Boeing 787s in final assembly.
Signs that Boeing is restoring its footing come after events that CEO Kelly Ortberg has described as “some of the most consequential” in the company’s history. Some would use the term “disastrous,” but “consequential” gives a sense of looking forward with new eyes and priorities.
At a leadership level, those eyes are indeed new. Ortberg took the helm in August 2024 and has made numerous changes at the top. Jesus “Jay” Malave, the former head of finance at Lockheed Martin, will join the team as CFO on Aug. 15. Stephanie Pope was appointed Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) CEO and president in March last year and is also Boeing EVP.
Pope fronts the part of Boeing that has experienced the longest and most difficult of its problems, from the 737 MAX crashes and grounding, through production, certification and delivery issues across its commercial airliner portfolio—including the new 777X—and the January 2024 mid-flight door blowout on an Alaska Airlines MAX that led to an investigation and ongoing oversight by FAA of BCA’s production processes.
On top of all that, and just days before the Paris Air Show in June, came the fatal crash of Air India Flight 171—a Boeing 787-8—shortly after take-off at Ahmedabad Airport in India. The investigation into that crash is ongoing, but a preliminary report issued July 12 said one of the pilots toggled both of the aircraft’s engine fuel supply switches from run to cutoff three seconds after liftoff. The effects on Boeing’s participation in the air show, however, were immediate. Ortberg and Pope both canceled plans to attend the show, and Boeing kept a low profile, making no aircraft order announcements and canceling media briefings. (Airbus announced 142 firm orders for airliners plus 102 commitments.)
In the lead up to Paris, BCA was gathering confidence, having won hundreds of new airliner orders earlier this year—including the largest single widebody order in its history, with 130 787s, 30 777-9s, and 50 more widebody options for Qatar Airways—and restored its MAX monthly production rate to 38, which remains FAA’s imposed cap while the agency’s oversight continues.
Pope, who rarely gives interviews, spoke with ATW from New Delhi, where she had attended the IATA AGM, 10 days before the crash of AI Flight 171. She emphasized there was still “a lot of work to do” with BCA’s recovery and was highly engaged when talking about culture change at the company. Nevertheless, she was careful to temper any idea that Boeing was bullish about continuing to achieve rate 38 on the MAX or the company's 2025 orders.
“We are not going to be focused on orders. Demand isn’t our problem. It’s about continuing to drive the confidence with our customers and suppliers on our ability to be predictable and reliable and have some resiliency going forward,” she said.
Boeing did release its 20-year Commercial Market Outlook at the outset of the show, but did not give its usual media brief on that forecast. The new Outlook predicts an overall demand for 43,600 new aircraft over the next two decades.
“Emerging markets, with expanding middle classes, dynamic and competitive airline networks and sustained aviation investment, will play an outsized role in global air traffic growth,” the company said. “These markets will represent over 50% of the global commercial fleet in 2044, up from nearly 40% in 2024.” The global airliner fleet will nearly double to more than 49,600 as airlines add capacity to meet travel demand, while about 80% of in-service aircraft will be replaced with more than 21,000 deliveries. Boeing said narrowbodies would constitute 72% of the global fleet, up from 66% in 2024, driven largely by short-haul travel and LCCs in emerging markets. The global passenger widebody fleet, meanwhile, would increase to approximately 8,320 aircraft, up from roughly 4,400 in 2024, with that growth increasingly driven by carriers in emerging markets.
On the cargo side, supply chain diversification and expanding express cargo networks will drive a nearly two-thirds expansion of the global freighter fleet and the need for 2,900 production and converted freighters, Boeing predicted.
Boeing’s monthly airliner delivery total reached 60 in June for the first time in 2025, Boeing data released in early July show. The company also logged 116 gross orders: for 54 737 MAXs and 62 787s. Fitch Ratings also revised its outlook on Boeing at the end of June from “negative” to “stable.”
Here are excerpts from the interview with Pope:
How would you sum up the mood among your airline customers as you met with them at the IATA AGM [at the beginning of June] versus a year earlier? The overall sentiment is more positive. We have a lot of work to do, but last year I would say our customers were very disappointed in our performance and our plans and holistically where we were. But I think when you look at the incredible work our team has done, I am really proud of the work they’ve done over the past 12 months.
At IATA last year, we did not have an approved quality and safety plan from the FAA; we were in development of that. We had a lot of risk with the labor negotiation that was coming up and that was on everybody’s radar. There were a lot of questions about our leadership. I think where we’re at now is we have an approved plan; we are executing that plan. Many of our customers have seen it at Charleston and at Renton and Everett, and we are seeing the progress in terms of results with improving quality and predictability around our delivery and our performance.
I would say the overall sentiment is more positive, but we still have a lot of work to do. And I keep reminding everybody that we are in the early miles of this marathon.
What are your priorities for your customers? Our customers need predictability that they can count on. At Boeing, what we are focused on is building a safety and quality plan that we can very methodically execute and increase our rates with predictability and quality. What the customers are seeing to date, while it’s early, is that we are increasing our production rate, and our quality is continuing to improve. It really does come back to the discipline around the safety and quality plan and it’s about how we are running our factory—we are building our airplanes differently from [how] we did a year ago. We are using the safety management system; we have wrapped that around our production system, and we are using that to deliver. At Boeing, we’ve been very challenged and when you have stability, you can absorb some disruption. What we had to do was build resiliency in everything we do, and when you have resiliency, you can absorb some disruption. You can’t absorb everything, but you can absorb some. Our job is to manage risk. Our industry has always been dynamic. There’s always going to be macro- and micro-risk and we have to have a system that is strong and stable to be able to absorb some of that risk for our customers, and we haven’t been in position to do that in a long time.
How significant was it to reach rate 38 on the 737 monthly production? I keep telling the team we are going to be very cautious. We won’t officially declare a rate until we’ve been at it a couple of months, but it’s very important. You know, we really haven’t been stable at rate 38 since probably pre-accidents. We only really hit rate 38 for a very short moment before the door plug incident, which is why it is very important now that we stabilize rate 38. But I think it’s a signal to the airlines, and more important than the rate is the quality. We’ve been able this time to systematically increase rate, we started at zero after the work stoppage, so we’ve gone from zero to 38 and the six KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] that have been put in have been improving.
So, it’s the first time you have seen us in a long time increasing our production and doing that by improving the safety and production in our factory and I think that’s really important.
It’s also important to us as a company, and Kelly has talked about restoring our financial balance sheet, and rate 38 is a line in the sand for us that’s important to our company. Kelly really gave us the time after the work stoppage—we did not try to go to 38 overnight.
I think that it speaks to how significantly different we are thinking about this as a leadership team and a production system. We say we are a newer workforce, so we are going to give everyone time to get back and get retrained and really set the system up for success.
You’re saying it’s not about the numbers. It has to be about the quality, the consistency and the reliability? That’s exactly right. We want to make sure we present the airplane for delivery at the date we told the customer we were going to present it and with the quality they would expect the first time.
Many of our customers are on site at our factories so they see what’s going on and I think it would have been counter to our intent if we were hitting rate, but they were seeing more escapes or we were missing by a couple of days. That is not the Boeing we want to be and that’s not the resiliency that we just talked about.
Are you confident that the BCA portfolio is right for current demand, in particular with regards to the 777X? The portfolio is performing very well in the market and that’s evident by the large orders and our backlog that equates to seven years of production. We are sold out through seven years. On the 777, it’s been a long journey. We’ve flown that airplane over 4,000 flight hours. All four airplanes are flying now in the test program. We are aiming to complete most of the certification work by the end of the year. So, there’s no change to the program; we have risk around that, and we have opportunities, but I think we are progressing now to where the scope, the statement of work, is getting more known. As you work through the development program early on, you have a lot of unknowns. This summer is really important to us as we work through the final flight tests. We have done a lot of work on the aerodynamics; we have been doing work on brakes and engine performance; we have resolved the thrust link issue. So, we will continue to execute the flight test program and validate the safety and performance and reliability of that airplane. It’s performing really well. And then we will work with the FAA and take their lead to get that certified. But we are seeing a lot of progress.
Talk about culture. What does this mean now for Boeing and for you as a leader? Boeing is its people and everything I’m talking about is driven by our team and I’m really proud of our team for their resiliency and commitment as they worked through all these challenges that we’ve had over the last year. The foundation of that is culture. It’s defined by your mission and values and your behaviors, and it becomes real based on how leaders lead and how they model that and reward that. You can have the values, but if you don’t make it real, you’re not going to be there. For Boeing on our journey, we developed it very similar to our safety and quality plan. I believe this safety and quality plan is working because it was built on feedback from our employees. We did stand down across all our factories for an entire day. We shut everything down and we asked the people who do the job, and who know better than anyone, “What are your issues, what are the concerns?”
We talked to the FAA, we talked to the customers, and we talked to the suppliers, and they were all saying the same thing, but again, nobody knows better than the people who are doing the work. We really listened to our employees and their thoughts on the culture. We’ve been engaging; we’ve been doing a lot of roundtables; and the company went to survey. And the greatest thing about it is the 82% [who responded] represent their passion and their belief and their desire to change the culture and strengthen the culture. Kelly likes to say we don’t have a case-for-change problem; we don’t have to go out and convince people that we need to change the culture.
What’s the biggest difference? I think one of the things that was missing when you look at the old values and our new values was the people focus. You have to start first and foremost by valuing, listening to and respecting our people. And then what are the behaviors we are going to tolerate and how do we hold people accountable and drive that across the enterprise?
Culture takes a long time. Everywhere I go, whether I’m out on the flight line or in the factory or with engineers, we are talking about it. I think that’s what we are really starting to see and change in our factories. Our employees are standing up and taking action. If you speak up and nobody takes any action, you stop speaking up. For the employees, it’s about seeing change. My leadership team and I are really focused on engagement, people listening and responding.
Are you sensing a restored confidence among employees? Our people dedicate their lives to designing, building and supporting airplanes. The mission is so inspiring, and I think that when you talk to our employees, they are inspired by the mission. They know that they build planes that connect the world and that their friends and family fly on. So, the importance of the work is already embedded. We have a foundation; we just have to deliver these new values and behaviors.
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