Boeing’s Seemingly Endless Reputational Quagmire
By Tony Jaques for Crisis Response Journal
When the label ‘troubled’ is inserted every time your company name appears, you know you are on a hiding to nothing. That is the reality for a once much-admired and envied giant of the aviation and aerospace industry. And it’s a stark example of how a succession of persistent and repeated crises creates a multiplier effect of exponential, corrosive reputational damage, each event building on the ones before. Most importantly, it demonstrates that traditional crisis response is sometimes just not enough. For the Boeing Company, the seemingly endless nightmare began in late 2018.
October 29, 2018: Boeing 737 Max aircraft belonging to Indonesian Lion Air crashes into the Java Sea soon after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 on board.
March 10, 2019: Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashes soon after takeoff from Addis Ababa bound for Nairobi, Kenya, killing all 157 passengers and crew. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg partially blamed aircrew for both disasters. He asserted that the pilots did not “completely follow” emergency procedures and that there was no “technical slip or gap” in the design of the aircraft. The American Airlines’ pilots union later said it was “inexcusable” for the CEO and others at Boeing to point the finger at foreign pilots. “Shame on you,” their spokesperson said. “That’s a poisoned, diseased philosophy.”
March 11, 2019: China grounds all of its 737 Max aircraft, followed by similar bans in more than 40 other countries around the world.
March 14, 2019: The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally grounds all 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft, one of the last aviation authorities to do so.
CEO Muilenburg at this point then said that the company supported this step: “Out of an abundance of caution.” However, respected writer John Beveridge argued the decision was several days too late. “As for acting out of ‘abundant caution’ in grounding the planes,” he said, “the time for that was after the first crash, not the second. And certainly not after most other regulators had already acted.”
December 20, 2019: Boeing’s unmanned Starliner spacecraft fails to reach the International Space Station, setting back hopes of carrying astronauts for NASA.
December 23, 2019: Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing, was fired and left with stock options and other assets valued at US$80 million.
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