New face of Boeing jets tries to win back 737 Max buyers

Bloomberg

Days after Stanley Deal took the helm of Boeing Co’s jetliner business last month, he was winging across the globe to meet with the airline bosses most shaken by the deadly crashes that have plunged the manufacturer into crisis.
Deal spent the October 29 anniversary of the first of two 737 Max crashes with Rusdi Kirana, founder of Indonesia’s Lion Air. And Deal apologised in person to Ethiopian Airlines Chief Executive Officer Tewolde GebreMariam in Addis Ababa, the site of the second disaster. The accidents killed 346 people, prompting a worldwide grounding of the Max and raising troubling questions about Boeing’s design and testing of new aircraft.
“It has been a humbling and inspiring first week at Commercial Airplanes,” Deal wrote to employees in a memo seen by Bloomberg. “The past few days have also been filled with emotion and a heavy heart.”
Trying to make amends isn’t just good customer relations for Deal, a genial aerospace engineer who worked his way up the ranks at Boeing and the rival it acquired in 1997, McDonnell Douglas Corp. His outreach will play a key role in shaping how Boeing emerges from a long nightmare that has shaken confidence in its most important product and disrupted operations for dozens of airlines.
“Customer skills are going to be critical as Boeing works with the airlines to bring the aircraft back into service,” said aerospace consultant Kevin Michaels. Deal is the rare senior aerospace leader with “emotional intelligence,” he added.
Deal, previously known to suppliers for his efforts to handle some of their business in house at Boeing, will see his people skills put to the test. His next task is to soothe airlines and lessors dismayed at the abrupt exit of his predecessor, Kevin McAllister. He was well-regarded for his years leading sales and services at General Electric Co’s aviation division before joining Boeing in 2017.
The new leader made his trade-expo debut as chief of Boeing’s $61 billion jetliner business at the Dubai Airshow, fielding questions from reporters about the Max and the planned 777x wide-body, which has been hit by delays.
He struck a contrite tone, apologising to families of crash victims and pledging to work through issues created for suppliers and customers by the Max’s unprecedented global flying ban, which is now entering its ninth month.
“We continue to work diligently around the changes necessary to the airplane,” Deal said. “We’re interacting daily with the FAA, but also regulators around the globe, and we continue to make progress.”
Deal has already jumped into the maelstrom around the jet.
The regulatory environment is tense, with the US Federal Aviation Administration under pressure for having certified the plane and members of Congress continuing to flay Boeing after tumultuous hearings.
The crisis has thrown the company’s product strategy into disarray while Airbus SE racks up sales in the crucial market for workhorse single-aisle jets.
And if Boeing’s plight worsens — a plausible scenario — Deal could end up shouldering the blame like McAllister, who was ousted on October 22 after a tense boardroom session.
“The good news is he’s very much the right person for the job,” said Richard Aboulafia, a consultant at Teal Group. “The problem is that if things go wrong, it could still potentially have a bad outcome, especially if folks at the top are determined to insulate themselves with another purge.”
Deal was a contender for the top post at the jetliner division in 2016 when Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg turned to McAllister, the first outsider to run the company’s biggest business. The fit was awkward at times for the GE veteran, who had never run an operation the size of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
Deal, in his previous job as head of Boeing Global Services, helped meld a sprawling collection of product offerings into a division with $17 billion in sales. Now he’s trying to repair customer relationships shaken by the Max as Boeing faces billions of dollars in reimbursement claims from airlines and lessors. With Max-related costs at $9 billion and rising at Boeing, the planemaker can’t be overly generous to customers.