How Boeing is quietly betting on a ‘brilliant’ 39-year old engineer—and setting the stage for a turnaround
As an aeronautics grad student at MIT in the 2010s, Brian Yutko was obsessed. He’d work deep into the night mining “black box” data and destination codes buried in antiquated computer languages like Fortran for obscure flight stats. He wowed his thesis advisor with his work on fuel efficiency. Among Yutko’s findings: Airlines could reduce pollution by 7% by flying planes at slightly slower speeds, and by 33% by mothballing old models sooner. But Yutko didn’t just study planes—he loved flying them. Yutko, his advisor, and fellow PhD students relished zipping up and down the East Coast on rented Cessna 170s that they would take turns piloting to conferences and blithe sojourns for picnic lunches in the country.
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 product development, the arm tasked with incorporating engineering advances that improve 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. With this year’s revenues clocking at an annualized rate of around $45 billion, if measured on its own, that unit would rank around 100th on the Fortune 500.
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. Ortberg secured a hard-won contract with the machinists’ union following a 54-day strike; reached a deal with the DOJ to avoid criminal prosecution for the crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 passengers and crew; won a contract initially valued at $20 billion over Lockheed to develop the Air Force’s next-gen fighter jet; and worked closely alongside the FAA to gradually raise production of the 737 Max, the bestseller whose production the regulator severely constrained since the notorious door-plug blowout over Portland early last year. He also avoided big risks by raising $21 billion in fresh capital, ensuring that Boeing harbored the cash reserves for weathering the tough times. But it’s the appointment of Yutko, though it has gone largely unnoticed, that may speak eloquently about 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 product 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 follow 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 like-minded younger people who will be more aggressive on the tech front.” Several sources I spoke to said that Yutko’s leadership and technical skills could take him a long way at Boeing.
Of course, that will certainly depend on how Yutko helps Boeing navigate the flight ahead—a period in which the company is in the early stages of exploring what could be a $25 billion bet on a brand-new plane, something that the aerospace giant only does once every few decades. Legendary aerospace analyst Richard Safran summarizes the promise 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. The seeds of its current problems date back to the late 1990s following its acquisition of rival McDonnell Douglas. Before that giant tie-up, Boeing had boasted a culture dominated by engineering excellence that elevated product quality and safety far above profit-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 shareholder value above all. From 2010 to 2018, Boeing radically reduced headcount and R&D as a share of sales, and returned over 100% of its cash flow to shareholders via buybacks and dividends. Over those eight years, its stock delivered annual returns of nearly 30%, beating the likes of Apple and Microsoft.
But the fatal Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes in late 2018 and early 2019 exposed how far Boeing had veered from the quality obsession and production safeguards that were hallmarks of its storied past. (You can read this author’s cover story on Boeing’s descent here.)
Now Ortberg’s plan to gradually raise the severely depressed production of its cash cow Max is showing green shoots, but to ensure dominance in the next decade, Boeing’s top chance at besting Airbus is designing and successfully commercializing a totally new and disruptive 737 successor. “Boeing’s not in a good place from a product portfolio standpoint,” says a former executive at a large Boeing supplier. “They haven’t been for four to six years. 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. And they have to develop the new plane right on schedule to restore their credibility after the delays on the 787,” the last all-new plane that arrived three years late in 2011.
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 unlikely rise to the Fortune 500 began in Northeastern Pennsylvania coal country. His hometown’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. Since the 1930s, Schuylkill has lost around a third of its population, and its often-crumbling homes at a median of $165,000 rank among the nation’s cheapest. Less than 20 miles from Yutko’s alma mater, Mahanoy City High School—where in 2022 he delivered the keynote address to the graduating class of 49, the smallest in its history—sits a virtual ghost town where a coal seam fire has been burning for over 60 years. 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 project 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. At Penn State, where Yutko graduated in 2004, he majored in aerospace engineering and developed a love for jerry-rigging airborne vehicles from everyday materials. In a recent Reddit post, he recalled joining “a project 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 proper inspection.”
At MIT, Hansman demanded that his PhD candidates pursue work that wasn’t just theoretical, but would improve 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 program 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 research, he’d charge, “This is wrong” or “This is BS,” mainly as a test for prompting students to vigorously push back. Once the presenter on the griddle “defended their position to the death,” they could often persuade their revered leader.
For years, in addition to their Cessna-piloting adventures, Yutko joined Hansman and Yutko’s best friend, NASA astronaut and engineer Woody Hoburg, on motorcycle sojourns on their rented BMW 1200 rigs between Christmas and New Year’s to exotic corners of the globe, from the deserts of Morocco to the valleys of Peru. During COVID, Yutko and Hoburg, a former rescue climber in Yosemite, camped in Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas to practice their technical skills deploying lines and harnesses. On foot, Yutko has braved the race to the summit of Pikes Peak, a grueling contest that scales 7,800 vertical feet.
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 home 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 professor 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 Business and previously worked as a White House advance aid, recently welcomed a son.
And Yutko’s funny. 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 Proposal.” The piece soberly calculates the dollars airlines could save if “they could provide incentives for passengers to go the restroom before getting on a flight.” The authors 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 professional 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.
Extra lift
After getting his PhD in 2014, Yutko split his time between MIT and Aurora Flight Sciences, an engineering firm that primarily created prototypes of unmanned, electric, and other next-gen planes, helicopters, and drones for the Department of Defense. 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 like 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 provided 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 D8’s stupendous goal: lowering fuel consumption by 70%. The tech incorporated in the D8 is still a contender for the new wave of narrow-bodies, and the program would prove Yutko’s ticket to Boeing.
Yutko had caught the eye of then–Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, who picked the rising star for personal mentorship as part of a Boeing program where top executives nurture future leaders. By early 2023 Yutko was ready for a new challenge, which presented itself when autonomous flying-taxi startup Wisk, (founded by Google cofounder Larry Page but majority owned by Boeing) needed a new CEO. Yutko moved to Silicon Valley for the job.
The Wisk rises like a helicopter; then six of its forward rotors tilt outward, and it flies like a plane. Yutko foresaw a network of “vertiports” at airports, topping highways and mounted on rooftops ferrying passengers up to 100 miles in what he widely praised as possibly “the next big leap in aviation.” Given the resistance of pilots’ unions and traffic controllers, and skepticism from regulators, for autonomous flight, it’s unclear when or if Wisk will reach the market. Still, Yutko continued to advance autonomous technology and added AI applications to simulate flight planning and patterns. Those improvements could potentially improve 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 approve takeoff, the aircraft-maker typically taps two leaders to head a greenfield project, according to an executive who worked for a Boeing supplier: a program manager, and a lead project engineer. The program manager is tasked with hitting key milestones for schedule and costs, and reports to the business side. The lead project 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 likely to look like? The advantage to the super avant-garde models Yutko knows so well is that the airframes themselves promise tremendous gains in fuel efficiency and CO2 reductions. The D8 “Double Bubble” technology 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 technology. It’s not clear if the TTBW or another model will prove 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 technical and design options, including the use of alternative fuels and new engine technologies, as well as automation.
In October of 2024, Yutko gathered with many of Hansman’s former students to salute their beloved teacher’s 70th birthday with a series of lectures. Yutko took the stage for a presentation reviewing 210 years of aviation history. 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 about.”
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.
