Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode

Tamara Littleton: Welcome back to What Just Happened. Kate, what are we talking about today?

Kate Hartley: So this crisis is so big that I almost don’t know where to start with it. So it’s one I’ve wanted to dig into for absolutely ages. But we normally wait for some sort of resolution before we tackle a crisis, and although we haven’t really seen that yet with this one, the signs of recovery are starting to show. So I thought it’d be really worth going into. But before I start, Tamara, how are you with flying?

TL: Well, I’m a terrible pre-flight person. We’re talking turning up at check-in before check-in is even open. But I do love it when I’m on the plane. So, why?

KH: Because today we’re tackling Boeing. I reserve the right to change my answer. You might want to. And we’re going to start in 2024. We’re going to go back further than that as well, but let’s start at 2024.

TL: Is this when the passenger window came off mid-flight?

KH: That’s the one, yes. Are you flying soon? On 5th January 2024, there was an unused emergency exit door on a Boeing 737 Max 9, operated by Alaska Airlines, and that emergency exit door blew out. So it was flight number 1282, it had taken off from Portland International Airport, and it was still climbing. It had reached over 16,000 feet, and that’s when the door blew, and just for context, these aircraft get to around 38,000 feet normally.

TL: I remember seeing video and photos online. It’s terrifying. There’s basically a gaping hole in the side of the plane, and luckily no one was hurt, which is an absolute miracle, it really is.

KH: And yeah, the plane landed safely, partly, I think, because it was still climbing, and so everybody still had their seatbelts on, which is another reason to keep your seatbelt on through the flight, isn’t it?

TL: And I almost don’t want to ask this, but what happens when you have a hole in the side of the aircraft?

KH: I mean, we’ve all seen these aeroplane disaster films, haven’t we? This is the trouble, but there are a few things that happen. If you’re higher and you’re not wearing a seatbelt, then that becomes very dangerous, and the real worry is you could be sucked out of the plane, and it gets very cold because the air at that height obviously is typically much colder. It’s around minus 57 Celsius, or minus 71 Fahrenheit for our US audiences, and you’ll need emergency oxygen.

TL: So the plane landed safely, although it must have been absolutely terrifying for the people on it. So what actually happened next?

KH: Well, unsurprisingly, Alaska Airlines grounded its fleet of 737 Max 9s, and then the Federal Aviation Administration, or the FAA, grounded all those planes as well, which meant 171 aircraft were grounded while they looked into what had happened. And that took about three weeks, and then the planes were allowed to fly again once the FAA was happy that they were safe.

TL: And do you know, do you get a warning when something like that is about to happen? And obviously on a car you get a warning light if something goes wrong. Is it the same?

KH: Usually, yes, there will be a light that tells the flight deck that one of the emergency doors isn’t closed properly. But because this one wasn’t being used, the warning light wouldn’t have come on.

TL: And technically the door had blown off. Does that count as not closed properly? Do you even get a warning flight light for that? Sorry, it’s just so incredible. I’m not joking about it, because it must have been terrifying and so incredibly lucky that no one was seriously hurt. I imagine, though, that these things do occasionally happen. I guess planes are no different to cars. Things go wrong, just hopefully not in the air. But why is this incident so significant?

KH: Well, I think it’s a really good question, because there are a few reasons, and this is where it gets interesting in terms of it unfolding as a crisis. So firstly, it wasn’t the first time it had happened to Boeing. So in 2018, an older model of the Boeing 737, which was operated by Southwest Airlines, had a similar problem, and one of the cabin windows broke. In this case, it was at 32,000 feet, and a woman did die after she was partially sucked out of the plane, and she died of her injuries later.

In this particular case, a fan blade that’s part of the engine had broken off and it hit the window, smashed the window, and I should say at this point the engine isn’t made by Boeing, so it wasn’t necessarily Boeing’s fault in the same way.

TL: What is Boeing’s safety record like apart from these two incidents?

KH: Well, this is the big issue actually, and this is what makes the blowout significant, because of the timing of when it happened. Ultimately, of course, in this case everybody was okay, so on its own it wasn’t a crisis, but it was part of something that was starting to look like a pattern of poor safety for Boeing.

TL: Because there were two serious air crashes, weren’t there, in 2018 and 2019? One in Ethiopia, one in Indonesia, that involved Boeing aircraft. And I remember Boeing systems being implicated in those crashes.

KH: Exactly. So there were two Boeing aircraft, also older variants of the 737 Max, and they were involved in fatal accidents. One of them, as you say, was off the coast of Indonesia on a flight operated by Lion Air in 2018, which killed 189 people.

And then in 2019 an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed just outside Addis Ababa, and that killed 157 people. It was just awful, and after those crashes, of course, the 737 Max aircraft were grounded, and there was a massive investigation into the causes of those crashes.

But the investigation after the first crash, the Lion Air one, showed that there were faults with the plane’s design, and in particular faults with the flight control software, and those were cited as contributing to both crashes. But the thing that’s really shocking to me is that the investigation found that the aircraft shouldn’t actually have taken off at all, because Boeing knew there was a fault and hadn’t properly tested a sensor that related to the stability system of the plane before the plane took off. And it also found that deficiencies in those systems had been highlighted during training but not actually resolved.

TL: That’s so shocking and shows that this wasn’t just a design flaw, but also a flaw of communication and safety culture, if a problem has already been reported and effectively ignored. And we see this so often that it’s not a single thing that causes a crisis, but lots of things happening together.

In this case, a flaw in the system, plus poor communication of a safety failure, and ultimately a reluctance to act on safety information.

KH: And the really terrible thing about that is, of course, that failure led to another fatal air crash the following year.

TL: So what did Boeing do?

KH: Obviously, it fixed the problem, and it lobbied to get the FAA to let the fleet fly again. But it did continue to produce the 737 Max planes even though they were grounded.

But eventually, in December 2019, it said it would stop production temporarily because obviously they were manufacturing these planes, but they couldn’t actually fly because they weren’t cleared to do so. And then in 2019 CEO Dennis Muilenburg was ousted, and Boeing said that was to restore confidence in the company, and he was replaced by the chairman, a guy called David Calhoun.

There have been other problems too over that period, and we’ll dig into some of these, but there were a couple of things that are worth looking at. One is that another older version of the same aircraft type was found to have cracks in it. And there was also a spacecraft that Boeing built to send NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, called the Starliner, and that malfunctioned.

TL: So let’s go back to the culture issue. There were a lot of whistleblowers within Boeing who had been raising concerns about safety problems, but nothing happened, and there were reports of them being harassed if they spoke out. And there were even suggestions that Boeing had deceived regulators.

I know you said the CEO went and David Calhoun was brought in, but he had been part of the company, so presumably he had overseen some of these issues as well.

KH: Well, that’s right, and that was pointed out by family members of the people who’d been killed in those crashes, that actually Calhoun had been part of the system that had failed them so badly. And those family members brought a case against Boeing to try and hold the company to account for all of this.

TL: This isn’t sounding good at all. What action was taken against Boeing?

KH: Well, if we move forward to 2021, Boeing was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, so that’s pretty serious, and it agreed to what’s known as a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice in the US.

Now that essentially means that criminal charges are suspended on condition that the company agreed to comply with conditions laid down by the department. So to break that down, Boeing had given what the DOJ said were misleading statements, half-truths and omissions, what you could call lies, to the Federal Aviation Authority about its flight control software failing.

So basically, there had been changes to the system that Boeing had deliberately covered up and didn’t tell the FAA about, and those changes may have played a role in those two crashes. So it’s really, you know, the most serious thing. Boeing agreed to pay two and a half billion in fines and compensation, and also agreed to a series of remedial measures over three years to improve its safety, including, and I think this is really interesting, to have all the engineers report to a chief engineer rather than through the business units.

TL: So that means safety would be considered an engineering issue that needs fixing, not a cost issue that could damage profits, and therefore might act as a disincentive to actually fixing the problem.

KH: And I think that is absolutely the nub of it. These issues were seen as negatively impacting profits, and that held its own problems.

TL: So how did they do against that judgement? Did they do everything asked of them, and that’s now job done?

KH: Not exactly, no. So unbelievably really, to me anyway, in July 2024 Boeing pleaded guilty to the criminal fraud conspiracy charge. So remember, this was a deferred criminal charge, not a dropped one.

So it had breached that 2021 agreement, and it paid another $243.6 million in fines.

TL: So what had changed, or rather what hadn’t changed?

KH: Well, this I think goes back to your point about culture, at least in part. So the Justice Department said it allowed potentially risky work at its factories, and didn’t keep accurate or complete records, which is extraordinary when you’re in something as important as aviation.

But I think the line that’s really interesting to me is in the court filing. It said that Boeing had, and this is a quote, failed to design, implement and enforce a compliance and ethics programme to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws through its operations.

And just to go into that a bit more, the finding also said Boeing had, and I quote, failed to ensure employees documented removal of parts during manufacturing on aeroplanes, and it did not ensure mechanics and inspectors who stamped the completed work had actually done so.

TL: So I mean that really is about not setting up a culture of safety. There was a Boeing engineer who told a Senate subcommittee in the US that he had been threatened and harassed after he raised concerns about safety, and also the CEO, David Calhoun, was booed and shouted at by the families of the crash victims.

And 2024 is the year the door blowout happened as well, which is where we started this conversation. So that can’t have helped the regulators trust Boeing.

KH: It really didn’t. And that blowout was two days before the initial agreement they made in 2021 expired. And unbelievably, a Boeing executive told a Washington senator that the company couldn’t find documents about the door plug that had caused that blowout, and probably those documents had not been created.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, who was chairing one of the hearings in Washington, looked at Boeing safety records, and he said that the company had, and again I quote, a broken safety culture. And the head of the FAA, a guy called Michael Whitaker at the time, said on Good Morning America in May 2024 there were three areas that Boeing had to improve: quality in factories, safety system improvements, and culture so employees can speak up.

And as an aviation manufacturer, if you don’t have quality and safety, I mean honestly, what have you got?

TL: I mean, it does sound like not much changed at all since that initial agreement in 2021. And Boeing is a B2B company of course and largely invisible to consumers, so I’m interested to know, has this had an impact on people flying?

KH: Well, it’s definitely had an impact on me flying, and I think, yeah, I think this is interesting because there was a new booking tool launched by Alternative Airlines at the time that let you filter out Boeing as an option for flight searches. So you could actually say, I don’t want to fly on a Boeing plane.

Now I’ve got no idea what impact that had on sales, if any, but I think it does show how much this crossed over into consumer consciousness.

TL: It was a really bad year for Boeing. There was another story that brought Boeing into the public consciousness as well. You mentioned the Starliner, the spacecraft that Boeing made to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station.

KH: Yeah, that didn’t go well either. So this was also in 2024, so it really was a bad year for Boeing.

So the Starliner had some technical problems when it was carrying two astronauts on board. You remember it had technical problems in its initial test flight as well, but this is separate from that. So it was carrying two astronauts on board, and then when they were at the International Space Station, it was deemed too risky to bring them back home, so it left them on the space station for eight months. They were supposed to be there for eight days.

TL: Eight months. I mean, I’m never going to complain about a plane being delayed again.

KH: I know, it’s mad, isn’t it. And there was one more incident in March 2024 when a LATAM plane dropped suddenly because a flight attendant hit a switch on the pilot seat, which propelled the pilot into the controls and forced the plane’s nose down.

TL: OK, before none of us ever want to fly again, let’s go back to the response to the criminal charge against Boeing. What did Boeing say?

KH: So initially, they said in a statement in May, before they pleaded guilty, and this is a quote from their statement, we believe that we have honoured the terms of that agreement and look forward to the opportunity to respond to the department on this issue. And that statement went on to say, as we do so, we will engage with the department with the utmost transparency, as we have throughout the entire term of the agreement, including in response to their questions following the Alaska Airlines 1282 incident. And then, of course, on 7th July, their charge of criminal fraud conspiracy was formally made against Boeing, and then it agreed to plead guilty.

TL: And in the middle of all this, the CEO, David Calhoun, announced he’d be resigning by the end of 2024.

KH: Yeah, and it happened a bit sooner than that. He was replaced by Kelly Ortberg in August 2024, and Ortberg is an engineer, and hopefully will change that culture.

TL: Let’s look forward at what all this means in practical terms. What do they have to do to improve?

KH: So as part of the deal, Boeing agreed to spend a minimum of $455 million to boost safety and compliance over a three-year period, and an independent monitor is going to make sure that they do that. So they have to file annual reports against their progress. But then it was announced in 2025 that Boeing had made a new deal with the US Justice Department to avoid prosecution completely.

So it still had to spend that money on safety. It still had to pay the money to the families of those who died in the air crashes in 2018 and 2019, but the FAA also capped its production rates until it could show improved safety.

TL: That has a huge impact. If you’re limited in how much you can produce, Boeing shares dropped by a fifth in 2024, the company hadn’t made a profit in years, and its CEO and some of the management team were out, and they were effectively under a remedial programme overseen by regulators. But where are they now?

KH: Well, they’re turning a corner, it seems. So in January 2026, Boeing announced its first profit in seven years. So that’s since the fleets were grounded after those crashes. So that’s only one quarter in profit. But the caps on production of the 737 Max have finally been eased a bit, although not completely, at the time of recording.

And also, Boeing has a good order book now, so it’s now bigger than Airbus orders for the first time since 2018, so it does look as though it’s on the path to recovery. And then the really significant step is that in November 2025 the US government requested the criminal case be dropped against Boeing, and a court agreed to that. So it still has to make the safety guarantees. It still has to make those payments, but that criminal case has been dropped, and it looks at the moment as though the families are going to appeal that decision because they want to see Boeing held to account.

TL: So I suppose the big question is for our listeners, what can we learn from it all?

KH: Well, I think there are a few things. So firstly, I think what’s interesting is Boeing was really too big to fail. So some people argued in the media that regulators were too lenient. But this is a massive exporter from the US. It has a lot of defence contracts, plus it’s got its space programme. I mean, it’s huge.

And there are really only two aviation manufacturers, people who make planes, Boeing and Airbus. So I think it kind of got away with stuff for years because of that as well. But also, I can see that it had to be helped to change and survive, because it was simply too big to fail.

TL: And then, of course, there’s the huge lesson about whistleblowers and culture, and you can avoid so many of these problems if you listen to your people and act on what you hear. This is such a recurrent theme on these podcasts. And if you’re making aircraft, you have to prioritise safety over profit. We’ll dig into all of this with our guest after this short break.

Break

TL: We’re delighted to be joined by Dirk Singer, who is an aviation expert and climate tech advisor, and he’s the co-author of two books on sustainability and aviation. He’s also a podcaster, and he’s Chief Sustainability Officer at Simply Flying, which is an advisory firm for the aviation industry. He also founded two communication agencies as well. Thank you for joining us, Dirk.

Dirk Singer: Thank you so much both for having me on.

TL: Now I’m going to jump in, and my first question, Dirk, is, was this a crisis for Boeing, or is it simply too big to fail?

DS: Yeah, I mean, I think the answer to that is both, and that’s really the crux of the problem. So first of all, I mean, it’s absolutely a crisis. Over 300 people dying, years without profit, share price dropping precipitously, a CEO being ousted, a guilty plea to criminal fraud conspiracy.

But at the same time, too big to fail is very, very real, as you’re aware. And the aviation industry, especially for long-haul travel, is essentially a duopoly. I mean, if you’re going to fly from London to New York, you’re either going to be on a Boeing aircraft, or you’re going to be in an Airbus aircraft.

Once you get to a regional level, obviously, there are other players in there, like Embraer and ATR and a few others, but there’s really only two manufacturers of large commercial aircraft that exist, and so airlines need Boeing planes. And not only that, if you place an order for a Boeing aircraft now, you won’t have that aircraft delivered for another eight or nine years because the backlog in that, because aviation is a growing industry, and the two major manufacturers can’t keep up with demand. And in fact, Boeing’s order book is now bigger than Airbus’s for the first time since 2018.

So yes, it is a case of too big to fail. And the US government obviously requested the criminal case be dropped. So if we compare that to the banks, I guess in 2008, something that we’re all very familiar with, too big to fail doesn’t mean too big to suffer, but the system will prop you up. So as I said, the market, in a sense, is already moving on. But of course, the families of the 300-plus, I mean, they’re still fighting, and the fallout is still with us, hence the conversation that we’re having today.

KH: I love that phrase, too big to fail doesn’t mean too big to suffer. I think that’s really critical, isn’t it? Thank you. Absolutely. Do you think Boeing has a safety problem? Obviously, it did have a safety problem with those two huge crashes. But do you think it does still have a safety problem, or is it a perception problem because of what happened before? And what could it do, or should it do, to change that?

DS: Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s one of these things that perception flows from reality. So it did have a genuine safety problem. And again, if we look at some of the events, Boeing did mislead the Federal Aviation Administration about software. The Department of Justice found misleading statements, half-truths and omissions. Two plane crashes, that’s not perception. That is reality.

There was an agreement that was breached with the door plug blowout, which happened two days before it expired. And then we have the NASA Starliner report as well, which showed that cultural problems were systematic across Boeing Defence and Space as well. However, I think it’s also worth saying that commercial aviation remains extraordinarily safe. I mean, even with Boeing, and I’m sure you’re aware, it is the safest form of travel.

I guess it gets a lot of attention because it is very high profile. It makes the news in the way that road accidents don’t. So I think the issue here, and something that they’ve tried to address for the past two or three years, was corporate culture, so cost over safety, suppressed whistleblowers, misled regulators. Obviously, the appointment of the new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, I think matters, because his background is engineering. He’s not a finance executive. He’s done things like he reacquired Spirit AeroSystems to bring fuselage production back in house and to make sure that Boeing had more control over the whole production process.

KH: And we’ve talked about Boeing turning a corner, and you’ve mentioned that it’s got a bigger order book now than Airbus, so it obviously is on the road to recovery. Does it have the confidence of the market, and what’s aided that recovery? You talked about the long time between ordering an aircraft and actually it being delivered. This isn’t like buying a loaf of bread from your local shop. But what’s aided that recovery, do you think?

DS: Well, I mean, I think the order books, the new CEO’s focus on manufacturing fundamentals, and some of the changes that he introduced, where safety is no longer, for lack of a better word, a profit centre, was important. As I mentioned, bringing Spirit AeroSystems back in brought fuselage production in house, and that’s helped.

And there has been a flood of new airline orders worldwide. As you’ve said, the market is partially driving that. Airlines, especially in the Middle East and in South East Asia, airlines like Turkish Airlines, are placing record orders. And as we said before, they only have one of two places to go to, and Boeing makes fundamentally good products.

I mean, there is a certain amount of fragility there. Independent safety monitors are still reporting. There’s been delays with the 777X, it’s been slipped to 2027, families are appealing this dropped criminal case. And then the Starliner report that I mentioned, where those astronauts were stranded for long periods of time, shows that certain problems are still company-wide.

The tailwinds overall are favourable. Aircraft capacity, so aeroplanes flew full, 84% globally in November 2025, and that’s a record. More people than ever are getting on aircraft. It’s an expanding industry. One of the things I obviously look at is sustainability, and one of the questions around that is that as more people fly, emissions go up, and airlines need aircraft, and the duopoly demand is pushing this recovery equally as much as any internal reform.

KH: Let’s pick up on that sustainability issue, because that I think is such an important thing to talk about, isn’t it? What role does sustainability play in Boeing’s future?

DS: Well, I mean, I think that sustainability is one of the fundamentals of trust. The industry is under the spotlight quite a lot for its sustainability record at the moment. Aviation accounts for about 3% of global emissions. And one of the criticisms that you hear from some of my peers within the industry is that, well, it’s only 3%, what about agriculture? What about chemicals? Or what about construction, and etc, etc.

But the issue is that aviation is a so-called hard-to-abate sector, which means it’s quite difficult to decarbonise, and it’s a growing sector. So as aviation grows, our emissions increase, while other sectors, their emissions decrease. So it’s a very important issue moving forward.

There was a study by, I think, Boston Consulting Group a number of years ago that showed that aviation’s emissions are 3% now, but it could be 20% in 2050 if there are no changes. Or if we look at the UK, where we’re based, aviation is obviously very fundamental to our economy, to how we work, to how we travel, to how we live. I mean, it’s not 3%, it’s about 7 or 8%, so it’s important.

And actually, to give Boeing a certain amount of credit, we actually featured them in our second book. They’ve done quite a lot in the sustainability field. They have a philosophy that’s called SAF. And so SAF is sustainable aviation fuel. It is basically fuels that are made out of feedstocks that are not fossil fuel-based.

Waste could be used. Cooking oil is the most common one now. It could be agricultural waste. It could be sewage. There’s a company that’s turning sewage into fuel. It could be landfill gas. It could even be carbon dioxide mixed with green hydrogen.

And Boeing is very, very active in pushing sustainability. They were part of a consortium working with Virgin Atlantic that flew a 100% SAF flight from London to New York in 2023. So to answer your question, Boeing recognises that it’s one of the foundations of trust, and it can produce world-leading innovation. So the question now for me isn’t whether Boeing can make safe planes, I think it can. It’s whether it can lead the biggest transformation that our industry needs, which is getting to net zero, and I think the early signs are certainly encouraging in that respect.

TL: Could I go back, if I may, to the point you made about culture? Boeing was accused of having a broken safety culture, and it’s doing things to fix that. But in your opinion, what should other aviation companies do to learn from that and get their culture right?

DS: Yeah, I mean, I think we have to separate safety from profit. That is the most important thing, and safety is the absolute cornerstone of the industry. And if people don’t feel safe, I mean, I mentioned the fact that even with some of the incidents that have happened, flying is still the safest form of travel. But if there are one, two or three high-profile incidents, the fact of the matter is people will not take that risk.

So you have to do that. You have to protect whistleblowers in practice. A structural change is that engineers need to report to a chief engineer and not through business units, which was one of the problems at Boeing previously. When safety sits inside a profit centre, there is ultimately pressure to trade it off.

Whistleblower protection has to be cultural, not just policy. Boeing did have policies, but whistleblowers were still harassed. So the test is, does a mechanic feel safe in stopping the line and bringing up a problem? If I just make a contrast to a safety culture, one organisation that gets it right is Qantas.

Qantas, the Australian airline, one of the world’s safest airlines, has had no fatal jet accidents at all. Safety is seen as a non-negotiable operational value and not as a compliance checkbox, for lack of a better word.

KH: There’s so much other industries could learn from that, isn’t there? I really like the idea of looking at what is fundamental to your success and then separating that from your profit centre. I think there’s a huge amount that other industries could learn from that. What are the things that you associate with profit, and what are the things that are absolutes that you just have to not even consider as part of a profit centre? I think that’s a really interesting lesson.

TL: And also the fact that Boeing, it’s a B2B company. It is, and yet it was thrust into the spotlight for flyers as well. And how do you think it coped with that? And how should manufacturers like this communicate publicly, or should they communicate publicly?

DS: Yeah, I mean, I guess Boeing ultimately is not a B2B, it was a B2B2C company, and that’s something that all of us are familiar with. And in my days when I was in the communications industry, one of my maxims was that everyone’s a consumer, even when you are talking to business audiences, and that’s something that you have to remember.

And I think that when a B2B crisis hits, you can’t hide behind corporate communications, and actions speak louder than words. So Boeing’s initial response of, we believe that we’ve honoured the terms, was tone deaf, with the door having been blown off six months earlier. And a lot of what they came out with in the earlier times was written for regulators and not by humans, for humans.

So the approach of the new CEO, I’ve mentioned him, is much better. It’s understated, it’s action-orientated, it looks at manufacturing fundamentals and not, for lack of a better word, spin. I mentioned as well, we’ve talked about the Starliner incident, the fact that the Starliner astronauts were stranded for eight months, in a way, was arguably more damaging to public perception than technical issues, because it’s a story that everyone could understand. And the longer that they were stranded up there, the worse that it became.

KH: And as ever in a crisis, that relatability issue is so important, isn’t it? When we can imagine ourselves in that position, that’s really when companies find themselves in the spotlight, and the media kind of takes all that attention. So interesting, so many lessons for other organisations here as well. Thank you. It’s been absolutely fascinating.

Outro

You’ve been listening to “What Just Happened?” with Kate Hartley and Tamara Littleton. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review.