Todd Citron on aviation safety
From Boeing Fireside Chat (Forum 360) · · AIAA
“One of those chapters needs to be making our airspace system that's already safe even safer. If you take a look at commercial airplanes over the past two decades, the accident rate has come down 40%. Fail accidents even greater than that. All while numbers of departures have gone up above 20%. So to get there, to be able to repeat that in the next decade, we're going to have to think about things differently. We're going to need new tools and we're certainly going to need new data streams.”
On , Todd Citron, Chief Technology Officer, Vice President and GM of Boeing Research & Technology at Boeing, spoke about aviation safety during Boeing Fireside Chat (Forum 360) on AIAA.
About Todd Citron
Todd Citron, Boeing's Chief Technology Officer, discussed the company's technology strategy and safety approach during a January 2026 fireside chat. He said Boeing is working to embed human-focused engineering design in commercial aircraft by partnering with universities to layer real-world certification examples onto academic safety analysis. Citron noted that about a third of Boeing's demonstrated technologies appear on real products, citing the natural laminar flow winglet tested in 2012 that led to the split winglet on the 737 Max, which he said provides a 2% efficiency improvement per aircraft. He also called for collaboration among regulators, oil and gas companies, and OEMs to advance sustainable aviation fuel, and described end-to-end optimization with real-time data as a potential source of 10% fuel efficiency gains. In May 2025, Citron participated in a podcast discussing the "Art of Business" program, which provides financial education and mentorship to student-athletes and musicians in Lafayette, Louisiana. He said that with the existence of name, image, and likeness (NIL) programs, student-athletes should be treated as small businesses requiring community investment)Skip. Citron expressed skepticism about simply giving athletes money without education, stating that programs like "Art of Business" could help athletes avoid financial missteps.