Boeing shares opened sharply lower on Monday, January 8, after a door came loose on an Alaska Airlines flight on Friday. In the first exchanges on Wall Street, the price of the airline manufacturer fell by 8.38%. That of its main supplier Spirit AeroSystems even fell by 13.74%. This is a new setback for the plane maker, whose inventories had been recovering since the beginning of the fall as its deliveries accelerated, long disrupted by technical problems. Alaska Airlines was also punished on Wall Street, losing 5.56%.
In addition, the door of the 737 MAX 9 aircraft was found on Sunday, said the President of the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Jennifer Homendy. A teacher recovered the piece of the plane that fell in his backyard in Portland, Oregon. “We will get it and start analyzing it,” the NTSB chief said at a news conference.
On Sunday, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun decided to cancel a conference that was supposed to bring together the company's executives earlier in the week and replace it with a safety meeting open to all employees on Tuesday.
The NTSB, Boeing, Alaska Airlines and the American Civil Aviation Regulatory Agency (FAA) are trying to determine the exact circumstances of the incident, which resulted in some minor injuries but could have ended more “tragically,” Ms. Homendy said.
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Series of setbacks for Boeing
The flying door, a configuration that Boeing offers its customers when the number of existing emergency exits is already sufficient in relation to the number of seats in the aircraft, was rejected. According to the NTSB, no one was sitting in the two seats next to the door. According to passengers quoted by American media, a teenager sitting in the row had his shirt ripped off by decompression, causing him to suffer minor injuries.
After this very rare malfunction, the FAA called for “immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9s before they can resume their flights”, affecting 171 aircraft worldwide, it specified on Let it stay on the ground. The grounding of these planes has already led to the cancellation of more than a thousand flights since Saturday, mainly for Alaska Airlines and United, which operate 144 of the 218 737 MAX 9 planes in circulation, according to the trade site FlightAware.
The companies Aeromexico, Copa Airlines – which operates 21 of these planes – and Turkish Airlines – which owns five – have also announced they will ground their planes. On the other hand, the European Aviation Safety Agency clarified that no operator in Europe used the 737 MAX 9 with the technical options in question.
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The incident marks a new episode in a series of setbacks for Boeing. The most serious were the crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX in October 2018 in Indonesia and in March 2019 in Ethiopia, which killed a total of 346 people. After these accidents, which were linked to the MCAS pilot software, all 737 MAXs were grounded for twenty months.
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Boeing has also suspended deliveries of its 787 long-haul aircraft several times, for a total of almost two years, due to manufacturing and inspection errors.
More recently, it was the 737 MAX that once again made headlines after faulty workmanship was discovered in the plane's rear waterproof bulkhead in the fall and the risk of a loose screw on the rudder control system was identified in December.