What Do Airlines Hope To Accomplish in Meeting With Boeing?

26.03.2024 - 17:50 / travelpulse.com / Rich Thomaselli / Airlines

Airline executives are looking to meet with Boeing management, possibly as early as this week, to discuss safety concerns and production delays.

So what do they think they can accomplish that the National Transportation Safety Board and other government agencies have been unable to do?

They can play a card that those entities cannot use.

Let’s just say that money talks. And the airlines have a lot of it.

In the immortal words of Vito Corleone, the airlines can make Boeing an offer it can’t refuse. They can dangle money and future business. That’s an enticement that nobody else can offer. Call it a veiled threat, or call it what you will, but the airline can tell Boeing to clean up its act or forfeit future business.

After all, there are really only two horses in this race. There’s Boeing and there’s Airbus. When it comes to airplane manufacturing, those two have the market cornered. And Boeing can’t afford to lose any more business to its competitor.

So the airlines can come to any such meeting with the upper hand and in a position of having a decided advantage.

They can play the role of the bully. They can dictate the terms and the tenor of the meeting. And Airbus might end up as the winner of this whole thing, the last man standing, if you will. Don’t think there wasn’t a collective smile on the faces of Airbus executives when they heard this news. A meeting between Boeing and airline executives can only benefit Airbus.

But Boeing could end up as a stronger company. Of course, having a door panel blow off one of your planes at 16,000 feet and then admitting, however partial it might be, some culpability in this whole thing is about as rock bottom as you can get. There’s no place to go but up.

But as has been written here before, Boeing is a great American company. It helped put a man in space, for goodness sake. Even more than 50 years later, that still buys a lot of equity.

But if a meeting is to take place, Boeing will come in as the underdog in this one. As if it hasn’t done so already since the January 5 incident with the door panel cast a brighter light on how the company runs its business, it might have to put its tail between its legs.

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