Another week, another series of bad news stories for Boeing.
On Monday, 50 people were injured (none were killed) when a 787 “dropped abruptly” midflight from Sydney to Auckland. That same day, the New York Times reported that a Federal Aviation Administration investigation into the production of the 737 Max jets found that the company failed 33 of the 89 product audits at the factory where the planes are being built. The FAA’s inspection was connected to the alarming incident in which a door plug blew out of a Max 9 midflight in January.
It’s worth underscoring: Air travel remains extremely safe. As my colleague Marina Bolotnikova writes, the number of Americans killed on US commercial fights in the last 10 years is two. During that same period, 365,000 Americans were killed in car crashes.
In fact, the reason Boeing’s recent failures have attracted so much scrutiny is because these types of events are so rare.
That said, reporting on Boeing’s plane problems — and reading Whizy Kim’s piece from late January diving deep into the corporate issues at the company — have made me more appreciative of the risks posed by a combination of profit-driven corporate culture, inadequate regulation, and strained resources.
“The Boeing story is far from over,” Matthew Oliver, an aerospace engineer formerly with the Canadian Armed Forces and expert in complex systems failures and forensic investigations, told me.
It’s “like an onion,” he says. “There are so many layers to the Boeing failure.”
Let’s peel them back.
Profits over planes
The flight control features that caused the 737 Max planes to........