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Boeing has crashed to the second biggest annual loss in its 109-year history as the plane maker grapples with the fallout of a major safety scandal.
The American giant on Tuesday confirmed it had fallen $11.8bn (£9.5bn) into the red last year, a figure only exceeded during the pandemic when the aviation market ground to a halt overnight.
It takes the company’s total losses since 2019 to more than $35bn.
The bleak results follow a torrid year for the plane maker that saw a mid-air blowout of a door plug in one of its passenger aircraft, walkouts by tens of thousands of factory workers and a string of faults aboard a spacecraft it built for Nasa.
Kelly Ortberg, who became chief executive in August, has been tasked with turning things around but the results on Tuesday underlined the scale of the task ahead of him.
The company has been plagued by persistent safety issues after two crashes involving its best-selling 737-MAX jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia – in 2018 and 2019 respectively – left 346 dead.
They led to temporary groundings of the jets and triggered broader concerns that Boeing had misled regulators during the aircraft’s certification.
In January 2024, safety fears surfaced again when an Alaska Airlines-operated 737-MAX suffered a door plug blowout while flying at 16,000 feet.
That triggered an investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration, which later capped 737-Max production rates, put officials on production lines and ordered a major review of manufacturing processes.
Separately, the company also suffered humiliation when Elon Musk’s SpaceX was called in to return four US astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station, following technical problems with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
On top of this, engineers who assemble the Max, along with 777 jets and 767 cargo planes, at the company’s plants in Renton and Everett, Washington, downed tools for seven weeks in protest over pay and conditions. The dispute ended after Boeing agreed to boost their wages.
As a result, Boeing delivered just 348 jets in 2024 – down from 528 a year earlier.
That left the company far behind rival Airbus, which says it delivered 765 jets during the same period.
Boeing said it had made some progress in its turnaround so far, adjusting factory arrangements for higher production. It is also seeking to address loss-making defence contracts.
On Tuesday, Mr Ortberg said the company’s recovery would be “a multi-year journey”, following accusations that Boeing had an ingrained culture of putting profit ahead of safety.
Dave Calhoun, the former chief executive who was forced out amid the safety crisis, previously admitted that “something went wrong” at the plane maker during stormy hearings in the US Senate.