On timing of bad news getting announced (ozaub #622)
Former CEO Dennis Muilenburg's ouster was announced as you say but the board had been resisting forcing his ouster until it became untenable for him to continue. Plus there was the need to arrange what the c-suite would look like after he'd gone -- in that stage of the crisis likely not a quick task. Recalling the atmosphere of events in those months leading up to the end of 2019, if the decision to oust him had been made a significant time earlier but was just held until the holiday season, then the company and its flacks did an admirable job, for its effectiveness not its ethics, in faking out a lot of astute people.
This isn't to ascribe any excess of public-interest minded ethics to the company or its senior or top management. Boeing named its General Counsel at the time of the crashes, T. Michael Luttig, to a newly-created position of Counselor and Senior Advisor to Muilenburg and to the Board on May 1, 2019 - at the time Dennis Muilenburg still wore all three hats, CEO, Chairman and President of the company. Per a Boeing press release issued at that time, Luttig "will manage all legal matters associated with" the two crashes as well as "other special matters." Former Judge Luttig has a beyond-illustrious legal resume and career . . . but if one already holds a measure of cynicism about Boeing in recent years, taking the GC and in effect boosting him above what was then emerging as a firestorm of legal difficulties could be seen as a way to insulate the obvious involvement the GC role had during the MAX development and the time immediately after the crashes. Luttig became GC in 2006. (News reports, seen when I looked up these details, indicate that Mr. Luttig's illustrious legal career has now extended just days ago to the title Counselor and Special Advisor at Coca-Cola - congratulations.)
As for the timing of the fine announced in 2015 relative to a 20-years earlier crash, part of the timing appears to be the convenience of tying the duration of the agreement to the start of a calendar year. And given the lapse of time after TWA 800 crashed and the resulting investigation and FAA inquiry which led to the fine, what amount of added attention could be logically and realistically thought to have obtained had the announcement been made in January, February, June or July? Not denying the flacks and others try to minimize bad
pr but in this example, there wasn't all that much attention even to be minimized in the first place, was there?