* Yesterday, the FAA told airlines to check panels on yet another Boeing plane. New York Times…

The Federal Aviation Administration recommended late Sunday night that airlines begin visual inspections of door plugs installed on Boeing 737-900ER planes, the second Boeing model to come under scrutiny this month.

The F.A.A. said the plane had the same door plug design as the company’s newer 737 Max 9. The agency grounded about 170 Max 9 jets after a door panel blew off one of the planes shortly after an Alaska Airlines flight left Portland, Ore., on Jan. 5, forcing an emergency landing.

The door plugs are placed as a panel where an emergency door would otherwise be if a plane was configured with more seats. […]

Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, which both use the 737-900ER, said in statements that they had already started inspecting their planes of that model. Delta Air Lines, which also flies the aircraft, said it had “elected to take proactive measures to inspect our 737-900ER fleet.” None of the airlines expected any disruptions to their operations.

* Today from the NYT…

What Boeing has missed, as it tried to dump costs and speed production, was the chance to ensure that safety was a cultural core and a competitive advantage. Corporations can choose to push back against the Wall Street-driven notion that safety equals cost, and thus lower profits. In the late 1980s and ’90s, the aluminum giant Alcoa, under its chief executive Paul O’Neill, made safety the top priority demonstrating that a culture built around safety can actually be efficient, because accidents and defects decrease when employees know the company cares about their well-being. While assembling an airframe isn’t as dangerous as working with molten metal, when employees know they’ll be supported in building the safest possible aircraft as opposed to the cheapest, the end product will benefit — and buyers will have more confidence.

Choices made by Boeing’s leaders also had consequences. In 2011, the chief executive at the time, W. James McNerney Jr., made what became a fateful decision by greenlighting the 737 Max, rather than investing billions in developing a new short-haul aircraft. His decision wasn’t necessarily a bad one — there was looming competition from the Airbus A320neo — but it committed Boeing to a flight path the company proved unable to navigate.

Mr. McNerney’s decision meant rushing development of the 737 Max while at the same time managing the Federal Aviation Administration so that the certification of redesigned jet — whose engines had been physically moved forward — would not require retraining of pilots, thus saving customers time and money. Being good at managing the agency charged with ensuring your product’s safety can put the whole process at cross purposes. That combined with the decline in the company’s other competencies contributed to the two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 that prompted the 737 Max’s grounding for nearly two years. And even before the Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 incident, Boeing had been having significant problems assembling its 787 Dreamliner on its South Carolina production line.

And just when Boeing needed experienced employees the most, it suffered a brain drain. In late 2022, many Boeing engineers started heading for the door to lock in pension payouts (which could be hurt by rising interest rates) they had accumulated. When full airframe production returned after the pandemic, a lot of the talent didn’t.

* AP…

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby says he is “disappointed” in ongoing manufacturing problems at Boeing that have led to the grounding of dozens of United jetliners, and the airline will consider alternatives to buying a future, larger version of the Boeing 737 Max.

Kirby said Tuesday that Boeing needs “real action” to restore its previous reputation for quality.

His comments came one day after United disclosed that it expects to lose money in the first three months of this year because of the grounding of its Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

United has 79 of those planes, which federal regulators grounded more than two weeks ago after a panel blew out of an Alaska Airlines Max 9 in midflight, leaving a gaping hole in the plane. Investigators are probing whether bolts that help hold the panel in place were missing or broke off.

Kirby said on CNBC that he believes that the Max 9s could be cleared to fly again soon, “but I’m disappointed that the manufacturing challenges do keep happening at Boeing.”

* Business Insider…

“The Max 9 grounding is probably the straw that broke the camel’s back for us,” Scott Kirby said. “We’re gonna build an alternative plan that just doesn’t have the Max 10 in it.” [..]

Kirby told CNBC he believes the best case for 737 Max 10 deliveries is still five years behind schedule.

* The Hill…

Scott Kirby said Boeing needs “real action” to restore its reputation and that he has spoken with Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s CEO, to express his frustration.

“Well, look, you know, we’re Boeing’s biggest customer in the world. They’re our biggest partner in the world,” Kirby said in an interview with CBNC. “We need Boeing to succeed … but they’ve been having these consistent manufacturing challenges and they need to take action together.”

* CNN…

Boeing has had a series of quality issues that have dogged the aircraft maker for the last five years, ever since two fatal crashes of the 737 Max 8 in late 2018 and early 2019 led to a 20-month grounding of the jet.

* An Atlantic article from 2019…

The isolation [of the headquarters in Chicago] was deliberate. “When the headquarters is located in proximity to a principal business—as ours was in Seattle—the corporate center is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations,” Condit explained at the time. And that statement, more than anything, captures a cardinal truth about the aerospace giant. The present 737 Max disaster can be traced back two decades—to the moment Boeing’s leadership decided to divorce itself from the firm’s own culture.

For about 80 years, Boeing basically functioned as an association of engineers. Its executives held patents, designed wings, spoke the language of engineering and safety as a mother tongue. Finance wasn’t a primary language. Even Boeing’s bean counters didn’t act the part. As late as the mid-’90s, the company’s chief financial officer had minimal contact with Wall Street and answered colleagues’ requests for basic financial data with a curt “Tell them not to worry.”

By the time I visited the company—for Fortune, in 2000—that had begun to change. In Condit’s office, overlooking Boeing Field, were 54 white roses to celebrate the day’s closing stock price. The shift had started three years earlier, with Boeing’s “reverse takeover” of McDonnell Douglas—so-called because it was McDonnell executives who perversely ended up in charge of the combined entity, and it was McDonnell’s culture that became ascendant.