It all began with a door that tore off in mid-flight. Then a wheel came loose during takeoff. Since what has become “the Boeing 737 MAX affair”, the plane maker has been constantly in the spotlight. It must be held to account and, above all, question its own model. The root cause of its troubles has long been identified. Yet in recent months, encouraging signs have pointed to a rebound for Boeing, the industrial giant. It was about time.

After a 2024 marked by an unprecedented quality crisis, Boeing is sending tangible signals of recovery in early November 2025. Two key indicators attest to this. On one hand, the FAA has eased the cap imposed on 737 MAX production; on the other, deliveries have picked up over the first nine months of 2025.

The Federal Aviation Administration has indeed authorized Boeing to raise the 737 MAX production rate from 38 to 42 aircraft per month, partially lifting the cap introduced in January 2024 following the Alaska Airlines MAX 9 incident (in flight loss of one emergency door plug). The decision comes after factory inspections and a review of the plane maker’s quality processes. On the outbound side, Boeing delivered 440 commercial aircraft as of September 30, 2025, compared with 291 over the same period in 2024, moving back above 2023 levels. The mix is strongly driven by the 737 family (330 units, vs. 229 in 2024), with the remainder split among 20 767s, 29 777s, and 61 787s. In the spring, management said it wanted to work with the FAA to take the next step and aim for 47/month B737 MAX by the end of 2025. The recent approval for 42/month, below the initial request, fits within this recovery trajectory.

The plane maker’s desert crossing

And yet, Boeing is emerging from a long desert crossing. The word “Boeing” has become synonymous with buzz and incidents for mainstream media and, at times, for the traveling public. During this dry spell, Boeing’s strength lay in having developed both civil and military aerospace. This dual capability made it the giant it is today, and likely prevented it from sinking altogether. World War II marked its rise, notably with the B-17, one of the best-known American bombers, and the B-29, which entered history by dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Boeing built a reputation as a serious industrial player. The company even made reliability a slogan, still sold today on badges and coffee mugs.

Until the 1990s, the American plane maker had no real competitor. Airbus’s rise would obviously change the equation, but that isn’t the core issue. The year that sealed Boeing’s fate was 1997. On December 15, 1996, after months of speculation, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, another American aerospace manufacturer, announced their merger in a $13.3 billion deal, unprecedented in aerospace. Yet that acquisition would mark the beginning of Boeing’s decline, because McDonnell Douglas brought not only its technologies but, above all, its corporate culture.

In a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, Professor Gautam Mukunda—now at Yale University—described the culture clash between the two firms: “Before its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing had an engineering-led culture and was accustomed to making bold investments in new aircraft. McDonnell Douglas, by contrast, was risk-averse and focused on cost-cutting and financial performance, and its culture ultimately came to dominate the company.” In other words, from 1997 onward, profit maximization took precedence over engineering.

Finance before engineering

Between 2014 and 2018, for example, while developing the 737 MAX, Boeing chose to pamper shareholders rather than invest: the group paid out $39 billion in dividends and share buybacks over the period, for less than $11 billion in investments. That cost-cutting drive had direct consequences: when the 737 MAX rolled out in 2017, Boeing did everything it could to present it as merely a stretched version of the 737 rather than a new aircraft type. The reason was simple: launching training and qualification for pilots on a new type would be extremely costly, grounding them and requiring many hours in simulators. Except the aircraft had been significantly modified. Stretching the airframe forced a change in engine position and the aircraft tended to pitch up. In 2018 and 2019, two successive fatal accidents would tragically show that pilots were insufficiently trained on the new aircraft.

A double-edged cultural shift

The impact of Boeing’s cultural shift has become a true case study. It is also very visible if you look at the composition of its board of directors. In a 2023 article, Christine Marsal, a senior lecturer at the University of Montpellier, tallied the change: “The composition of the board shows a slow tipping movement between 1997 and 2020. Engineers, who made up 54% of the board in 1997, account for only 23% of members in 2020. At the same time, there has been a rise in management and finance backgrounds: 61.5% in 2020, compared with 23% in 1997.”

Sued by disgruntled shareholders, Boeing settled in 2021 and agreed to appoint at least one safety expert to the board. But the damage was done. In January 2024, Bank of America downgraded the stock, judging that “Boeing’s technical prowess has dulled due to an obsession with financial metrics inflated by cost-cutting and cash-flow generation.” To climb back up sustainably, Boeing has no choice but to rethink itself—something the plane maker has been doing under the FAA’s paternal gaze for far too many months.

The recovery following Boeing’s downturn is still far from complete. In addition to the accumulated debt, the manufacturer continues to face significant regulatory and legal fallout. This includes financial penalties proposed by the FAA itself for various safety violations, as well as several criminal investigations opened by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In the wake of the “Boeing 737 MAX crisis,” the aircraft manufacturer is also carrying the burden of the Boeing 777X program. The 777X has indeed suffered from a slowed

certification process (due to tighter post-MAX rules and oversight) and a series of technical setbacks during testing — including a pylon-attachment issue in 2024, GE9X engine reliability challenges, and a static test failure in 2019 — all stemming from industrial shortcomings.

For now, the timeline has slipped to 2027 for the 777-9 and 2028 for the 777-8F, resulting in ongoing heavy financial impacts and forcing customers to adjust their own schedules accordingly.

Jean-François Bourgain, November 1, 2025, for AeroMorning