Boeing CEO to testify in Senate on Max crash

Bloomberg

Boeing Co’s chief executive officer will testify before a Senate committee next week to answer questions about the planemaker’s design and certification of a jet involved in two deadly crashes.
Dennis Muilenburg will appear at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing next Tuesday, a day before his expected appearance before the House’s Transportation committee, according to two people familiar with the hearing who spoke on the condition they not be named.
Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, confirmed there would be a hearing related to Boeing, but not who would appear.
A second panel with witnesses from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and an international review panel known as the Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR), which examined the 737 Max’s certification, appeared on Tuesday, said a person familiar with the hearing.
Both the NTSB and the JATR have in recent weeks issued findings related to the plane.
The appearance by Muilenburg comes as the Chicago-based company is under fire over its design of the 737 Max jet and its candor with regulators during the jet’s certification.
The company’s board recently stripped Muilenburg of the chairman title and made other changes among top executives.
Muilenburg’s appearance before the Senate will be on the one-year anniversary of the first of two crashes involving the 737 Max, Boeing’s best-selling jet.
The company says it is making progress in winning approval from regulators to get the Max flying again after redesigning a flight control feature that malfunctioned, causing a Lion Air jet to crash off the coast of Indonesia last October and an Ethiopian Airlines plane to go down in March, leading to a worldwide grounding of the model.
A total of 346 people were killed.

Boeing’s jetliner chief quits over Max crisis
Bloomberg

Boeing Co said Kevin McAllister is stepping down as head of its jetliner division after less than three years amid a crisis engulfing the 737 Max and production snarls with other planes.
Stan Deal, the head of Boeing’s global services business, will replace McAllister, the company said in a statement. McAllister, who joined Boeing shortly before the Max’s debut, is the first to depart from Boeing’s upper echelons since two deadly crashes prompted a worldwide grounding that began in March.
The exit marks the second jolt to Boeing management this month, after Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg was stripped of the chairman’s job on October 11. The flying ban has cost Boeing more than $8 billion, and the Max isn’t expected to carry passengers until next year. “The drumbeat for major executive changes is only getting louder,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group. As for McAllister’s ouster, “I’m not sure what it accomplishes, but at least Stan Deal is a really great choice.”
Boeing rose 1.8% to $337 at the close in New York. The shares have tumbled 20% since an Ethiopian jetliner plunged into a field on March 10, the worst performance on the 30-member Dow Jones Industrial Average.
With Deal, Boeing is tapping an executive with deep sales and supplier-management experience to lead the company’s largest business amid one of the biggest crises in its 103-year history. He will be replaced at Boeing’s services division by Ted Colbert.
Vishwa Uddanwadiker was named as Boeing’s interim chief information officer,
replacing Colbert.