New York:
Boeing has made headlines recently after a series of problems with its planes, with the most recent incidents in Turkey and Senegal.
The episodes, which follow a near-catastrophic panel blowout on an Alaska Airlines plane in January, point to production and maintenance problems, say experts, who see no clear pattern behind the numerous incidents.
Result of incidents
The US planemaker has been under scrutiny since January 5, when an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 made an emergency landing after a fuselage panel blew out, somehow avoiding serious injuries in an incident that safety officials say could have been catastrophic.
United Airlines has experienced recent problems on several flights using Boeing planes, as has Southwest Airlines, which suffered an engine fire on one flight in early April.
On Thursday, a Boeing 737-300 skidded off a runway in Senegal, causing 11 injuries, including four seriously.
That followed an incident Wednesday in Istanbul in which a FedEx Boeing 767 cargo plane landed on its nose after its front landing gear failed to deploy.
Such a confluence of incidents is “quite rare” in aviation, said aviation expert Bertrand Vilmer, who described the numerous “abnormal” problems as reflecting “an alignment of unfavorable planets.”
Alternative causes
Aviation experts typically look at three possible explanations for problems.
There may be a design flaw, as in the two fatal crashes of 737 MAX jets in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia, which involved a fault in a flight stabilization system.
Aviation observers have pointed to a production error as the likely source of the Alaska Airlines incident, which involved a Boeing 737 MAX 9 that had only been delivered in October.
A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board released in February found that four bolts intended to secure the blown-off panel were missing.
A third possible cause would be inadequate maintenance.
Although design and production are the responsibility of the aircraft manufacturer, the airline is responsible for maintaining the aircraft once it receives it.
“Once the plane is delivered, Boeing has nothing to do with it” regarding maintenance, said Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory.
Safest form of transportation?
Despite the recent spate of incidents, aviation experts point to an overall strong safety record.
“We haven't had a single casualty in the entire U.S. aviation industry in the last 10 years, despite millions of people flying,” Aboulafia said. “That's incredible.”
Aboulafia calls modern flying “the safest form of transportation ever created by man,” noting that “hundreds of people die on the roads every day.”
Boeing's rival, Airbus, has not been entirely spared from difficulties. Hundreds of aircraft produced by the European company are being taken out of service to check for microscopic “contamination” of metals in Pratt & Whitney engines.
Airbus also had a public dispute with Qatar Airways over the deterioration of aircraft exterior surfaces.
But there have been fewer such problems at Airbus, with no incident attracting a similar level of attention as Alaska Airlines, experts said.
“Every incident involving Boeing aircraft this year has made headlines, indicating that Boeing aircraft are unsafe,” said a note from equity research firm Bernstein.
“The reality is that the number of incidents in the US involving Airbus and Boeing aircraft so far this year is proportional to the number of aircraft in US airline fleets.”
The U.S. commercial fleet currently has about 4,800 aircraft, about 60 percent of which are Boeing jets, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)