Boeing Executive Overseeing 737 MAX Plant Leaving Company

The Boeing executive in charge of the factory that built the jet involved in last month’s door-plug blowout is leaving the company amid a broader leadership shake-up.

Boeing said Wednesday that Ed Clark, a vice president for the 737 program and general manager of the company’s factory in Renton, Wash., would be succeeded by Katie Ringgold, who oversees deliveries of 737s to customers.

Clark, who spent nearly 18 years at Boeing, took over the Renton plant in 2021 as the company worked to recover from a pair of fatal MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019.

In other leadership changes, the company also said it was creating a new position overseeing quality control at Boeing’s commercial airplanes unit. Elizabeth Lund, a Boeing senior vice president, will serve in that role.

The shake-up was announced in an email from Stan Deal, the head of Boeing’s commercial airplanes unit, to employees earlier Wednesday.

The changes come as Boeing works to increase production of its bestselling 737, while facing additional scrutiny from the Federal Aviation Administration following the midflight incident on a plane flown by Alaska Airlines. Investigators believe critical bolts needed to keep the piece in place were missing when the plane left the factory.

The incident resulted in the FAA ordering airlines to ground some MAX 9 planes—the model involved in the blowout—and to conduct inspections.

Air-safety regulators have since cleared the grounded jets to resume flying but also last month placed limits on Boeing’s production of MAX passenger jets.

Earlier this month, Boeing said that it was reworking about 50 undelivered MAX jets after an employee at one of its suppliers, Spirit AeroSystems, found misdrilled holes on some fuselages.

FAA Chief Mike Whitaker last week visited Boeing’s 737 production line and met with company personnel as well as FAA employees to understand the plant’s safety culture. The agency is completing an audit of the company’s manufacturing quality systems. Last year, the FAA commissioned an independent assessment of Boeing’s safety culture. The agency’s own inspectors, instead of Boeing’s employees, handle the final safety check on each 737 MAX.

“We are aggressively expanding oversight of new aircraft with increased floor presence at all Boeing facilities to ensure Boeing is delivering safe airplanes,” he said in a statement last week.

Write to Sharon Terlep at [email protected]