Chief Executive Officer, Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg has been fired.
Muilenburg who until few months ago served as the chairman of the aircraft manufacturing company was fired due to different disastrous years the aerospace giant has had that include two deadly crashes of Boeing’s new MAX 737 that happened in October, 2018 with the second mishap happened in March, 2019.
Further investigations revealed that the crashes were due to flaws in the design of the aircraft’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software.
Boeing’s current Chairman, David Calhoun will take over as Chief Executive.
Calhoun is currently the head of private equity operations at money management giant Blackstone. A former General Electric executive who ran that company’s jet engines division, he is also the lead director of the board of the construction equipment maker Caterpillar.
He will take over as CEO in mid-January after he wraps up non-Boeing related business and had expressed interest in the CEO job in the past, according to insiders.
Boeing has been sharply criticized by U.S. regulators and members of Congress in the months since the 737 Max groundings for providing incomplete information and paperwork, as well as pressuring agencies to speed up the approval process.
Muilenburg, a lifelong Boeing employee who started at the company as an intern, has steadfastly denied he was being pressured to resign despite calls to do so from members of Congress and victims’ families. Mounting pressure from Wall Street has weighed on him also: Boeing has lost some $60 billion in stock market value since the second Max crash in March.
On Monday, though, the board in a statement said “a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence” in the company as it works to repair relationships with regulators and stakeholders.
Calhoun says he strongly believes in the future of Boeing and the 737 Max.
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