Confidence in Boeing is plummeting. According to the Morning Consult barometer, the balance of Americans having confidence in the brand fell from 32 to 20 points between December 2023 and January; that of passengers frequently using its planes fell from 41 to 28 points. After the emergency exit door of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 detached in flight on Friday January 5, the aircraft manufacturer is in dire straits. Here he is once again caught in turmoil, unable to fly his planes safely, after the disaster of the 737 MAX 8 of Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, which caused 346 victims in 2018 and 2019. And on Wednesday January 24, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US civil aviation regulator, said a front wheel of a Boeing 757, operated by Delta Air Lines, came loose as the plane was lining up for takeoff from Atlanta International Airport, the weekend of January 20-21.
Even the stock market is finally coming to terms with the facts: something is broken at Boeing, which has lost 18% of its value since the start of the year.
The regulatory authority ordered the immobilization for inspection of 737 MAX aircraft with these door closures, mainly at United Airlines and Alaska Airlines. She strongly criticized the company, which had already lied to the authorities during the certification of the 737 MAX 8. “This incident should never have happened and it cannot happen again”, declared the FAA in a press release. On Sunday, January 21, it extended door inspection requirements for the 737-900 ER, which preceded the MAX 9. Since its inaugural flight in 2006, the FAA said the 737-900 ER had recorded more than eleven million hours of operation and completed 3.9 million flights, without any problems related to door closing.
His mistakes made over a quarter of a century
The affair led to the trial of the company and all its errors committed over a quarter of a century: its inability to see the rise of Airbus and its A320s, which were going to compete with the Boeing 737s; the merger with the military aircraft manufacturer McDonnell Douglas and the takeover of Boeing by its managers, more accustomed to political frolicking in Washington to obtain subsidies than to working industrially on the quality of aircraft; an obsession with profitability, leading after a major strike in Seattle, the historic cradle of the aircraft manufacturer, in 2000, to relocate the headquarters to Chicago; moving part of the production to South Carolina and subcontracting the construction of the fuselage to a former Kansas factory, Spirit AeroSystems.
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