In 2017, it had reported a 67% jump in earnings, to $8.2bn.īoeing's share price had almost tripled during Muilenburg's short tenure, to $386, and his chief financial officer, Greg Smith, told colleagues that it could top $800 or $900, if the company kept doing what had made shareholders happy: Raising the dividend, buying back shares, and keeping expenses low. Picture: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty ImagesĪt Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, the buzz-cut Iowa native who became chief executive officer that year, saw untapped markets like Indonesia and talked about how the aerospace industry had reached some kind of cycle-busting new normal.īoeing had been a giant of US aviation for a century, but a financial reinvention under Muilenburg turned it into something else: A Wall Street darling. 'The bottom line here is the 737 Max is safe - safety is a core value for us at Boing,' its CEO Dennis Muilenburg said on Fox Business on November 13, 2018. His airline controlled half the domestic market in Indonesia, a nation of 250m people living on 17,000 islands stretching 4,800km from east to west. Lion Air began flying in 2000.īy 2015, with Asia's powerhouse economies producing newly mobile middle-class travellers, Kirana was a billionaire. Kirana and his brother cobbled together $900,000 and leased an old 737-200, as well as a woeful Soviet-made competitor, the Yakovlev Yak-42. In the early days, he would hold up a name board at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport to pick up arriving passengers. The company's charismatic co-founder, Kirana, had started out as a distributor of Brother typewriters, before opening a travel agency in Jakarta with his brother in the 1990s. Lion Air's short history had included its share of turbulence, but, on balance, it was one of remarkable ascent. Alerts signaling faulty altitude and airspeed readings blinked on.įlight data recorders don't pick up the expressions on pilots' faces, or the stab in their spines when they sense their machine might kill them. The nose gear had barely left the ground when Suneja's control column began shaking, the cue for a potential stall. Neither Suneja nor Harvino knew that a tiny sensor on the left side of the plane (called an angle-of-attack vane) had a 21-degree misalignment in its delicate innards - an oversight by the mechanics who had inspected it. It was 6.20am when Lion Air 610 left the runway for a short hop to an island off Sumatra. Wahyu Aldilla sat with his son, Xherdan Fahrezi, with whom he’d gone to Jakarta for a soccer match.įamilies of the victims of Lion Air flight JT 610 visit an operations centre to look for personal items of their relatives. In the minutes before the door closed, 22-year-old Deryl Fida Febrianto, a newlywed of two weeks, texted a selfie to his bride as he departed for a job on a cruise ship. His mother was a manager at Air India Ltd, and his younger sister aspired to become a pilot.Īfter flight school in California, Suneja had joined Lion Air in 2011, the same year the airline placed what was then the biggest single order in Boeing Co's history, a $22bn (€19.45bn) Max purchase that co-founder, Rusdi Kirana, sealed with a handshake from then US president, Barack Obama.Īt the Jakarta airport that morning, Paul Ayorbaba, 43, sent his family a choppy WhatsApp video of his walk down the jetway and onto the Lion Air Max jet, which was painted a cheery orange and white. Suneja was passionate about machines after this run, he planned to fly home to New Delhi, then drive through the highlands near Nepal the next week with his wife of two years, Garima Sethi.Īirlines were a family affair for the Sunejas. Bhavye Suneja, the captain, told his co-pilot, who went by the single name Harvino, that he was feeling ill, but in better health he was a sunny, life-of-the-party kind of guy. Four large colour screens arrayed in front of them made altitude and speed readouts easier to see - nothing like the old analog dials that Boeing designers once called the 'steam gauges'.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |