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You should worry that a crying baby will be in the seat next to you. You should worry that snow in Chicago will snarl air traffic. But you should never, ever have to worry that a plug in the side of your plane — a hidden weak spot — will suddenly blow out at 16,000 feet. That is what happened to Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 shortly after takeoff from Portland, Ore., on Friday.
No one was seriously injured, but air travelers are frightened, and rightly so, partly because of the unnerving sense of hidden danger. The wall next to seat 26A on the two-month-old Boeing 737 Max 9 looked like any other part of the wall as the plane ascended. What passengers couldn’t see was that behind the plastic shell and the insulation was a cutout in the fuselage. The cutout was where an emergency exit would go in a different configuration of the plane. That unseen cutout was filled with a plug, a kind of door that’s ordinarily bolted shut except during maintenance. Something was wrong with the plug, though, and suddenly it blew out, landing three miles below in the backyard of a science teacher.
By sheer luck, the two seats next to where the hole opened were among only seven on the plane that happened to be empty. Also by sheer luck, the blowout happened before the jet had reached cruising altitude, where the sudden loss of cabin pressure would have been far more severe. Passengers might have been sucked out of the hole or, if unmasked, died from a lack of oxygen.
I asked experts why the blowout occurred, who’s to blame and what needs to happen next. Air travel remains remarkably safe. But I didn’t come away with any strong reassurance that something like this won’t happen again.
It seems unlikely that the accident was caused by a design flaw, making it different from the crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 jets in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, both within minutes of takeoff. Other Max 9 jets haven’t had any problems with their plugs blowing out in flight.
That’s good news in one way but bad in another, because it makes it more likely that the problem occurred in manufacturing. A design flaw can be fixed once and for all, but sloppiness in manufacturing — if that is indeed the problem here — tends to be chronic and harder to put right. Come to think of it, one could well argue that any design that’s highly susceptible to being manufactured incorrectly is, by definition, flawed.
Jennifer Homendy, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said Monday that the agency was pursuing a theory that bolts that were supposed to hold the plug in place were never installed. That came after United Airlines said it had found loose bolts on similar panels on some of its Max 9 jets and Alaska Airlines said it had found “loose hardware” on Max 9s. (United and Alaska have all the Max 9s in the United States and two-thirds of those worldwide. The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded for inspection all those that have door plugs.)
Imagine that one person with a power wrench doesn’t tighten the bolts on a door plug enough. Or overtightens them and strips them. Or fails to thread through the thick wire at the top of the bolt that keeps it from loosening. Or, worse yet, leaves the bolts out entirely. Then imagine that the person’s faulty work isn’t inspected or that the inspector overlooks the mistake. The plug is then covered, and the plane goes into service with a potentially fatal flaw. Speculation, of course, but easy to imagine.
If manufacturing is the problem, it may not be entirely Boeing’s fault. The fuselages for the 737 Max 9 are made by Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, a 2005 spinoff of Boeing. They’re produced in Wichita, Kan., and then shipped by rail to Renton, Wash., for final assembly of the planes by Boeing. Spirit installed the plugs, although investigators haven’t determined whether it is responsible for whatever went wrong. Boeing had other issues with Spirit twice in the past year. One case involved fittings that attach the vertical tail fin to the fuselage. In the other, holes were improperly drilled in the aft pressure bulkhead in some Max 8s.
It’s hardly reassuring to know that Boeing might have someone else to blame, because ultimately Boeing is responsible for the safety of the aircraft it delivers. If it can’t catch mistakes, who can? Again, for airline passengers, it’s that sense of hidden danger and the feeling that one’s fate is not in one’s own hands.
After the two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, Boeing fired its chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, and agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the Justice Department. Last year it reached a $200 million settlement that resolved an investigation into whether Boeing and Muilenburg had misled investors by suggesting that human error was to blame for the crashes and by failing to mention the company’s concerns about the plane.
David Calhoun, who replaced Muilenburg in January 2020, told Wall Street analysts this past October that “we’ve added rigor around our quality processes.” He also expressed confidence in the new chief executive of Spirit, Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive.
Now Calhoun’s confident talk of straightening things out rings hollow. Jason Gursky, who follows Boeing for Citi, told me he’s seen emails from angry shareholders calling for Calhoun to resign.
One big problem Calhoun has is a relatively inexperienced work force, Gursky said, due to employees not returning from Covid-era furloughs. There’s a steep learning curve in assembling passenger jets, just as there is in putting together a kid’s bicycle, he said, and many of Boeing’s veterans are gone from the factory floor. Richard Healing, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board who is chief executive of Air Safety Engineering, a consulting company in Lewes, Del., said the Covid pandemic damaged employees’ motivation and attention to detail in many industries across the economy, and Boeing and Spirit may be no exception.
I have no idea if what Healing said is correct. When I asked Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant in Burke, Va., if Boeing had a flawed safety culture, he said: “I just don’t know. It’s obviously not perfect, because they’ve been having these problems recently. I just don’t know.”
Boeing declined to comment for this newsletter, simply reasserting that “we are committed to ensuring every Boeing airplane meets design specifications and the highest safety and quality standards.” Spirit’s website says, “Spirit is a committed partner with Boeing on the 737 program, and we continue to work together with them on this matter.”
On Monday — that is, after the Alaska Airlines accident — I flew on a Boeing 737 Max 8. It was a United Airlines aircraft. There was no 13th row, apparently because United worries that superstitious customers won’t want to sit in it. I happened to be in the 14th row, which, of course, was actually the 13th. I didn’t worry at all about being in the 13th row, but I did worry just a bit that the aircraft could have a hidden flaw. If it did, there was nothing that any of us on board could do about it.
Elsewhere: Russia’s Economic Expansion Is Fragile
The Russian economy seems to be weathering Russia’s war against Ukraine well, but “over a third of Russia’s growth is due to the war, with defense-related industries flourishing at double-digit growth rates,” according to Alexandra Prokopenko in a Jan. 8 article in the journal Foreign Affairs. Inflation is “fast becoming a problem,” she wrote, and “overheating — often a precursor to recession — is a growing threat.” Prokopenko, who worked at Russia’s central bank until early 2022, is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin and a researcher at the Center of Eastern European and International Studies.
Quote of the Day
“Certainly, with this further solid evidence of the ability of citrus fruits to combat scurvy, one would expect the British Navy to have adopted this innovation for all ship’s crews on long sea voyages. In fact, it did so, but not until 1795, forty-eight years later, when scurvy was immediately wiped out. After only seventy more years, in 1865, the British Board of Trade adopted a similar policy and eradicated scurvy in the merchant marine.”
— Everett M. Rogers, “Diffusion of Innovations,” fifth edition (2003)
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