Posted on 03/04/2024 10:56:46 AM PST by EinNYC
Ed Pierson was flying from Seattle to New Jersey in 2023, when he ended up boarding a plane he’d never wanted to fly on.
The Seattle resident booked with Alaska Airlines last March, purposefully selecting a flight with a plane he was happy to board – essentially, anything but a Boeing 737 Max.
“I got to the airport, checked again that it wasn’t the Max. I went through security, got coffee. I walked onto the plane – I thought, it’s kinda new,” Pierson told CNN. “Then I sat down and on the emergency card [in the seat pocket] it said it was a Max.”
He got up and walked off.
A flight attendant was closing the front door. I said, ‘I wasn’t supposed to fly the Max.’ She was like, ‘What do you know about the Max?’” he said.
“I said, ‘I can’t go into detail right now, but I wasn’t planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane.’”
Pierson made it to New Jersey – after some back and forth, he said, Alaska’s airport staff rebooked him onto a red-eye that evening on a different plane. Spending the whole day in the airport was worth it to avoid flying on the Max, he said.
Pierson has a unique and first-hand perspective of the aircraft, made by Boeing at its Renton factory in the state of Washington. Now the executive director of airline watchdog group Foundation for Aviation Safety, he served as a squadron commanding officer among other leadership roles during a 30-year Naval career, followed by 10 years at Boeing – including three as a senior manager in production support at Renton itself, working on the 737 Max project before its launch.
But he’s one of a number of travelers who do not want to board the aircraft which has been at the heart of two fatal crashes, as well as the January 5 incident in which part of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane blew out mid-air. The part – a door plug – was found to be missing four bolts that should have held it in place. Further reports of “many” loose bolts and misdrilled holes have emerged from the subsequent investigations into the Max 9 model after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the grounding of 171 Max 9 aircraft with the same door plug.
Experts agree that the Alaska incident could have been worse, and the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has warned that “something like this can happen again.”
The previous model, the Max 8, was involved in two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people. The crashes were widely attributed to the malfunctioning of MCAS, an automated system in the Max designed to stabilize the pitch of the plane, overriding pilot input in some circumstances. Boeing accepted its liability in 2021 for one of the crashes.
Weeks after the Alaska incident, Boeing CEO David Calhoun told investors on a quarterly call: “We will cooperate fully and transparently with the FAA at every turn… This increased scrutiny, whether it comes from us or a regulator or from third parties will make us better.”
“We caused the problem, and we understand that,” Calhoun said. “Whatever conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened. Whatever the specific cause of the accident might turn out to be, an event like this simply must not happen on an airplane that leaves one of our factories. We simply must be better.”
In February, in the wake of the Alaska incident, the company removed the head of the Max program from his position and reshuffled other senior management figures.
The move comes as critics have repeatedly said that the aircraft manufacturer is prioritizing profits over safety.
The FAA is now “taking a holistic look at the quality control issues at Boeing to ensure safety is always the company’s top priority,” a spokesperson for the government agency told CNN. Representatives are on the ground assessing the production lines at Boeing’s Renton factory and Spirit AeroSystems, whose Wichita, Kansas factory made the door plug that blew off mid-flight in the Alaska incident.
On February 28, the FAA gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to address quality and safety issues.
Boeing told CNN: “Every day, more than 80 airlines operate about 5,000 flights with the global fleet of 1,300 737 MAX airplanes, carrying 700,000 passengers to their destinations safely. The 737 MAX family’s in-service reliability is above 99% and consistent with other commercial airplane models.”
Of course, many thousands of people board Max aircraft with no concerns. But do other passengers care? It appears that enough do.
Mixed impressions The last time the Max was grounded – for 20 months, following the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 on a Max 8 in March 2019 – 25% of the 1,005 Americans questioned in a Reuters/Ipsos poll said that they had “not a lot” or “no” confidence in the aircraft – compared to 31% who did, and 44% who were unsure. The poll was taken in December 2020, shortly before the aircraft’s return to the skies.
After being “told about the aircraft’s safety issues,” a further 57% said they would be somewhat unlikely or not likely to fly in a Max, according to the report. Nearly half – 45% – said that they would still be somewhat unlikely or not very likely to fly in it after it had been back in the air for six months. And 31% of all respondents said that they had little to no confidence that the Federation Aviation Administration (FAA) “puts passenger and crew safety first when determining whether an aircraft is fit to fly.”
Most countries cleared the Max 8 to fly again by 2021, but three years on, there still appears to be negative public opinion about the Max.
“It’s unsettling that there have been so many issues with this specific type of plane,” Stephanie King, a passenger on the affected Alaska Airlines flight, told CNN in January. “I hope something is done so that this doesn’t happen again.”
Then there’s flight booking site Kayak, which has seen usage of its filter to deselect Max aircraft (models 8 and 9) during the booking process increase 15-fold since January, the company told CNN. The site introduced the filter in March 2019, after the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
Doubts have also remained across the industry as a whole. Following the Alaska incident, a February AP-Norc poll regarding air travel safety found nearly a third of Americans surveyed answered “not at all” or “a little” when asked if they believe that airplanes are safe from structural faults. While planes were generally viewed to be as safe as cars or trains for means of transportation, fewer than two in 10 surveyed strongly agreed that planes are fault-free.
If it’s Boeing, ‘I ain’t going’ Belén Estacio has boycotted the Max since the January incident. Shortly after the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout, she was scheduled on a Max for a work flight.
“My boyfriend didn’t want me to fly on it so I changed my travel plans to make sure I wasn’t flying on any type of Max,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter which model, I don’t want to fly them.” To her, she said, “The Alaska incident was further confirmation that Boeing is still not being thorough and not fixing its issues.”
Florida-based Estacio, who works in marketing, now checks the aircraft type before booking any flight. She’s made two trips since January.
“The whole thing of, ‘If it’s not Boeing I ain’t going,’ it’s totally the opposite now,” she said. “I’m very happy when I’ve seen I’ll be flying an Airbus.”
She says she’s not the only one in her circle, and says she knows people employing both “soft” and “hard” boycotts.
“Some say, ‘Absolutely not,’ others say, ‘If I can change it, I will; if not I’ll just go on it.’”
‘Not an aircraft I’d want to fly’ UK-based communications consultant Elayne Grimes is another with a personal boycott. Grimes, who travels regularly for work, was worried following the Max 8’s first crash in October 2018: Lion Air flight 610, in Indonesia, which killed all 189 onboard a plane in service for less than three months. Grimes – who’d previously worked in emergency crisis management – was immediately concerned about Boeing’s new aircraft, which had launched to great fanfare in 2017.
“I actively sought out airlines that didn’t have the Max,” she said. When Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed in March 2019, killing another 157 people, it confirmed her resolve.
In 2022, Grimes watched “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” a Netflix documentary directed by Rory Kennedy, which looked at the two tragedies and flagged concerns about the working environment at Boeing.
“I watched that and thought [Boeing] was an organization putting profit before people, and thought, ‘That’s not for me.’ I don’t see myself flying one in the near future,” she said.
While the FAA has cleared the Max to fly once more, Grimes believes that “its issues are not resolved.”
“When the door came off and they called [the planes] in and found other aircraft with issues, I thought ‘Hmm,’” she said. “It’s just not an aircraft I’d want to fly.”
Grimes is a self-declared “avgeek,” or aviation fanatic – and she’s not the only one monitoring the industry closely to have reservations. Elliot Sharod, who says he took 78 flights last year, is on the fence. “I wouldn’t exactly refuse to fly it, but I’d ideally fly an Airbus if given the choice,” he said.
A former aviation journalist, who wished to remain anonymous for professional reasons, says they lost trust after the second crash.
“After the first one, the predominant talking points were, ‘Oh, it’s got to be pilot error, or the weather – it can’t be the plane,” they say. “It was Boeing. I believed that everything coming out of Boeing had been tested and retested – it had to be something else.
“Then the Ethiopian crash happened, and there was a bit of the same messaging, but finally it came out that actually it was the plane. I lost all trust at that point in the Max.”
They say they still love flying the “older style of Boeings – the 777s and the original 737s.”
“They were all designed back in the days when engineers ruled Boeing,” they say. “I feel I can trust them more than the Max.”
‘Piss poor design’ “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”
They sound like the words of an anxious passenger in 2024. In fact, they were written by one Boeing employee to another in February 2018 – eight months before the Lion Air crash. (In the internal communications, their co-worker replied, simply, “No.”)
In April 2017, in internal messages by Boeing employees working on the soon-to-be-released Max, another employee wrote, “This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” The same exchange included a reference to the aircraft’s “piss poor design.” A design tweak was labelled as “patching the leaky boat.”
These internal communications were released as part of the 18-month investigation into the Max by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. In a 238-page report, released in September 2020, the committee outlined “the serious flaws and missteps in the design, development, and certification of the aircraft.” The report highlighted five key themes, including “production pressures that jeopardized the safety of the flying public” and a “culture of concealment” at Boeing.
At the time, Boeing said that the communications “do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable.” The company issued a statement acknowledging the committee’s findings and saying that the victims of the crashes were “in our thoughts and prayers.”
Boeing said that when the Max 8 returned to service it would be “one of the most thoroughly scrutinized aircraft in history, and we have full confidence in its safety.”
It added: “We have been hard at work strengthening our safety culture and rebuilding trust with our customers, regulators, and the flying public… We have made fundamental changes to our company… and continue to look for ways to improve.”
The House Committee report also included concerns about the FAA and its “grossly insufficient oversight” over Boeing during the Max design process and in the period between the two crashes. The report said that “gaps in the regulatory system at the FAA… allowed this fatally flawed plane into service.”
A spokesperson for the FAA told CNN: “The FAA made significant improvements to its delegation and aircraft certification processes in recent years and took immediate action following the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines door plug incident to address concerns about the quality of aircraft that Boeing and its suppliers produce.”
‘Vindicated’ after safety failure Rory Kennedy followed the investigation from start to finish. The director of “Downfall” told CNN she didn’t have a “strong opinion” on the plane until she started making the documentary in early 2020.
But, she said, “I was shocked by what we discovered… [it] was really disturbing.”
Her film is a forensic investigation of the two crashes. “Downfall” interviews ex-Boeing staff and concerned pilots, who paint a picture of an accident waiting to happen. It follows the congressional hearings held as part of the House investigation, and interviews the victims’ families.
Kennedy says that during the design process Boeing “went to great pains to hide [MCAS] and how powerful it was.” The stabilizing system was designed specifically for the Max, since the fuel-efficient engines being added to the 1960s-designed plane affected the trim. The House committee found that Boeing concealed its existence from the FAA, airlines and pilots.
Additionally, after the Lion Air crash, FAA analysis in December 2018 predicted that without a software fix, a Max could crash on average once every two years over the course of its usage. Yet the plane was not grounded at the time.
“Boeing and FAA both gambled with public safety,” House committee chair Peter DeFazio said in a 2020 statement.
IF YOU WANT TO READ THE REST OF THIS VERY LONG ARTICLE, GO TO THE URL.
When pilots start refusing to take the wheel of a “Max” I’ll get worried.
This whole fiasco stems from the McDonnell Douglas merger and envelops nearly the entire 737 family ever since (starting with the NG, outlined here https://www.aljazeera.com/program/people-power/2010/12/15/on-a-wing-and-a-prayer).
Boeing’s ‘fix’, ironically, is to buy back Spirit AeroSystems (which split off from Boeing a few years back).
Well I ain’t flying on one. You do what you want. It’s your life.
Fair enough
Boeing needs to come up with a replacement for 737 Max line. And then replace all 737 Max 8 and 9 planes.
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