Boeing’s Calhoun says his board is ready to make succession decisions

By Joanna Plucinska

BERLIN (Reuters) – Boeing’s board is ready to make decisions as the planemaker’s chief executive, David Calhoun, is set to resign at the end of the year, he told Reuters on Wednesday. adding that the decision on his successor was up to the board of directors.

“The board is ready to make its decisions, it has time to be able to make them,” Calhoun said on the sidelines of an aviation conference in Berlin, adding that he was determined to help the company to straighten up.

Calhoun is expected to resign by the end of the year as part of a broad management shakeup sparked by the planemaker’s sprawling safety crisis, exacerbated by the in-flight panel explosion of a new 737 MAX plane in January.

Speculation is growing about his successor. Calhoun is backing Stephanie Pope, head of Boeing’s commercial division, as investors, analysts and others have called for a new top executive with both CEO and engineering experience.

Calhoun has been a member of Boeing’s board of directors since 2009 and was named CEO in 2020 to help the planemaker recover following two fatal crashes involving the MAX, its best-selling plane.

However, the planemaker has lost market share to rival Airbus, with its stock losing nearly 32% of its value this year as MAX production fell this spring. Following the Jan. 5 incident aboard a plane operated by Alaska Airlines, U.S. regulators reduced the company’s production cap.

Boeing is also facing new scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice, which is weighing whether to pursue criminal charges against the company for violating a non-prosecution agreement stemming from the crashes of 2018 and 2019 which killed nearly 350 people.

(Reporting by Joanna Plucinska, editing by Thomas Seythal and Chizu Nomiyama)