Boeing's $36 Billion Lesson.
Every Warning Was Already in the Building.

Boeing's collapse is the most extensively documented governance failure in modern corporate history. Every component of it — the fatal software concealment, the missing bolts, the ignored whistleblowers, the $15 billion programme overruns — had precursors. What it lacked, at every stage, was a system to convert those precursors into financial risk before they became headlines, regulatory actions, and criminal proceedings.

Six Years. $36 Billion. One Pattern.

Boeing last posted an annual profit in 2018. Since then, the company has recorded six consecutive years of losses — a cumulative $36 billion erosion in shareholder value driven not by any single catastrophe, but by a compounding sequence of execution failures, each traceable to the same root dynamic: signals present in the system, governance unable to act on them in time.

Each row in that table is not an isolated event. It is a stage in a single compounding sequence. An engineering culture that prioritised schedule over safety. Warning signals filed into whistleblower systems that had no mechanism for board-level escalation. Programme commitments made without scenario modelling. Execution risk, in every form, going unquantified until the accounting forced recognition.

The MCAS Decision: Where It Started

To understand Boeing's $36 billion loss, you have to understand a single engineering decision made in 2012. Under competitive pressure to respond to Airbus's fuel-efficient A320neo without triggering expensive pilot retraining, Boeing chose to retrofit a software system — MCAS — onto an existing airframe rather than design a new aircraft. That decision compressed the safety architecture of a new flight-control system into a cost-preservation constraint.

Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in October 2018. 189 people died. In the five months between that crash and the second — Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019, which killed 157 more — Boeing's board never once discussed grounding the aircraft on safety grounds. The signals were present. The governance architecture had no path to translate them into a board decision.

The House Transportation Committee's 18-month investigation, drawing on 600,000 pages of documents, concluded the crashes were "a horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing's management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA." Every word of that conclusion describes an execution risk failure, not a technical one. The technical risks were known. They were not converted into decisions.

The Door Plug: History Repeating

On 5 January 2024 — more than four years after the 737 MAX was returned to service following a 20-month grounding — a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 at 14,830 feet over Oregon. All 177 people on board survived. Four bolts that should have secured the panel were missing. Boeing has no record of who removed them or who was responsible for reinstalling them.

The NTSB's final investigation report, released in June 2025, identified the probable cause as "Boeing's failure to provide adequate training, guidance, and oversight necessary to ensure that manufacturing personnel could consistently and correctly comply with its parts removal process." It was a process failure of exactly the same type as MCAS — execution risk present in the operational data, governance without a mechanism to surface it as financial or safety exposure.

The FAA capped 737 MAX production at 38 aircraft per month following the incident — a cap it did not lift until October 2025, following months of stepped-up oversight. Each month of constrained production during the recovery period cost Boeing deliveries, revenue, and customer confidence it could not afford to lose.

The 777X: Seven Years Late, $15 Billion in Charges

The 737 MAX and door plug failures were the most visible governance breakdowns. But Boeing's 777X widebody programme illustrates a different and equally costly pattern: the accumulation of programme risk across a decade without a mechanism to surface it as a board-level financial decision until accounting recognition became unavoidable.

The 777X was originally scheduled for first delivery in 2020. As of Q3 2025, that date has been pushed to 2027 — seven years behind original schedule. Total programme charges now stand at approximately $15 billion. In Q3 2025 alone, Boeing took a $4.9 billion charge on the programme, contributing to a $5.34 billion quarterly net loss at a moment when revenue was actually growing 30% year-on-year. The programme's financial trajectory was knowable from data that existed throughout the delay cycle. It was not converted into forward-looking financial risk at any stage where the decision window was still open.

The same pattern applies to Boeing's defence portfolio. The KC-46 tanker programme has accumulated over $9 billion in charges across the past decade. The T-7A trainer, Starliner spacecraft, and MQ-25 drone have all generated repeated fixed-price contract charges — each one a management-classified adjustment that had precursors in programme data quarters before the accounting recognition.

Four Governance Failures Behind $36 Billion in Losses

The full arc of Boeing's losses — from MCAS to the door plug to the 777X — reflects four specific governance failures that NAVETRA™ is designed to prevent. Each maps to a category of execution risk that was present in Boeing's data and absent from its governance architecture.

Was This Preventable?

Some of Boeing's losses were not preventable. The COVID-19 pandemic devastated global aviation demand in 2020 — that was exogenous. The machinists' strike in 2024 reflected labour dynamics years in the making. Competitive pressure from Airbus was structural.

But the scale of the loss — $36 billion across six years — was not the inevitable cost of competing in aerospace. It was the accumulated cost of governance that had no system to convert what it knew into decisions it could make.

The question is not whether Boeing faced hard conditions. It did. The question is whether thirty-one billion dollars of that loss was the inevitable cost of those conditions — or the preventable cost of a governance architecture that had no mechanism to surface what its own engineers, auditors, and production managers already knew.

The NAVETRA™ Domains That Were Failing at Boeing

NAVETRA™ measures the ten organisational and human domains that determine whether governance actually functions. It does not track programme schedules, model flight test data, or predict impairment triggers — those are the jobs of Boeing's own engineering and finance systems. What it measures is whether the people and structures responsible for acting on those signals are aligned, capable, and positioned to do so. At Boeing, five of those domains were failing — not suddenly, but over years, compounding silently until they became crashes, criminal proceedings, and $36 billion in losses.

The Question Every Board Should Now Be Asking

Boeing's case is the most expensive and most thoroughly documented proof of what happens when an organisation's governance architecture cannot translate what it knows into decisions it can make — at the right time, with the right people, before the regulatory, legal, and reputational cost has already been incurred.

It is not a story about bad engineers. It is not a story about insufficient compliance frameworks. Boeing had ERM processes, board committees, a whistleblower system, and an FAA oversight relationship. What it lacked was the instrumentation to verify whether any of those structures were actually working — whether the five domains that determine whether governance functions were operating at the level the organisation's risk profile required.