Boeing says Kelly Ortberg will step in as CEO next week

Boeing will have a new CEO starting Aug. 8.

The aerospace giant announced Wednesday that Robert K. "Kelly" Ortberg will step into the role that Dave Calhoun said he planned to vacate earlier this year.

"Kelly is an experienced leader who is deeply respected in the aerospace industry, with a well-earned reputation for building strong teams and running complex engineering and manufacturing companies. We look forward to working with him as he leads Boeing through this consequential period in its long history," board chair Steven Mollenkopf said in a statement.

The board's emphasis on "building strong teams and running complex engineering and manufacturing companies" is likely no coincidence.

Boeing has been under intense scrutiny and suffering low employee morale for years following a series of serious safety incidents that left the quality of its planes in doubt. Starting with two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, and highlighted most recently by an Alaska Airlines jet that lost a piece of its fuselage in an explosive decompression mid-flight earlier this year, the company is struggling to regain its image as the premier American aerospace manufacturer.

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Regulators capped the production rate of the 737 Max as part of their response to quality issues on the line, and the company announced a quality control and improvement plan in May that it's working to enact.

The planemaker insists that it's on the path to a turnaround. In a media open house earlier this summer, executives told journalists that the safety culture at the company is changing for the better. But Boeing was quickly sanctioned by the National Transportation Safety Board after the presentation for revealing non-public details about the investigation into the Alaska Airlines incident.

Ortberg has a big job ahead of him continuing that turnaround when he steps into Boeing's C-suite next week.

"I'm extremely honored and humbled to join this iconic company," Ortberg said in a statement. "Boeing has a tremendous and rich history as a leader and pioneer in our industry, and I'm committed to working together with the more than 170,000 dedicated employees of the company to continue that tradition, with safety and quality at the forefront. There is much work to be done, and I'm looking forward to getting started."

Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Boeing says Kelly Ortberg will step in as CEO next week