Boeing’s CEO was supposed to take accountability. Instead, he said he’s proud of the company’s safety record

For all the mistakes and safety problems Boeing has managed under CEO Dave Calhoun’s watch — resulting in a dozen corporate whistleblowers, multiple groundings and a chunk of a plane’s fuselage literally blowing off in midair — virtually no one has held him to account. Not Boeing’s board of directors, which has responded by lavishing him with a salary and stock options worth more than $20m a year, plus a $45m golden parachute when he retires later this year. Not its customers, aka airlines — and that’s by design. People often call Boeing and Airbus a duopoly, but that suggests there’s some kind of legit competition happening. Once an airline commits to a tribe, it can’t just switch if it decides the other one is making better planes, because that’d involve a ton of money and time retraining staff who tend to specialize in one or the other. And naturally, we the flying public can cry all we want and it won’t matter a lick to Boeing, because we have even less choice than the airlines to pick the aircraft we fly. Until recently, the government had also been largely snoozing. Calhoun was supposed to be overseeing efforts to reform a safety culture that was so broken, Boeing has acknowledged its lapses led to the deaths of 346 people in two separate crashes in 2018 and 2019. It wasn’t until January 5 this year, when a Boeing jet’s door plug blew off shortly after takeoff, that regulators and lawmakers appeared to snap to attention. Tuesday marked the first time ever that Calhoun has had to testify before lawmakers. He faced an intense grilling, fielding one biting question after the next from both Republican and Democratic senators.<br/>