The Alaska Airlines plane that lost a piece of its fuselage. Photo / AP
A sudden hole appearing in the side of an Alaska Airlines plane midflight follows years of problems with the manufacturer’s aircraft.
A harrowing flight over the weekend is again forcing Boeing to confront concerns over its planes, particularly the 737 Max, already one of the most scrutinised jets in history.
No one was seriously injured in the episode on an Alaska Airlines flight Friday night in which a portion of a 737 Max 9 fuselage blew out in midair, exposing passengers to howling wind. The plane landed safely, but the event, on a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, has spooked travellers and prompted immediate safety inspections on similar planes.
Federal authorities focused attention on a mid-cabin door plug, which is used to fill the space where an emergency exit would be placed if the plane were configured with more seats.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered the inspection of 171 Max 9 planes operated by Alaska and other US airlines, causing dozens of flight cancellations Saturday. It said the inspections should take four to eight hours per plane to complete.
“We agree with and fully support the FAA’s decision to require immediate inspections of 737-9 aeroplanes with the same configuration as the affected aeroplane,” Jessica Kowal, a Boeing spokesperson, said Saturday.
Alaska Airlines’ woes continued into Sunday, with 163 cancellations, or 21 per cent of its scheduled flights, by early afternoon, according to FlightAware. Travellers took to social media to complain about continued long hold times on the phone for customer service, and inadequate compensation as they waited at the airport and faced lengthy delays and abrupt cancellations. United had cancelled more flights on Sunday, 243, but they represented just 9 per cent of the carrier’s scheduled flights, according to FlightAware.
It is not clear whether Boeing is to blame for what happened to the Alaska Airlines plane, but the episode raises new questions for the manufacturer. Another version of the Max, a 737 Max 8, was involved in two crashes that killed hundreds of people in 2018 and 2019 and led to a worldwide grounding of that plane.
“The issue is what’s going on at Boeing,” said John Goglia, a longtime aviation safety consultant and a retired member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes.
Last month, the company urged airlines to inspect the more than 1,300 delivered Max planes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder-control system. Over the summer, Boeing said a key supplier had improperly drilled holes in a component that helps to maintain cabin pressure. Since then, Boeing has invested in and worked more closely with that supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, to address production problems.
“We are seeing increased stability and quality performance within our own factories, but we’re working to get the supply chain caught up to the same standards,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said on a call with investor analysts and reporters in October.
Spirit AeroSystems also worked on the fuselage for the 737 Max 9, including manufacturing and installing the door plug that failed on the Alaska Airlines flight.
Deliveries of another Boeing plane, the twin-aisle 787 Dreamliner, were virtually stalled for more than a year, until summer 2022, while the aircraft maker worked with the FAA to address various quality concerns, including paper-thin gaps in the plane’s body.
Another flaw discovered last summer slowed deliveries of the plane again. And production of both the 737 and 787 has been slow to speed up amid those and other problems with quality and the supply chain.
The Max was grounded in early 2019 after two crashes killed a total of 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Over 20 months, Boeing worked with regulators worldwide to fix problems with the plane’s flight control software and other components.
By the time passenger flights aboard the Max resumed in late 2020, the crisis had cost the company about $20 billion.
The two midsize variants of the plane, the Max 8 and Max 9, have been flying since then. But the smallest, the Max 7, and the largest, the Max 10, have yet to be approved by regulators.
The Max is the bestselling plane in Boeing’s history. The more than 4,500 outstanding orders for the plane account for more than 76 per cent of Boeing’s order book. The plane is also popular among airlines: Of the nearly 3 million flights scheduled globally this month, about 5% are planned to be carried out using a Max, mostly the Max 8, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider.
Alaska Airlines has 65 Max 9 planes, while United Airlines has 79. Both were conducting inspections Saturday.
On Sunday, Turkish Airlines announced that it would immediately ground the five Max 9 planes in its fleet until further notice.
Investigators with the NTSB have started looking into the case and are expected to examine a wide range of factors, including Boeing’s manufacturing process, the FAA’s oversight of the company and any work Boeing or Alaska Airlines carried out on the plane. Investigators have also identified an area where the door probably landed and asked for help from the public in finding it.
“This is the kind of thing where, until you really get into the investigation — you identify all the facts, conditions and circumstances of this particular event — do you determine whether this is just a one-off or a systemic problem,” said Greg Feith, an aviation security expert and former NTSB investigator.
In the meantime, those who make, service, operate and regulate the planes will all be in the spotlight.
“Every American deserves a full explanation from Boeing and the FAA on what’s gone wrong and on the steps that are being taken to ensure another incident does not occur in the future,” Senator J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said in a post on Saturday on X, formerly known as Twitter.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Niraj Chokshi
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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