Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun to step down in shake-up amid safety crisis

(Reuters) -- Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun will step down by year-end in a broad management shake-up brought on by the plane-maker's sprawling safety crisis exacerbated by a January mid-air panel blowout on a 737 MAX plane.

Stan Deal, Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO, will retire, and Stephanie Pope will take over that business, the company said Monday. Steve Mollenkopf, former CEO of tech company Qualcomm, has been appointed new chair of the board and is leading the search for the next CEO.

The leadership changes cap weeks of turmoil at Boeing, after the mid-air incident involving an Alaska Airlines-operated MAX 9 jet carrying 171 passengers turned into a full-blown safety and reputational crisis for the iconic plane-maker.

Boeing shares have lost roughly one-quarter of their value since the incident. They were up 2.3% in early trading Monday.

The January incident was only the most recent in a series of safety crises that have shaken the industry's confidence in the plane-maker and hampered its ability to increase production. Calhoun himself was brought in as CEO following a pair of crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed nearly 350 people.

Some investors expressed concern that this shake-up would not be enough to address these issues.

"We've long thought that the issues at Boeing have been seated in cultural challenges," said Cameron Dawson, chief investment officer at NewEdge Wealth.

The company is facing heavy regulatory scrutiny and U.S. authorities curbed production while it attempts to fix its safety and quality problems. The company is in talks to buy its former subsidiary Spirit AeroSystems to try to get more control over its supply chain.

"Given the broad sweep here, big and overdue changes are likely," said Boeing