The following letter was posted last week to the offices of Senator Maria Cantwell and representatives Smith and Larson. Cantwell chairs the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Smith is ranking member of House Armed Services Committee. Larson is ranking member on House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and serves on its Aviation Sub-committee. These are powerful voices on trade, defense, transportation, aviation and the FAA.
Fletch Waller
Senator Maria Cantwell
Representative Adam Smith
Representative Rick Larson 21
May’24
Dear Senator and Representatives:
Boeing Corp is a national asset that is being diminished
in value by feckless leadership that persists even after its problems and flaws
have become so glaringly evident. I
write as a concerned citizen of Puget Sound; when I discuss Boeing with other non-employees,
like myself, residents here in the greater Seattle area, I often get a rueful
shrug, a "yeah, they have sure screwed up”, but no sense of being a constituent
with a real stake in the company’s performance. Boeing is still, despite its
administrative and manufacturing moves away from Puget Sound, our region’s
largest employer. Its future is in large part ours.
The latest disheartening evidence that the leaders of
Boeing just don’t get it is their $30 million goodbye gift to Calhoun, who was
supposedly overseer of the company’s attempts to right its ship after causing
hundreds of passenger deaths, losing market leadership to Airbus, losing
millions of dollars, and causing its customers untold millions more as portions
of their fleets were grounded. To add injury to insult, the Directors voted
Calhoun onto the Board! What are they thinking!? It confirms my hunch that the
directors don’t know what they don’t know. Moreover, it appears that they do
not care to know.
The Directors are from away, as my Newfoundland grandfather
would say. There is not one Puget Sound-based Director on the Boeing Board. Think
of that: the largest employer in the region without one Director on
its board who lives and works in the region.
It’s not just Puget Sound that has a large stake in
Boeing’s performance and leadership, it’s the US’s also. As our nation’s
largest exporter, all citizens have a stake. At a small dinner with Alan
Mullally years ago, his first sentence in an after-dinner presentation to us was
a stunner: “Britain, Germany, France and Spain are waging war on Puget Sound.”
That was before Boeing leadership decamped to Chicago, before choosing as
President a Jack Welch acolyte rather than a gifted, engineer problem-solver
steeped in the aircraft business (and allowing Ford to benefit from Mullally’s skills and leadership), before shifting HQ again into the Washington DC area.
I don’t know aircraft or defense industries, but I do
know first-hand of leadership and directorship. You three and all your
constituents have a stake in how Boeing pulls out of its nose-dive. What are
your options to intercede? To bring national interests to bear? To help restore
the value of this national asset? Arise.
Sincerely yours, a frustrated and concerned citizen,
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