Repeated incidents, disastrous audit, death of a whistleblower… New black streak for Boeing

Air hole for Boeing. Incidents on aircraft have been linked for several days for the American aircraft manufacturer, Airbus' great rival. The latest one is also one of the most serious: on Monday evening, around fifty passengers on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, en route between Sydney and Auckland and operated by the Chilean company Latam, were injured after their aircraft quickly lost altitude above the Tasman Sea.

All passengers whose seat belts were not fastened were suddenly thrown to the ceiling. Four people were still hospitalized Tuesday morning, and an investigation was opened by the New Zealand authorities, who will receive support from Chile.

Already last week, within a 48-hour period, two incidents affected Boeing aircraft. First on Thursday March 7, with a United Airlines Boeing 777 forced to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles (California) after losing the tire on one of its wheels when it took off from San Francisco, without cause injuries. The next day, a Boeing 737 MAX, still from the American company United Airlines, saw its landing gear break shortly after landing on the tarmac at Houston airport (Texas), which had caused him to finish his race off the track. No one was injured in the incident.

Also read: Bankruptcy, temporary nationalization… Can Boeing escape the worst-case scenario?

We also learned last week that a Boeing 737-800 had landed on March 1 at the Portland (Ore.) airport with the door to its animal hold slightly open. Luckily, all the pets there survived. We can also cite, among recent setbacks, the U-turn and emergency landing of a Boeing 737-900 at Houston airport, after its reactor caught fire, again without causing any casualties. Another plane experienced the same mishap in Portland after passengers complained of a smell of smoke inside the cabin.

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The media coverage of such incidents on social networks and in the media maintains psychosis among travelers, which (re)appeared after the serious incident in early January of which a 737 MAX 9 aircraft was the victim. In mid-flight, a door of the plane, operated by Alaska Airlines, came loose 16,000 feet above Portland. By some miracle, the plane was able to turn around and make an emergency landing, without any serious injuries being reported.

However, this incident was not without consequences for the aircraft manufacturer. Several passengers filed complaints against Boeing in January. Three passengers present on the plane that day are even claiming no less than a billion dollars (or a little more than 920 million euros) in damages, according to information revealed by the British daily The Independent last week. .

Following this incident, the American Civil Aviation Regulatory Agency (FAA) grounded 171 of the 737 MAX 9 aircraft in circulation while it conducted emergency inspections. The regulator also launched an audit of the 737 MAX production process, which is proving catastrophic for the aircraft manufacturer. Revealed by the New York Times this Tuesday, its results show that the production of the device failed in 33 of the 89 tests carried out, according to the American newspaper, with a total of 97 cases of alleged non-compliance. Earlier this month, the FAA gave Boeing 90 days to submit a plan to address quality control issues, with the Federal Aviation Administration urging the company to "commit to making real improvements and deep.

Boeing therefore seems to have entered a new zone of turbulence, after having already experienced a serious crisis linked to its “cursed plane”, the 737 MAX, two aircraft of which were victims of crashes between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019. The first accident, in October 2018, a Lion Air plane off the coast of Indonesia caused 189 deaths. The second, in March 2019, caused the death of 157 passengers and crew members of the Ethiopian Airlines plane, which crashed in a field southeast of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. In both cases, a problem with new software was the cause of the crashes.

As if the period was not dark enough for Boeing, a former employee of the aircraft manufacturer who became a whistleblower, regularly questioning the company's production and safety standards, was found dead in the United States. SATURDAY. He died from an apparent "self-inflicted" wound, according to the South Carolina coroner's office. In other words, it would be suicide. Police have launched an investigation into his death.