Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

Mullenberg has been strongly criticized in part because he never accepted the buck stopping with him, didn't clean house, and acted as a mouthpiece, while saying nothing.

What people expect from Boeing is a gesture of humanity; an acceptance of culpability. An admission that something went wrong, and a genuine gesture of contrition and change.

The company culture needs a wholesale change, which means a hell of a lot more than the CEO need to be on their way out. Until you can rid Boeing of the taint of financial commoditization as a first order objective, Boeing is still going to suffer from a crisis of faith.

No one , or at least I don't, want to fly on a product of the "Boeing Corporation, stock ticker whatever". I want to fly on an aircraft made by the most committed people in the world to the challenge of designing and manufacturing the absolute best, most pilotable, most safe to be on, and most efficient/performant aerospace hardware in the world, all working under one group (if we take the over consolidation as a necessity in this day and age; I'm not personally sold on it). An engineering marvel built on human aspiration, commitment to good and safe work, and with profitability as an objective, but not an overriding principle. There needs to be a commitment to the nature of the endeavor as a physical struggle against the forces of Nature first and foremost, and an implicit understanding that the economic affairs of men must come secondary to the fulfillment of the requisite solution to the physical problems of aircraft making.

I know it's probably just a fiction in all likelyhood to expect all that. Some naive fantasy that I'm sure anyone whose run a business is shaking their head at. I'm not even sure I can wholeheartedly accept my own prioritization given the endless nature of the daily struggle with the balance sheet that is life, and the expectations placed on a publically traded company.

Alas, we have to accept that Boeing, and I think to a greater extent, any corporation should not be treated as primarily financial abstractions. We don't (or shouldn't be) running businesses just to make money. We should be out to solve physical problems first, with profitability keeping us from going overboard on the expenditure.

Sorry if this seems ranty. I always thought these ideas were a given; but the last few years have been real eye openers in terms of making clear that they are by no means universal, or at least universally applied.

Can you point to where in the PE Code of Ethics it says that cutting corners due to "pressure to deliver" is okay? The whole purpose of the PE designation is to avoid circumstances like that.

If the end result is that a new type certification is required for the 737 MAX, it may still be a viable product but not the one customers were originally sold on.