign parts of its troubled 787 Dreamliner, raising the prospect of a third delay in recent months to delivery of the new aircraft."

A another delay in the launch of the plane would trigger penalty payments from some carriers and might also cause some cancellations as buyers begin to look at alternatives from Airbus.

Boeing is making a bid to be the worst managed company in the US this year. Just a few months ago, the company had everything going for it. Delays in some Airbus products allowed it to be aggressive marketing the 787 and a new version of the 747. Boeing’s share price was almost $107 in early October. It is now at $73.45 and news of another product delay are likely to take it lower.

The bad news about the 787 can be added to one of the company’s excuses for losing the Air Force contract. Boeing said if it knew the government wanted a larger tanker, it would have pitched its 777 instead of the smaller 767. The people at the company may have forgotten to read the driver’s manual before getting behind the wheel for that bid.

Over the course of less than six months, Boeing has blown advantages which most companies could only dream about. Shareholders are going to pay an increasingly dear price for that.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.