How many incidents do we need to realise Boeing has a serious problem?

Yet again there’s a worldwide headline-grabbing inflight incident involving a Boeing jet: yesterday’s LATAM flight from Sydney to Auckland resulted in the 787-9 Dreamliner suddenly ‘falling through the air’, resulting in passengers bloodied and hospitalised after the pilot’s controls blanked out.

The safety issues just keep on coming: they include a near-catastrophic incident in January when a fuselage panel on a 737 MAX Alaska Airlines jet blew off mid-flight.

Boeings have had a number of other manufacturing flaws and incidents. Most recent ones include a problem identified in October 2023 in there being improperly drilled holes on the aft pressure bulkhead, and in December last year Boeing was asking all airlines to inspect aircraft for a possible loose bolt in the rudder-control system. The same month a Ryanair Boeing 737 MAX 8-200 flying from Manchester to Tenerife suffered an engine failure.

On February 6 a United Airlines flight from the Bahamas, to Newark, New Jersey, experienced ‘stuck’ rudder pedals during the landing rollout.

United Airlines alone has just racked up five Boeing-related incidents in a week: a 737 MAX ran off the taxiway into a grassy area after landing at Houston on Friday 8 March; before that the mid-air loss of a tyre from a 777-200 on Thursday 7th March, just after the plane took off from San Francisco on a flight to Osaka, Japan.

There were another three incidents involving United on Monday 4th March: an engine failure on a United flight from Houston to Fort Myers, Florida, forcing an emergency landing after one of its engines began belching flames 10 minutes after takeoff; a United flight en route to San Francisco from Honolulu encountering engine failure over the Pacific, before landing safely at its destination; and a flight from Pensacola, Florida, landing safely in Chicago after reporting a gear issue with the 737 aircraft.

There has been increasing concern about Boeing since the fatal Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes in 2018 and 2019, killing more than 350 people. Boeing failed 33 of 89 audits during an examination conducted by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in January.

Is it getting to the point where we should start thinking the unthinkable? That the safest form of transport is no longer so, and we should start boycotting Boeing flights?

The aviation industry would say no. According to aviation industry publication FlightGlobal, there were only six recorded fatal commercial aviation accidents worldwide in 2023, resulting in 115 deaths. That followed 2022’s respective figures of 12 and 229 and represents the fewest on record. The average annual figures for the 1990s as a whole, in comparison, were 48 fatal commercial aviation accidents and 1,195 deaths.