Boeing’s chief refuses to step down amid 737 MAX crisis

New York —  Boeing chairman and CEO Dennis Muilenburg said Monday that he would not resign and was working to regain customers’ confidence amid the crisis over the grounding of the 737 MAX following crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

“The first focus here is safely getting the Max up and flying,” Muilenburg said during Boeing’s annual shareholder meeting in Chicago. “And then we’ll address the follow-on issues.”

The 737 MAX was grounded following a March 10 crash that killed 157 people in Ethiopia.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required that Boeing do a software update before certifying the 737 MAX as safe to fly.

In his first public appearance since the accident, Muilenburg refused to blame a software glitch for the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610 crashes.

The crash of the Lion Air 737 MAX killed 189 passengers and crew members on Oct. 29.

Muilenberg told shareholders that a “chain of events” led to the accidents, not just the aircraft’s software.

“We know we can break this link in the chain. It’s our responsibility to eliminate this risk,” Muilenburg told shareholders.

The initial results of the investigation into the crash of the 737 MAX 8 in Ethiopia found that the crew followed all the established procedures but was unable to disable the automated stall-prevention system, which caused the plane to lose altitude.

The crew apparently turned on the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which is designed to prevent the plane from stalling, once again and tried to cut off the power to the trim motor.

The MCAS, however, kicked in and continued driving down the aircraft’s nose.

The same thing happened to the Lion Air crew.

“We don’t make safety features optional,” Muilenburg said in his prepared remarks. “Safety has been and always will be our top priority, and every one of our airplanes includes all of the safety features necessary for safe flight,” Muilenberg said during the shareholders meeting.

The Boeing CEO said the MCAS met all the standards set by the FAA and that the aviation giant had always made safety its top priority.

“I am strongly vested in that my clear intent is to continue to lead on safety and quality and integrity,” Muilenberg said. “It’s important to stress that. We deeply regret what happened with these accidents. It gets to the core of our company.”

The CEO said Boeing had a continuous and ongoing focus on safety.

“The reason this industry is safe is that we never stop on making safety improvements. We never claim we have reached the end point. We are continuously, across all of our airplane programs, improving safety every day. We always look for opportunities to improve,” Muilenberg said.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing failed to notify Southwest Airlines, the biggest operator of 737 models in the United States, and other carriers that a safety feature found on earlier models of the plane and warns pilots about malfunctioning sensors had been deactivated.