How Boeing Is Ramping Up 737 Production
Boeing is ramping up 737 Max production under CEO Kelly Ortberg, moving from 42 to 47 planes per month with a long-term goal of 63. After years of crises including two fatal crashes and a door plug blowout, Boeing has shifted its culture to prioritize quality over speed. The FAA is capping production rates to ensure key quality metrics are being met before further increases.
Summary
Boeing is in the midst of rebuilding its 737 Max production program under CEO Kelly Ortberg, with a deliberate focus on quality and stability over raw speed. The company has raised its monthly production rate from 42 to 47 units, with targets of 52 and eventually 63 planes per month — but only when the production system proves stable enough to support those rates.
The road to this point has been turbulent. Beginning in late 2017 and early 2018, two 737 Max crashes killed 346 people, grounding the aircraft globally. Investigations revealed that faulty flight control software (MCAS) was responsible. Congressional hearings laid bare deep cultural and leadership failures at Boeing, ultimately resulting in the firing of CEO Dennis Muilenburg. His successor, Dave Calhoun, oversaw a recovery that steadily increased Max production from 2020 to 2023 — until a door plug on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max blew out mid-flight in early 2024, just weeks after delivery. This incident triggered another round of leadership accountability, with Calhoun stepping down and acknowledging that Boeing's habit of 'pushing work down the production line' — moving planes forward even with incomplete or non-conforming work — had sent the wrong message to employees about quality priorities.
Kelly Ortberg took over shortly after and has led a cultural reset centered on disciplined production practices. Workers at Boeing's Renton facility now operate in six-hour shifts with each employee performing only two to three focused tasks per shift, promoting repeatability and precision. The FAA is actively monitoring Boeing's quality metrics and has capped monthly production rates accordingly. A new final assembly line is being readied at Boeing's Everett, Washington plant to support the ramp to 52 units per month.
Boeing leadership and observers describe the mood as 'cautiously optimistic,' acknowledging past failures while expressing measured confidence in the new approach. The emphasis throughout is that rate increases will only happen when the production system demonstrates genuine stability — a direct reversal of the previous culture where schedule pressure overrode quality concerns.
Key Insights
- Dave Calhoun argued that pushing incomplete work down the production line sent a damaging cultural message to employees — signaling that moving the airplane was more important than first-time quality of the product.
- Under Ortberg's restructured production model, Renton employees work six-hour shifts doing only two to three tasks each, with the explicit goal that repeatability and focus — not speed — create the efficiency Boeing needs.
- Boeing's monthly 737 Max production is actively capped by the FAA, which is requiring the company to meet specific quality metrics before authorizing rate increases — a level of regulatory constraint not previously described in Boeing's production history.
- Ortberg states that Boeing's new discipline includes voluntarily slowing down production when problems arise, contrasting sharply with the prior culture where the response to issues was 'nope, we got to keep going.'
- Boeing's long-range production target of 63 737 Max aircraft per month will not be pursued until the production system is demonstrably stable, with Ortberg explicitly stating they will stay at the current rate if stability isn't achieved.
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