A short flight on Friday teetered into near-disaster, and eyes are on Boeing—again.
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On Friday, a short flight teetered into near disaster when a chunk of the plane flew off during its ascent. Whatever the results of the pending investigation into what went wrong, the accident comes at a bad moment for Boeing.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
‘A Black Eye’
Ten minutes into an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, a plug in the frame of a spare emergency door broke off. The scene that unfolded sounds like a nightmare: One passenger texted loved ones that something was wrong with the plane, adding, “I love you.” Headrests were ripped off seats, and a shirt even reportedly flew off a young boy on board before the plane—with a gaping hole in its side—began an emergency landing. Thankfully, no one was killed or seriously injured, but the scene is both terrifying on a human level and concerning on a corporate one.
The National Transportation Safety Board, with the cooperation of Boeing, is starting an investigation to figure out what happened. On Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded some Boeing 737 Max 9 airplanes until they could be thoroughly inspected. A pressurization warning light on the same plane involved in Friday’s incident had lit up on recent flights, leading Alaska Airlines to restrict the aircraft from long journeys.
The missing plug was discovered over the weekend in a teacher’s backyard near Portland; having access to that piece will make it easier for investigators to understand what went wrong, experts told me. But for Boeing, this is, at the least, “a black eye,” as Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst, told me; the potential longer-term damage to the company will depend on the results of the investigation.
Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft have a harrowing history: In 2018 and 2019, two separate flights on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes crashed, killing a total of 346 people. The fiasco cost the company more than $20 billion and reputational damage; 737 Max planes were grounded for nearly two years. Friday’s incident may shove those bad associations to the front of consumers’ minds again. “This couldn’t have come for a worse model of aircraft than the 737 Max,” Scott Keyes, the founder of the travel company Going, told me. Many people can’t name a single plane model, he said. That many can name 737s—and that they may associate it with safety problems—is not great for Boeing. In a note to employees today that a spokesperson shared with me, two Boeing executives wrote, “The safety of our airplanes and everyone who steps onboard is a core Boeing value … We agree with and fully support the FAA’s decision to require immediate inspections of 737-9 MAX airplanes with the same configuration as the affected airplane.” (Alaska Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The crashes that grounded Boeing aircraft five years ago were linked to the malfunctioning of a computer system called MCAS. Problems came about in part because the FAA—short on resources—was allowing Boeing to effectively police itself on some routine inspections. “The FAA essentially allowed the fox to oversee the chicken coop,” Harteveldt told me, adding that in the years since, the FAA has said that it will not allow companies to have as much self-oversight.
In the 26 years since its merger with a rival manufacturing firm, Boeing has received criticism for prioritizing its stock performance over customer safety. Boeing stock dipped after Friday’s accident (as has the stock of Spirit AeroSystems, which manufactured and first installed the plug). Its executives canceled a planned retreat and announced a meeting with employees. In the airline industry, a business’s standard focus on profit must coexist with safety, Harteveldt said: “What good is it for a company to have stellar financial metrics if one of its products is viewed, or feared to be, unsafe?”
Related:
Today’s News
Evening Read
A Second Life for My Beloved Dog
By Charlie Warzel
Peggy was my first dog—the dog I waited 28 patient years for. I finally met her on August 15, 2015. She was eight weeks old, covered in filth after a 14-hour ride from Georgia to New York, and inexplicably still adorable. Floppy ears. Jet-black muzzle. Meaty little forepaws …
She was a constant, as any dog would be, through cross-country moves, quarter-life crises, career changes, new presidential administrations, and a pandemic. Then, one day last May, quite unexpectedly, she was gone.
We let her go in the middle of the night, so quickly that we weren’t able to say goodbye. Until then, I’d been lucky enough to avoid this type of tragic, sudden loss. My grief in those early moments felt like the emergency exit on an airplane had opened mid-flight, the sudden loss of cabin pressure violently sucking everything out of the hull that isn’t bolted down. For days, my fuselage was empty, the contents scattered and falling from the sky. I went on walks, laughed and cried at random, and tried to stay busy. But all I really wanted to do—the only thing that felt appropriate and sustaining—was look at pictures of Peggy on my phone. I lost hours inside my camera roll staring at her reddish-brown fur centered in the frame, while watching us become a family in the background. My device, normally a wasteland, became a refuge.
Read the full article.
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Culture Break
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Read. “Reasons to Live,” a new poem by Ruth Awad:
“Because if you can survive / the violet night, you can survive / the next, and the fig tree will ache / with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives”
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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