With its new CEO, is Boeing about to write the 'turnaround story of the century'?

With the selection of its new CEO, Boeing charted a course Wednesday that is giving some officials hope for the future of the aerospace company.

"Kelly Ortberg comes from a place with a deep technical background and a wonderful sense of how an aerospace company should be run," said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace industry analyst and managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory.

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“I think this is Boeing’s best day in literally decades. This person has deep aerospace experience and ran one of the most respected companies in the industry. The exact opposite of all that Boeing has been struggling under and suffering from for quite a few years now.”

Boeing announced Wednesday that it hired Ortberg to be its next president and CEO. He officially starts work Aug. 8. It will be a bit of a comeback for Ortberg, who retired in 2021, but has remained involved in the aerospace industry. He spent more than three decades with with Iowa-based Rockwell Collins, serving as the avionics company's CEO between 2013 and 2021. He was also previously chair of the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) board of governors.

"I'm extremely honored and humbled to join this iconic company," Ortberg said in a statement. "Boeing has a tremendous and rich history as a leader and pioneer in our industry, and I'm committed to working together with the more than 170,000 dedicated employees of the company to continue that tradition, with safety and quality at the forefront. There is much work to be done, and I'm looking forward to getting started."

As NPR reports, this will be a significant change from outgoing Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun. Ortberg's background is rooted in engineering, not finance. Before climbing the ladder at Rockwell Collins, he was an engineer at Texas Instruments.

Many hope that with Ortberg in Boeing's pilot seat, it will signal a comeback for the company as well.

"Leadership for quite some time now has been a master class in incompetence and poor execution, and frankly, it was starting to illicit understandable safety concerns," Aboulafia said. "This approach of appointing someone of this stature, and this experience, is tremendously welcome news."

“It’s gonna take a lot of time and work, and of course it’s not without risk, but this could be the turnaround story of the century ... to go from a culture that just didn’t look at the importance of the supplier base, of the workforce, or indeed the product being sold. It instead just focused on manipulating financial abstracts. That was completely dysfunctional."

Shortly after the announcement, The Seattle Times reported that Ortberg plans to return the CEO's home office to Seattle, 23 years after it was moved out of town. KUOW has not confirmed this reporting. This would be yet another signal that the company will be leaning back into engineering.

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The news was welcomed by U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who further argued that all of Boeing's operations need to be relocated back to the Seattle area.

"It's a good first step that the CEO will be based in Seattle, and now the rest of the headquarters needs to move back home to rejoin our world-class aviation workforce," Cantwell said in a statement. "When it comes to quality and safety, being close to the workforce on the ground matters."

"The company needs to move back to Seattle. The notion that somebody thinks they can run the company from anywhere other than Seattle is a big mistake."

Boeing moved its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001. Manufacturing operations remained in Renton and Everett. In 2022, Boeing announced plans to move its global headquarters to Arlington, Virginia, to be closer to Washington, D.C., and its government contracts.

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