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Stephanie Pope was still in her first week as Boeing’s first-ever chief operating officer when a frightening accident on a 737 Max thrust the company into a new crisis and put the manufacturing and supply chain she oversees under the microscope.
Pope was previously head of the aircraft maker’s services business — its only division to deliver a profit in recent years. She was a relatively new face to investors when the company announced her appointment last month, effective January 1. Not only is Pope a Boeing lifer, she is widely considered to be the heir apparent when chief executive Dave Calhoun retires. If she gets the top job, she would be Boeing’s first female CEO.
She has been charged with overseeing Boeing’s commercial plane, defence and services businesses, and ensuring smooth operations in the supply chain, quality control and manufacturing. Those are the very areas now being scrutinised following Calhoun’s admission that a “mistake” led to a piece of fuselage falling off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 flight last week, leaving a hole and terrifying passengers.
Last month Pope said Boeing would continue to improve performance “while ensuring the highest levels of safety, quality and transparency in all that we do”. That now looks harder as the US Federal Aviation Administration investigates whether the plane that Boeing manufactured met its own specifications.
It is up to Boeing’s chief safety officer to ensure the 737 Max 9 can return to the skies. But it will be Pope’s job to stop these “quality escapes” from happening again, whether at the plane maker or one of its suppliers, setting up a make-or-break moment for her career.
Pope grew up in a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, and her father worked for 30 years at aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas, where he started as a mechanic. Pope told the local magazine Plano Profile in 2017 she imagined becoming a teacher one day.
Instead, she studied accounting at Southwest Missouri State University, getting her MBA at Lindenwood University. She joined McDonnell Douglas directly out of college in 1994 as a financial analyst, working on contracts for the T-45 trainer and the AV-8B Harrier, according to a 2007 story in the St Louis Business Journal. In 1997, she joined Boeing when it merged with the Missouri company.
By 35, she was managing well over 100 employees as a finance director. Then in 2012 chief financial officer Greg Smith invited her to Boeing’s headquarters to lead investor relations. She had never played that role or lived in Chicago.
“Women tend to be, myself included, more hesitant around challenges or new opportunities, and it really comes down to fear of failure,” she said in 2017. “I remind myself that usually when I’m the most uncomfortable or the most fearful, those are the pivotal moments in life where I grew personally and professionally.”
She rose through the ranks, becoming CFO of the services division, then taking the same role at the commercial planes business. In the same 2017 interview, she noted that “culture eats strategy. You can have the perfect strategy, but if you have the wrong culture you’re never going to succeed.”
She returned to services in April 2022 as chief executive for the unit. Services, the Boeing division that handles tasks for airlines ranging from maintenance to pilot training systems to supply chain management, was a bright spot for the company. While commercial planes and defence both racked up losses in 2022 and the first three quarters of 2023, services earned $2.7bn for 2022 and $2.5bn for the first nine months of 2023.
When she took that job, Boeing had been reeling after a pair of fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 resulted in the worldwide grounding of the 737 Max 8. The Covid-19 pandemic battered it further as demand cratered for air travel, and then jets. As demand returned, its supply chain sagged.
“Her record at services speaks for itself,” said Rob Stallard, analyst at Vertical Research Partners. “After a long line of pretty arrogant (male) CEOs at Boeing, I’m hoping that she will bring some normality.”
Pope still will have to contend with the politics of Boeing, as “she’ll no doubt be facing the issue that she is not an engineer at a company where the engineers historically ruled the roost”, he added.
There is irony to that reality, as the men who ran Boeing during its darkest moments — Dennis Muilenburg, chief executive at the start of the Max crisis, and Phil Condit, who led it during a procurement scandal with the Department of Defense — were both engineers. Pope’s financial background may be seen as a liability by critics who think the company’s problems — first the fatal Max crashes and now this blown-out fuselage — stem from privileging shareholder returns above investments in engineering and manufacturing.
When Pope’s elevation to chief operating officer was announced, it seemed like the biggest challenge she would face would be to turn around the money-losing fixed-price programmes in the defence division while also increasing the rate at which Boeing builds Maxes, from the current 38 a month to 50 by the middle of the decade. Increasing the rate at which the manufacturer builds planes is critical to meeting the company’s goal of earning $10bn a year in free cash by the end of 2026.
It still looks like the Max will be her main challenge. Just not in the same way.
