Dave Calhoun
Dave Calhoun is an American business executive who served as president and chief executive officer of Boeing from January 2020 to August 2024. He took charge in the aftermath of the two fatal crashes of the 737 MAX and left following a further safety failure, the detachment of a door plug from an aircraft in flight in January 2024.
Before Boeing he spent twenty-six years at General Electric, rising to vice chairman, and subsequently led the market research company Nielsen and headed portfolio operations at the private equity firm Blackstone.
Early life and education
Calhoun was born in 1957 and grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He studied accounting at Virginia Tech, graduating in 1979.
Career
General Electric
Calhoun joined General Electric in 1979 and spent twenty-six years there, the entire period of Jack Welch's leadership and the beginning of Jeffrey Immelt's. He ran a succession of the company's businesses, including GE Lighting, GE Employers Reinsurance, GE Transportation and, from 2000, GE Aircraft Engines, before becoming a vice chairman.
The aircraft engines business, one of the two dominant suppliers of large commercial engines alongside Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney, gave him direct knowledge of the aerospace industry and of Boeing as a customer, and he was regarded within General Electric as a candidate to succeed Immelt.
Nielsen and Blackstone
He left in 2006 to become chief executive of VNU, the Dutch information company that owned the Nielsen ratings business, which had been taken private by a consortium of private equity firms. He led its restructuring and its return to public markets as Nielsen Holdings in 2011, remaining chief executive until 2014.
He then joined Blackstone as a senior managing director and head of portfolio operations, responsible for improving the performance of the firm's portfolio companies, a role he held until 2020 and returned to in an advisory capacity subsequently.
Boeing
Board and appointment
Calhoun joined Boeing's board in 2009. He became lead independent director and, in October 2019, non-executive chairman, when Dennis Muilenburg was removed from the chairmanship following the 737 MAX crashes. When Muilenburg was dismissed as chief executive in December 2019, Calhoun was appointed to succeed him, taking office on 13 January 2020.
The position he inherited was among the worst faced by any chief executive of a major industrial company. Lion Air Flight 610 had crashed in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019, killing 346 people in total. Both were attributed to the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, flight control software that could push the aircraft's nose down in response to a single faulty sensor and whose existence had not been disclosed to pilots. The entire 737 MAX fleet had been grounded worldwide since March 2019, production had been halted, and congressional investigations had produced internal messages in which Boeing employees discussed the aircraft's certification in terms that were extremely damaging.
The 737 MAX return and the pandemic
The aircraft was recertified by the Federal Aviation Administration in November 2020 and returned to service, with software changes, additional sensor redundancy and revised pilot training. The process had taken twenty months.
Within weeks of Calhoun's appointment the coronavirus pandemic removed most of the world's air travel, and with it most demand for new aircraft. Boeing borrowed very heavily, cut roughly thirty thousand jobs and suspended its dividend. The company recorded losses in every year of his tenure.
Separate difficulties affected the 787 Dreamliner, where manufacturing defects in fuselage joins halted deliveries for the better part of two years, and the 777X, whose entry into service was delayed repeatedly. The KC-46 military tanker and the Starliner spacecraft both incurred very large charges under fixed-price contracts.
Alaska Airlines Flight 1282
On 5 January 2024 a door plug detached from a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines shortly after take-off from Portland, Oregon, leaving a hole in the side of the fuselage. The aircraft landed safely and no one was killed, which was substantially a matter of chance, since the adjacent seats were unoccupied and the aircraft had not reached cruising altitude.
Investigation established that the door plug had been removed during production at Boeing's Renton factory to allow repair work and had been reinstalled without the four bolts required to secure it. No documentation of the removal existed, which the National Transportation Safety Board described as a failure of the company's own record-keeping rather than only of the individual work.
The finding was more damaging than the immediate event. It indicated that the quality system, which had been the subject of five years of remediation following the crashes, had not been repaired. The Federal Aviation Administration capped 737 production, placed inspectors in the factories and required a comprehensive quality plan.
Calhoun's response included a public statement accepting that the company had caused the problem, and an appearance before a Senate committee at which he apologised directly to families of those killed in the earlier crashes.
In July 2024 Boeing agreed to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States, relating to the representations made to the Federal Aviation Administration during the original certification of the 737 MAX, having been found to have breached the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement reached in 2021.
Departure
On 25 March 2024 Boeing announced that Calhoun would step down at the end of the year, that the chairman would not stand for re-election and that the head of the commercial aircraft division would leave immediately. Kelly Ortberg, formerly of Rockwell Collins, was appointed and took office on 8 August 2024, earlier than the announced timetable.
Calhoun's compensation, which rose substantially in 2023 to approximately US$33 million, drew criticism given the company's losses and safety record.
Assessment
Calhoun's tenure is difficult to assess fairly because of what he inherited and what happened during it.
The case for him is that he took over a company facing an existential crisis, kept it solvent through the collapse of air travel, returned the 737 MAX to service, and did so while the company lost money every year. He was also, by most accounts, more candid publicly than his predecessor, accepting responsibility explicitly rather than attributing failures to others.
The case against is the one the door plug made. The central charge against Boeing, articulated by congressional investigators, by its own engineers and by the safety board, is that a company once defined by engineering came to be run for financial results, that the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas imported a cost-focused culture, that the move of the headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001 separated management from manufacturing, and that outsourcing and schedule pressure degraded quality. Calhoun was a director from 2009, throughout the period in which the 737 MAX was designed, certified and delivered, and he was chief executive for four years before an aircraft lost part of its fuselage because four bolts were not installed. Whether he was the right person to correct a culture he had helped oversee was asked repeatedly at the time.
The broader point his tenure illustrates is that safety culture cannot be restored by process alone. Boeing added inspections, documentation and oversight after 2019, and the failure in January 2024 occurred nonetheless, in a factory, on a shift, during a repair that nobody recorded. That is the problem his successor inherited.