Boeing, Alaska Airlines, United Airlines and some other airlines still have to be patient. Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft remain grounded indefinitely. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has taken a hard line with the manufacturer to ensure that a scare – or worse – like the one that affected Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, when a panel was lost mid-flight, is not repeated there was a hole in the hull. This Friday, just a week after the accident, aviation authorities released a statement with new demands on the company that would prevent this version of the plane from returning to the skies.
The press release headline was long, four lines, but it had the benefit of making the message clear from the start: “For the safety of American travelers, the FAA will ground the Boeing 737-9 Max until it undergoes a thorough inspection . “and maintenance is carried out and inspection data is checked.” It was the aviation authority's third salvo at the company in just two days, after it announced on Thursday the opening of a formal investigation and on the same Friday closer monitoring of the production process, audits and a possible submission to an external company had announced its quality controls.
They are somewhat humbling announcements for Boeing, which is trying to recover from the unprecedented crisis it suffered due to the two catastrophic accidents of two 737 Max 8s (another version of the aircraft) in 2019. Not directly related to that In the current case, the message from the FAA is that it no longer trusts Boeing enough. And in an airline, trust is crucial.
The latest announcement made this Friday suggests that the flight of the 737 Max 9 will take some time and will do so again gradually and under special monitoring. “We are working to ensure this does not happen again,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said in a statement. “Our only concern is the safety of American travelers, and the Boeing 737-9 Max will not return to the skies until we are fully satisfied that it is safe,” he added.
“After reviewing Boeing’s proposed inspection and maintenance instructions, the FAA concluded that additional data was required before approving them. “For this reason, the FAA is requiring door inspections on 40 aircraft,” says the agency, which is “encouraged by the comprehensive nature of Boeing’s instructions for inspections and maintenance.” “However, in the interest of maintaining the highest level of safety, the authority will not approve the inspection and maintenance process until it has reviewed the data from the first round of 40 inspections.”
That is, the FAA has submitted its instructions for the preliminary inspections of these 40 aircraft. It will then analyze the data collected and prepare a new final instruction for the entire fleet reviews that must approve the aircraft for return to service. It will take a long time.
After a complete review of the data, the FAA will determine whether the instructions meet the highest safety standards. If the FAA approves Boeing's inspection and maintenance instructions, operators will be required to apply this regulation to all aircraft before returning them to service.
So this indicates a lengthy and expensive process that harms not only the manufacturer, but also the airlines that have aircraft of this version in their fleet. United Airlines has the most (79), but in the case of Alaska Airlines, a smaller company, the 65 airlines make up about a fifth of its fleet, making operations much more difficult.
Inspections initiated by United Airlines and Alaska Airlines have identified preliminary deficiencies in some Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft that were grounded following the incident on the flight from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, last Friday. Inside is a panel that covers a gap that in other configurations serves as an emergency door detached from the aircraft, with its internal coating and insulating material leaving a gap in the fuselage in mid-flight.
United Airlines reported earlier on Monday that it had found some loose screws and other “installation issues” in the panels covering the space reserved for emergency doors. “Since we began pre-inspections on Saturday, we have identified cases that appear to be related to installation problems in the door panel, such as screws that needed to be tightened more,” the airline said. Then it was Alaska Airlines: “As our maintenance technicians began preparing our 737-9 Max fleet for inspections, they entered the area in question. Initial reports from our technicians indicate that some loose components have been identified in some aircraft,” the company said in a statement.
This Wednesday, Boeing Chairman and CEO Dave Calhoun and company management held a conference call with all employees in which they addressed the importance of safety and emphasized how important every detail is. In it, Calhoun intoned a “mea culpa.” “We will first address this problem by admitting our mistake,” said the manager from a factory in Renton, Washington, where these planes are made. “We will approach the matter with complete transparency at all times. We will work with the NTSB [Junta Nacional de Seguridad en el Transporte] “The company is investigating the accident itself to determine what the original cause is,” Calhoun said, according to a fragment of the intervention released by the company. In it he pointed out that, as a father and grandfather, he was aware of the danger that passengers and crew were in when a panel fell off the plane in mid-flight.
Boeing's stock price fell 12.5% this week, losing about $18 billion in market value. The company is worth $132 billion, less than half what it was in March 2019, before the second fatal accident involving one of its 737 Max 8s.
The American company closed the 2022 financial year with a loss of 4,935 million dollars (just over 4,500 million euros at the current exchange rate), making it in the red for the fourth time in a row. The company has been hit in recent years by the 737 Max crisis, the pandemic and the ruinous contract to produce the new US presidential plane Air Force One. In the first nine months of 2023, it cut its losses almost in half to $2,212 million, thanks to a 20 percent increase in income that seemed to point to an upswing. The company carries $52.3 billion in debt.
In fact, the new incident has once again put Boeing and its 737 Max model in the eye of the hurricane, having had its license to fly revoked in 2019 – the American manufacturer even halted production – after two fatal accidents that killed more than 30,000 people People aboard another version of the 737 Max, the 8. In October 2018, the flight crashed in the Java Sea in Indonesia. 610 of the low-cost airline Lion Air, operated by a 737 Max 8; A few months later, in March 2019, 157 people died on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in the worst air disaster of the year – the aircraft model was the same, the Max 8. The investigation launched after the two accidents revealed deficiencies in the design of the stabilization system (MCAS). of the model and that the company, although it had assured that the 737 Max was as safe as any other type of aircraft, knew about the error.
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