How Boeing is quietly betting on a ‘brilliant’ 39-year old engineer—and setting the stage for a turnaround

Finance· leadershipHow Boeing is quietly betting on a ‘brilliant’ 39-year old engineer—and setting the stage for a turnaroundBy Shawn TullyBy Shawn TullySenior Editor-at-LargeShawn TullySenior Editor-at-LargeShawn Tully is a senior editor-at-large at Fortune, covering the biggest trends in , aviation, , and leadership.SEE FULL BIO Brian Yutko has quietly taken a pivotal role within Boeing

He’d work deep into the night mining “black box” data and destination codes buried in antiquated computer languages Fortran for obscure flight stats

He wowed his thesis advisor with his work on fuel efficiency

But Yutko didn’t just study planes—he loved flying them

Fast-forward a decade and suddenly Yutko has a much bigger fleet at his disposal

In May Boeing named Yutko, 39, chief of commercial airplanes duct development, the arm tasked with incorporating engineering advances that imve today’s models, and taking a leading role in designing and bringing to market all-new aircraft at Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA), the company’s largest division

Though Boeing’s litany of safety concerns and union turmoil have dominated the headlines for several years, behind the scenes there are glimmers that things are changing one year into new CEO Kelly Ortberg’s tenure

But it’s the appointment of Yutko, though it has gone largely unnoticed, that may speak eloquently where Boeing is headed. “I’m biased, but my take is that Brian’s appointment is a real indication that Boeing is returning to prioritizing engineering and duct innovation,” R

John Hansman, Yutko’s PhD advisor and director of the MIT International Center for Air Transportation, told Fortune. (Boeing declined to make Yutko or other managers available for this story

Yutko, however, sent a message that read in part: “Because I’m just getting my feet wet in this new role and drinking from a firehose a bit, I’ll the comms team lead on this one.”) Adds Gary Gysin, the founding CEO of Wisk, where Yutko served on the board before taking the helm: “One guy won’t fix everything, but he’ll help attract more -minded younger people who will be more aggressive on the front.” Several sources I spoke to said that Yutko’s leadership and nical skills could take him a long way at Boeing

Legendary aerospace analyst Richard Safran summarizes the mise and peril Yutko’s facing as this: “He’s a classic MIT, somewhat brilliant guy

Who hasn’t demonstrated he knows how to make money yet.” Boeing at a crossroads Boeing is at a critical juncture

Before that giant tie-up, Boeing had boasted a culture dominated by engineering excellence that elevated duct quality and safety far above fit-making

Though Boeing remained a wellspring of innovation, the McDonnell ethos took over, and was accelerated by a parade of CEOs who seemed to prioritize holder value above all

The new plane can’t be a me-too

When you’re behind, you need to be aggressive

They have to come up with something that’s a real crowd-pleaser for the airlines

Much of this will fall to Yutko

To say it’s a tall order is an understatement, but as interviews with colleagues, peers, and friends show, he has again and again surprised those around him

His town’s the tiny village of Buck Mountain nestled near the foothills of Locust Mountain, a hikers’ favorite roamed by white-tailed deer and black bears

Decades ago, one of the biggest draws for this corner of Appalachians was its rowdy annual beer fest

This region comprising historic Schuylkill County holds the world’s largest deposits of anthracite black carbon, but the industry’s decline decimated the local economy

Brian’s ancestors migrated over a century ago from Eastern Europe to the area’s then-bustling company towns, and generations of Yutkos have worked in the coal trade

Yutko’s dad ran a shop that changed springs for coal mining trucks, and Brian worked alongside him as a kid. “When Brian got his master’s at MIT, I invited his parents to dinner,” remembers his mentor Hansman. “It was the first time his father had ever been out of the state, and the first time his mother had left the county.” Yutko and his two brothers were the first in the family to attend college—the younger a ject engineer at a large power and metals company who also volunteers as a high school wrestling coach in the area, as does the youngest—all three honed clinches and armlocks on the mats at Mahanoy

In a recent Reddit post, he recalled joining “a ject that designs and builds a sailplane” and getting assigned to “weld out metal chromoly tube fuselage … because I knew how to weld.” Yutko didn’t mention whether he learned the metal-bending skills at the family workplace, but jested: “I’m positive my welding wouldn’t pass per inspection.” At MIT, Hansman demanded that his PhD candidates pursue work that wasn’t just theoretical, but would imve the way airplanes fly and operate so that the next wave would show big strides in curbing emissions and lowering noise. “You think of MIT as teaching heavy math, nerdy kinds of things,” says a fellow gram member. “But Hansman was very applied and practical.” Hansman was also a super-tough taskmaster who, as this Yutko classmate avows, “didn’t suffer fools gladly” and would put his doctoral candidates through “a tear down and rebuild mill.” Glancing at a piece of re, he’d charge, “This is wrong” or “This is BS,” mainly as a test for mpting students to vigorously push back

Once the presenter on the griddle “def their position to the death,” they could often persuade their revered leader

During COVID, Yutko and Hoburg, a former rescue climber in Yosemite, camped in Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas to practice their nical skills deploying lines and harnesses

A slim six-footer, his brown hair close-cropped, Yutko in his Wisk incarnation favored T-shirts and jeans

At work, he can be intense and demanding. “He and I are both ‘A’ types, and we had quite a few battles,” says ex–Wisk boss Gysin, who adds that Yutko “would really dig in on an issue” and relentlessly hammer his position, a stance he learned in the Hansman crucible at MIT. “I have a number of non-consensus views on a number of topics,” Yutko admitted in a recent podcast

Yet Gysin says that despite their dustups, he and Yutko “are friends to this day.” According to fellow students and colleagues, Yutko’s as likable as he is doggedly determined

Marvels Hansman, “We’d go to a bar on the Moroccan coast on our motorcycle trips, and Brian would make friends with all the guys in the bar,” says Hansman. “He’s just magnetic.” Lishuai Li, a fellow PhD student under Hansman and now a fessor at City University of Hong Kong, attests to Yutko’s gift for putting people at ease. “As an international student, I sometimes feel hesitant in social settings, so I’d sometimes be quiet

But Brian had a natural way of making everyone feel included.” Yutko is married, and he and his wife, who holds an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of and previously worked as a White House advance aid, recently welcomed a son

In interviews, he lampoons his own wonkish credentials by uncorking such quips as, “I’ll do a little systems engineering on your question.” As a PhD student, he coauthored a semi-satirical editorial that echoes 18th-century essayist Jonathan Swift’s tongue-in-cheek “A Modest posal.” The piece soberly calculates the dollars airlines could if “they could vide incentives for passengers to go the restroom before getting on a flight.” The also get serious, extolling the fuel economies garnered by ditching such items as water bottles handed out by flight attendants, and replacing “flight bags” carrying heavy paper manuals, charts, and checklists with versions loaded on computerized tablets

The writing is so clever that, for this judge, it could have been penned by a fessional pundit

Hansman praises Yutko’s willingness to take chances when the potential payoff is big. “This is a guy who listens, who thinks things through, who assesses risk, but doesn’t have fear,” he observes

At Aurora, he participated in a NASA design competition for a revolutionary, highly efficient commercial aircraft configuration called the D8

Boeing teams were competing on other models

Traditional aircraft design features a pressured tube for the passengers flanked by wings

But the D8 put two tubes side by side, which made the fuselage wider, enabling it to, in effect, become part of the wing and add to the lift

The design also placed the engines in the tail, which reduced turbulence from the fuselage

The D8 looked a bit a shark, and won the moniker “Double Bubble.” Its edge: It could carry wings smaller and lighter than those of regular planes because of the extra lift vided by the reshaped fuselage

Those characteristics lowered drag big-time

The D8 was also originally conceived to fly at slightly lower than normal speeds, a key to saving fuel that Yutko had identified in his doctoral work

Yutko tested D8 forerunners in a new wind tunnel donated to MIT by Boeing

The incorporated in the D8 is still a contender for the new wave of narrow-bodies, and the gram would ve Yutko’s ticket to Boeing

Yutko moved to Silicon Valley for the job

The Wisk rises a helicopter; then six of its forward rotors tilt outward, and it flies a plane

Still, Yutko continued to advance autonomous nology and added AI applications to simulate flight planning and patterns

Those imvements could potentially imve safety and testing on commercial planes

Boeing’s next big bet Of course, any decision on a new plane will fall to Ortberg and the Boeing board

Once they apve takeoff, the aircraft-maker typically taps two leaders to head a greenfield ject, according to an executive who worked for a Boeing supplier: a gram manager, and a lead ject engineer

The gram manager is tasked with hitting key milestones for schedule and costs, and reports to the side

The lead ject engineer is responsible for working with the supply base to optimize the plane’s design and development, and bring it to market

That person is part of the engineering team that, it appears, would work closely with Yutko as chief of commercial airplane development. “You can’t BS Brian on the engineering side,” noted one of his former colleagues

What’s this airborne breakthrough ly to look ? The advantage to the super avant-garde models Yutko knows so well is that the airframes themselves mise tremendous gains in fuel efficiency and CO2 reductions

The D8 “Double Bubble” nology that Yutko labored on featuring the bulbous fuselage is still a leading candidate

Another potential winner is the so-called X-66, also known as the jawbreaker transonic truss-braced wing or TTBW

Conceived in-house at Boeing, and long supported by grants from NASA, the X-66 features extra-long, thin wings supported by diagonal struts, so that from the nose you’re looking at two triangles

In April, Boeing scrapped pursuit of an X-66 demonstrator in partnership with NASA, but pledged to keep working on thin-wing nology

It’s not if the TTBW or another model will ve the winner, but Yutko has expressed openness to new aircraft configurations. “It’s really an open book,” says Hansman

Yutko will be leading the evaluation of all the nical and design options, including the use of alternative fuels and new engine nologies, as well as automation

He started by recapping the first primitive, butterfly-shaped gliders, reminding the audience, “[I’m] as you all know … a future-thinker,” then spotlighted the “opportunity for new airplane shapes” and lauded the “Double Bubble … that came out of MIT” and “that I’m so passionate .” Boeing watchers may similarly hope that the storied company is entering a new era, too

And Boeing finally has what it needs, a visionary engineer who can pilot this lagging colossus towards winning the big one, the contest for the aircraft of the future

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