Kelly Ortberg said Boeing must get its financial house in order and wait for the right technology before committing to a new aircraft design
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Boeing $BA CEO Kelly Ortberg said Monday that the planemaker must shore up its balance sheet over the next two years before it can seriously pursue a new commercial aircraft, making clear that steadying current operations takes precedence over any 737 MAX follow-on.
Ortberg laid out three conditions Boeing must meet before committing to a new aircraft program, he told CNBC at the Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom. "First of all, we have to be ready, and part of that is getting our financial house in order, and we're working on that," Ortberg said. "It's going to take a couple more years to get where we want to be." The other two conditions are having the right technology in place and seeing sufficient market demand.
Boeing has already begun work on a new aircraft design, but does not yet have a firm configuration, Ortberg told The Wall Street Journal in an interview ahead of the air show. "We're evaluating trade studies," he said. "You create a baseline and you evaluate things against the baseline, and then you change." The company is spending time and money preparing to introduce a new design at the right time, he added.
Airline customers are pressing Boeing to concentrate on lifting the dependability and output of planes already in service rather than chasing a clean-sheet design, Ortberg told CNBC, an indication that a new narrowbody would not arrive until at least the back half of the decade. "Orders are not our challenge," he told the Journal. "Our challenge is getting these orders delivered."
The commercial aircraft market pits Boeing directly against Airbus, whose CEO Guillaume Faury told CNBC on Monday that the European planemaker has set its sights on an all-new single-aisle around 2030, expecting to put it into revenue service sometime in the latter years of that decade. "We're the leader in the single-aisle segment, and we want to retain that position," Faury said.
Ortberg left retirement to take the helm at Boeing following a string of safety and manufacturing lapses, among them a fuselage plug that blew out on a 737 MAX 9 in January 2024 and led federal regulators to impose a production ceiling. Boeing has since been ramping up 737 MAX output, reaching 47 jets per month and opening a fourth final assembly line in Everett, Washington in early July.
On Air Force One, Ortberg said the company plans to boost headcount and operate around-the-clock shifts at the facility building the replacement presidential jets, with the goal of meeting a 2028 handover date.
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