Boeing names Ortberg as new president and CEO

Updated Aug. 1

Boeing’s board of directors announced Wednesday that Robert K. “Kelly” Ortberg will be its next president and CEO effective Aug. 8, succeeding Dave Calhoun, who previously announced his intention to step down after a turbulent, nearly four-year tenure as the Arlington County Fortune 500 aerospace and defense giant’s chief executive.

According to Boeing’s announcement, Ortberg started as an engineer at Texas Instruments in 1983, and then joined Rockwell Collins in 1987 as a program manager, becoming its president and CEO in 2013. In 2018, Rockwell Collins integrated with United Technologies and RTX — formerly Raytheon Technologies. Ortberg retired in 2021 but still sat on RTX’s board of directors before resigning on Tuesday, according to a document RTX filed Wednesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to a Seattle Times story, Ortberg will be based in Seattle, Boeing’s original headquarters and near its large Puget Sound workforce, a person with knowledge of the situation said. Boeing’s headquarters moved in 2001 to Chicago and then to Arlington County in 2022. Although Boeing has not announced any plans to move its headquarters to Seattle, Commercial Airplanes CEO Stephanie Pope, head engineer and Chief Technical Officer Todd Citron and Ortberg will all be in Seattle, the article notes.

“The board conducted a thorough and extensive search process over the last several months to select the next CEO of Boeing, and Kelly has the right skills and experience to lead Boeing in its next chapter,” Boeing’s board chair, Steven Mollenkopf, said in a statement Wednesday. “Kelly is an experienced leader who is deeply respected in the aerospace industry, with a well-earned reputation for building strong teams and running complex engineering and manufacturing companies. We look forward to working with him as he leads Boeing through this consequential period in its long history.”

In late March, Boeing President and CEO Calhoun said he would step down by the end of the year. The announcement came amid ongoing bad press over production problems and fallout from a high-profile January incident in which a 4-foot wall panel blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet cabin in mid-air. The board also elected a new independent board chair, Mollenkopf, to succeed its previous chair, Larry Kellner, and lead the search for Calhoun’s replacement. 

In addition to National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration investigations, the incident also was investigated as a criminal matter by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In July, Boeing finalized a guilty plea to a federal criminal fraud conspiracy charge under which it will pay at least $243.6 million in fines related to Boeing’s violation of a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Justice Department that stemmed from Boeing’s role in two fatal 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019.

Boeing, which employs 170,000 workers worldwide, posted 2023 revenue of $77.79 billion, up nearly 17% from its 2022 revenue of $66.6 billion. For the first half of 2024, Boeing has posted $33.43 billion in revenue, down 11% from the first half of 2023, when it reported $37.67 billion.

In April and May, Boeing received no orders for its 737 Max planes, and only four new orders for any planes in the month of May, the company reported in June. In June, Boeing sold 14 new jets and three 737 Max jets, including one to Alaska Airlines to replace the one that experienced the blowout.

In July, the company announced it was going to purchase Spirit Aerosystems in a $4.7 billion, all stock transaction; the fuselage maker, responsible for manufacturing the part that blew out in the Alaska Airlines flight, was spun off from Boeing in 2005. In addition to the $4.7 billion payment, Boeing agreed to take on Spirit’s net debt, making the deal’s total value $8.3 billion. The acquisition is set to be finalized in mid-2025.