By Eric M. Johnson
SEATTLE (Reuters) – Veteran Boeing Co board members, Arthur Collins and Susan Schwab, are expected to retire from the U.S. planemaker’s board, one person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
Their departure from the board, if confirmed, could be announced later on Wednesday and follows a number of high-profile board-level changes in response to the nearly two-year 737 MAX safety crisis.
The company is also working to stem the financial fallout from the overlapping coronavirus pandemic, which has rocked global aviation.
A Boeing spokesman declined to comment on the departures, first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Collins, a former chairman and chief executive officer at Medtronic, has been a director on the board since 2007. Schwab, a director since 2010, is a former U.S. trade representative.
More broadly, the board has implemented changes to improve oversight of Boeing’s engineering ranks and industrial operations as it faces intense scrutiny over the two crashes in October 2018 and March 2019 that killed 346 people.
Boeing separated the chairman and chief executive roles, before ousting previous CEO Dennis Muilenburg, created a new Aerospace Safety Committee, and added two new directors with experience in engineering and safety.
In March 2020, Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, resigned from the board, citing her opposition to a Boeing request for U.S. government aid to help stem fallout from the pandemic.
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Leslie Adler and Jonathan Oatis)
