CHANGE: Boeing’s head of quality for commercial planes, Elizabeth Lund, is retiring.
Lund has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in mechanical and aerospace engineering. She rose steadily over a long career at Boeing and led various major jet programs, including the 777 and 747 programs, as well as the commercial airplanes supply chain.
In late 2021, she was appointed senior vice president and general manager of all airplane programs.
A month after the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout, Lund was tapped to lead the quality organization after the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to fix its management of product quality.
Interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board in June, Lund admitted that a major push in 2019 to cut the number of Boeing quality inspectors by Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, then head of quality at Commercial Airplanes, had been a mistake.
“We are undoing much of what was done there,” Lund told the NTSB. “We have undone it, and I don’t think that we appropriately controlled and looked at all the risks when they did it.”
Later that month, Lund made a misstep at a press briefing when she commented on details about the Alaska Airlines incident that had not previously been publicly disclosed. She was rebuked by the NTSB for breaking strict disclosure rules about ongoing accident investigations.
As a result, Boeing was sanctioned and its access to the NTSB’s investigative information on the incident was withdrawn.
It isn’t clear exactly why Lund is leaving but her new position can’t have been very fun or rewarding.