Last week’s emergency involving a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines is the latest safety failure for Boeing. Shortly after the jet took off from Portland on January 5, a door panel blew off, forcing an emergency landing. There were only minor injuries, but the 737 MAX 9 has been grounded amid inspections. Both Alaska and United say they’ve found loose hardware on other MAX 9 jets in their fleet.
Peter Robison is a Seattle journalist who has written extensively about the history and culture at Boeing. He’s a senior reporter for Bloomberg News and the author of the2021 book – Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, which examines the lead up to deadly crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 in 2018 and 2019.
On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it had launched an investigation into Boeing related to the door panel incident over Portland.
Interview Highlights
On whether the FAA investigation will have any teeth
That is a huge issue. And it's one that I wrote about in the book. It's the shift in the FAA's culture, not just Boeing's, where the FAA felt that it was almost subservient to the manufacturer and viewed Boeing as its customer. In this case, I do think the FAA is trying to set a tone right from the start of saying that it is in charge. That's why it issued this statement in the way that it did and is saying that 'we are investigating you Boeing, and we are going to be looking at all of the aspects of manufacturing, and especially the potential lack of inspections that may have led to this accident'.
On how this incident differs from previous Boeing safety lapses
What's different about this one is that it happened in real time in the United States on a U.S. airline. The two crashes in 2018 and 2019 happened overseas. People read about them, [but] they may not have experienced them viscerally. In this case, people saw what was happening through those cell phone videos in real time. And it added a real terrifying aspect to it. And the thought that something like that could have resulted from loose bolts or a skipped step in the manufacturing process has been very alarming to the flying public.
On how Boeing is managing this crisis
Boeing seems to have learned its lesson, at least the lesson in how to communicate to the public about this, in that you saw this speech by [current CEO] Dave Calhoun to employees, which Boeing also made sure that people could see, it distributed a clip of that on its website. And Dave Calhoun said we're going to acknowledge our mistake. And that was something that was lacking after the previous incidents. [Previous Boeing CEO] Dennis Muilenberg blamed the pilots after the Lion Air crash [in 2018]. He insisted there was no technical slip or gap that Boeing had made after the second crash. That hasn't happened. But we'll have to see if Boeing's actions from this point, as it's responding to the FAA and explaining what it did, hopefully to both the FAA and to the NTSB, and to the public. We'll have to hope that that is as transparent as they're promising.
On whether anything’s changed at Boeing after the deadly 737 MAX 8 crashes of 2018 and 2019
Again, Boeing has put in place publicly available measures that show that it is putting safety first. It created a safety committee of its board. And we're told that the safety committee met a day after the incident in Portland. Boeing has appointed one of its engineers to be the Chief Safety Officer, and Dave Calhoun made a point of saying during that meeting with employees that he is in charge from this point, and the plane won't fly until he's satisfied. But again, the reports we hear from the ground are that Boeing is pressing to meet production rates. This is not the first manufacturing problem we've heard about. There have been loose bolts in the rudder control system that the FAA already said it was stepping up inspections of. There have been misaligned drill holes, there's been discussion of workers who supply Boeing with the fuselage being under pressure to meet production rates and potentially having issues with turnover there among the workforce.
On why Boeing has been attached to the 737 for more than a half century
Boeing faced [what] some people call the 'innovator's dilemma.' It was first to the market with this airplane that brought a lot of innovations to the market, and then it started making lots of money, lots of profits on that model as it paid off the costs of the tooling. And especially when the Airbus A320 emerged as a viable competitor. Boeing always had this choice of should it scrap what it had done with the 737? [or] move on with a new airplane? And in several cases, deemed that that would be too expensive and didn't update the airplane and didn't create an all new airplane. And many people now point to that as a missed opportunity. Boeing, from 2013 to 2019, spent more than $40 billion on stock buybacks at a time when interest rates were extremely low, it could have used that money to put out an all-new airplane instead of simply updating the 50-year-old 737.
On how long it might take to get the MAX 9 back into the air
It may take weeks or months because the FAA is under a lot of pressure to show that it's independent from Boeing. And it's already slowed the process of approving the procedures Boeing wants to use to inspect these airplanes. And that's just one step along the way. There are going to be many steps like that along the way.
