Boeing postpones annual guidance amid 737 Max crisis

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Boeing withheld its usual financial guidance for the coming year and vowed to focus on the safety and quality of its operations, as the US plane maker tries to stem the fallout from a mid-air blowout on one of its 737 Max 9 jets earlier this month.

Chief executive Dave Calhoun wrote in a note to employees on Wednesday that “now is not the time” to share financial or operational objectives as executives prepared to address investors publicly for the first time since part of a fuselage blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight on January 5.

The Max issue was overshadowing Boeing’s latest quarterly earnings results, which were better than expected. The company did not provide any estimate for the financial hit from the incident and the subsequent grounding of potentially affected jets.

It also did not disclose the impact of the growth limit on its 737 Max production rate recently imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration, the US aviation regulator.

The crisis has dealt a blow to Boeing’s management and sharpened scrutiny of its manufacturing and quality control processes, as well as those of key supplier Spirit AeroSystems. Spirit, which was spun out of Boeing in 2005, builds the Max fuselages and the door panel that blew out on the Alaska Airlines aircraft.

“The subject of how we interact with all of our suppliers will be a subject that we will be working on for quite a long time,” Calhoun told CNBC on Wednesday. Boeing outsources much of its supply chain to thousands of suppliers, including Spirit.

“On the subject of vertical integration and did it go too far — yeah, it probably did,” he said.

Calhoun declined to comment on reports that bolts that should have been attached to the Alaska jet’s door panel to hold it in place had never been installed.

“That’s the critical question,” he said, while stressing that he…