Boeing, Boeing, gone: yet more catastrophic problems for the aircraft manufacturer
On 16 August last year I was on a Ryanair flight from Limoges to Stansted. I don’t usually take a look at what kind of aircraft I’m in, but knowing that Ryanair had bought loads of Boeing 737 MAX’s, I was slightly concerned and decided to check. Indeed, I was on a Boeing 737 MAX.
That model of aircraft was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 or even longer in some places after 346 people died in two similar crashes, Lion Air flight 610 on October 29 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 on March 10 2019. The groundings occurred despite the then CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, both telephoning President Trump and making public assurances to say that the MAX aircraft was safe.
The groundings, of MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes, weren’t immediate: the US Federal Aviation Association (FAA) didn’t ground the aircraft until March 13, by which time 51 other regulators had grounded the 737 MAX. It took until March 18 for all 387 those in service worldwide to be grounded.
Yesterday Alaska Airlines grounded all its Boeing 737 MAX 9 aeroplanes after a window and section of fuselage blew out on one of the aircraft in mid-air shortly after takeoff from Portland Oregon, and had to make an emergency landing. The aircraft was apparently only put into service in October.
“The aircraft landed safely back at Portland International Airport with 171 guests and 6 crew members,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. Strange calling them ‘guests’ instead of passengers, but there you are.
After the fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, the aircraft returned to service only after Boeing made changes to an automated flight control system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), implicated in the crashes.
This system that proved faulty was introduced because the position and larger size of the engines of the latest 737s, installed on an older aircraft design, had a tendency to push the nose of the plane upwards during certain manoeuvres.
Boeing - a company that also designs, manufactures, and sells rockets and missiles among other things, by the way - initially defended the 737 MAX against any faults and suggested the pilots of the crashes had insufficient training, until evidence proved this to be false.
After a meeting with Boeing in November 2018, Daniel Carey, Union president of the Allied Pilots Association of American Airlines said: "The huge error of omission is that Boeing failed to disclose the existence of MCAS to the pilot community. The final fatal mistake was, therefore, the absence of robust pilot training in the event that the MCAS failed.”
As well as criticising the aircraft design, retired pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, famous for ditching an Airbus A320 into the Hudson River in 2009 when both engines were disabled due to a bird strike, said that the relationship between the aeroplane industry and its regulators had become too ‘cozy’.
On January 7 2021, Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion to a crash-victim beneficiaries fund, as a criminal monetary penalty, and in damages to airline customers. On October 14 of the same year former Boeing pilot Mark Forkner was charged with fraud for lying to the FAA in an attempt to obtain money from customers. He is the first person to receive criminal charges in the investigation into the fatal crashes.
The 737 MAX has had a number of other manufacturing flaws. For example, in April 2021 Boeing notified 16 airlines and the FAA of a potential electrical problem, in October 2023 a problem was identified in there being improperly drilled holes on the aft pressure bulkhead, and only last week Boeing was asking all airlines to inspect aircraft for a possible loose bolt in the rudder-control system.
On 12 December, less than a month ago, a Ryanair Boeing 737 MAX 8-200 flying from Manchester to Tenerife suffered an engine failure. This sort of thing happens from time to time with aircraft of course - but Boeing do seem to have an inordinate amount of problems, to say the least.