Boeing said on Tuesday that its chief executive, W. James McNerney Jr., would step aside on July 1 and be succeeded by its second-ranking executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, an aeronautical engineer who had widely been seen as the heir apparent.
Mr. McNerney, 65, has been the plane maker's chairman and chief executive since 2005 and will remain chairman until next February. Mr. Muilenburg, 51, ran Boeing's military business before being named the company's president and chief operating officer in 2013. He also will join Boeing's board.
Analysts said the transition was expected and came at a good time for the company, which has ridden a wave of orders for new and more fuel-efficient commercial planes to record highs in revenue and profit.
Mr. Muilenburg said in an interview that even though he spent most of his career in the military business, he had focused intently on the commercial plane unit over the last two years and was already working on its long-term concerns.
Some of the toughest issues, like how sales of 777 jetliners will hold up as Boeing builds a replacement, "have been front and center as I worked with Jim," Mr. Muilenburg said.
Boeing's board had previously granted Mr. McNerney a waiver from its normal retirement age of 65. But, he said in an interview on Tuesday, "I'll be 66 here in a month or so, and we've been working on a transition plan very explicitly since 2013."
He added that Mr. Muilenburg "has some ownership of what lies in front of him because he worked with me to put it in place. And Dennis is 51. This is a long-cycle business and it's helpful to have someone take a long run at it."
Analysts credited Mr. McNerney, a former General Electric executive and a chief executive of 3M, with restoring Boeing's credibility after a military contracting scandal in the early 2000s. During his tenure, the company also ushered in a new era of lighter planes, like the 787 Dreamliner, with more efficient engines that have sharply reduced fuel costs.
But after repeated production snags, the Dreamliners were several years late when they arrived in 2011, and problems with their lithium-ion batteries have helped keep them from becoming profitable yet.
Boeing said in April that the deferred production costs for the 787 program had risen to $ 27 billion. Deferred production cost accounts for the gap between what it costs the company to build each plane and the average cost it has projected for the first 1,300 aircraft.
Still, the company's stock price had practically doubled over the last two and a half years as investors looked ahead to the day when the new planes would start increasing the company's cash flow.
Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., said Boeing's engineers would cheer the return, in Mr. Muilenburg, of an engineer to the chief executive's suite. Mr. Aboulafia said he thought that Mr. McNerney, who has an M.B.A. from Harvard, had been too confrontational with Boeing's labor unions.
Robert Stallard, an analyst at the Royal Bank of Canada, also said in a note to clients that changes "in communication and tone" would be helpful at Boeing.
Political leaders and Boeing workers in the Puget Sound area were upset that Boeing placed some of the Dreamliner production in South Carolina. It also pressured labor unions and Washington State for concessions to keep from moving more jobs there.
Mr. McNerney said some of the moves he made were not "anti-labor," but were focused on diversifying the company's geographic base to reduce risks.
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