| By AP News Photos: AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson\YouTube Screenshots Aircraft assembly workers walked off the job early Friday at Boeing factories near Seattle after union members voted overwhelmingly to go on strike, another setback for the giant aircraft maker whose reputation and finances have been battered and now faces a shutdown in production of its best-selling planes. Read more. |
| Why this matters: As long as the strike lasts, it will deprive Boeing of much-needed cash that it gets from delivering new planes to airlines. That will be another challenge for new CEO Kelly Ortberg, who six weeks ago was given the job of turning around a company that has lost more than $25 billion in the last six years and fallen behind European rival Airbus. The strike will stop production of the 737 Max, Boeing’s best-selling airliner, along with the 777 or “triple-seven” jet and the 767 cargo plane at factories in Renton and Everett, Washington. The strike will not affect commercial flights and likely will not affect Boeing 787 Dreamliners, which are built by nonunion workers in South Carolina. Very little has gone right for Boeing this year, from manufacturing problems like a panel blowing out and leaving a gaping hole in one of its passenger jets in January, to NASA leaving two astronauts in space rather than sending them home on a problem-plagued Boeing spacecraft, multiple federal investigations and a criminal trial over previous 737 Max crashes. |
