Spirit hires GE executive to oversee its operations

Spirit AeroSystems filled an executive post that has been vacant for more than 2 1/2 years.

On Tuesday, the aerospace supplier to Airbus and Boeing said it hired Tom Gentile as executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Gentile, 51, will start April 1.

He comes to Spirit from General Electric, where since 1998 he worked in a variety of leadership roles for the conglomerate, including as president and CEO of GE Aviation Services and GE Healthcare Systems. Gentile was most recently president and COO of GE Capital, its financing unit.

“He has demonstrated success in managing and growing large, complex, global technology businesses across a multitude of industries,” Spirit president and CEO Larry Lawson said in a news release.

Before joining GE, Gentile held positions at global management consultancy McKinsey & Co., broadcasting company CBS and General Motors.

Gentile has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in business administration from Harvard University. He also studied international relations at the London School of Economics.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, Gentile will have an annual salary of $1 million and a signing bonus of an award of restricted stock valued at $3 million.

He fills a post that has been vacant since June 30, 2013, when former COO Mike King retired from Spirit.

The vacant seat was a topic of discussion among some financial analysts before Spirit released its fourth-quarter and full-year 2015 results two weeks ago. That’s because of a late January report that the company was seeking a COO to succeed Lawson when he retired.

Lawson, on a Feb. 3 conference call with analysts to discuss financial results, downplayed any near-term succession planning that was in the works.

Wells Fargo senior analyst Sam Pearlstein, in a note to investors, said he could see nothing in Gentile’s contract about prepping him to eventually succeed Lawson.

“The employment contract for Gentile makes no mention of any future roles or promotions unlike contracts we have seen at other aerospace suppliers,” Pearlstein wrote.

This story was originally published February 16, 2016 at 9:50 AM with the headline "Spirit hires GE executive to oversee its operations."