Boeing’s financial targets must ‘take a back seat’ in focus on safety, says big customer

Boeing cannot “afford another slip-up” with its 737 Max family of aircraft and must set aside financial targets to focus solely on quality and safety, the head of one of the world’s largest aircraft owners has warned. “Given what has happened with the two fatal crashes and this incident, the financial targets have to take a back seat for Boeing and its supply chain,” said Aengus Kelly, CE of the world’s biggest aircraft leasing company AerCap. Talking to the Financial Times in an interview on Wednesday, Kelly said he backed Boeing and its management but added: “Boeing must now focus 100% on quality and safety metrics. Financial metrics are completely secondary to the future of the company at this point.” His comments come as Boeing seeks to contain the fallout from the damaging fuselage breach on a 737 Max 9 aircraft operated by Alaska Airlines 12 days ago.  The US FAA has grounded 171 of the Max 9 aircraft while investigations continue into what went wrong, but the incident has already raised questions over Boeing’s quality controls. It has also refocused scrutiny of the 737 Max, Boeing’s most popular plane, whose smaller model, the Max 8, was involved in two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. Kelly stressed that he thought Boeing was a “tremendous” company with “tremendous” people and that it was premature to speculate on what went wrong. He also threw his weight behind the Max aircraft, adding that AerCap was continuing to buy it.  <br/>