A string of accidents and problems involving Boeing planes has left many passengers wondering if air travel is still safe.
Is flying getting more dangerous?
A succession of midair mishaps has made it seem that way. In January, a door plug blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight minutes after takeoff from Portland, Ore. The vacuum created by the hole in the fuselage bent the metal of nearby seats and sucked out iPhones, headsets, and the shirt off the back of a teenage passenger. Remarkably, Flight 1282 was able to land safely, with no serious injuries or loss of life. Then in March, a LATAM Boeing 787 to New Zealand nose-dived so sharply that 50 passengers were left needing medical attention; aviation investigators believe a flight attendant accidentally hit a switch that moved a pilot's seat, pushing the pilot into the controls. That same month, a wheel fell from a United Boeing 777 taking off from San Francisco, crushing cars parked below; some experts think maintenance practices at the airline may be to blame. And in April, an engine cover blew off a Boeing 737-800 that had just left Denver, forcing an emergency landing. Those incidents have shaken many people's confidence in the safety of air travel. Leila Amineddoleh, a lawyer and frequent flyer, told NBCNews.com that she will no longer fly in a Boeing. "I just can't step on that plane."
Are these worries justified?
The statistics suggest they're not. The last fatal U.S. airline crash was in 2009, when a regional jet smashed into a home in Buffalo, killing 50 people. Since then, only five people have died in accidents on scheduled commercial flights in the U.S. Meanwhile, more than 100 people die every day on American roads. "When you arrive at the airport, and step aboard the pressurized tube, that's the safest part of the trip," said crash investigator Anthony Brickhouse. "You were more at risk driving to the airport." He believes the drama of the Alaska door blowout has made the public "hypersensitive" to routine "safety events" that don't pose a serious risk, but nevertheless shouldn't have happened. Still, other experts note that the aviation industry's record of safety is not a guarantee of future safety, and point to quality failures at Boeing as a particular source of concern.
What's happened at Boeing?
Critics say the company has in recent years put profit above safety — the results of which can be seen in the problem-plagued 737 Max. Introduced in 2017, the Max suffered two catastrophic crashes, in 2018 in Indonesia and in 2019 in Ethiopia, which together killed 346 people. Those disasters stemmed from a flight-control system that relied on data from a single sensor with no backup; when that sensor failed, it triggered anti-stall software that pushed the plane's nose toward the ground. Pilots were not told about the software, which would have required Boeing or airlines to cover the cost of additional training. "It was all about money," Shawn Pruchnicki, an aviation systems expert at Ohio State University, told Congress. "That's why those people died." The Max was grounded for two years, and Boeing paid a $2.5 billion settlement to the Justice Department. But after the Max was reauthorized by regulators, more issues were discovered: improperly mounted brackets for the vertical tail fin, improperly drilled bulkhead holes, loose bolts. The Alaska door-plug blowout was caused by four missing bolts that should have held the panel in place.
Do the problems go beyond the Max?
At Senate hearings last month, two whistle-blowers — Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour and former Boeing engineer Ed Pierson —painted a picture of a company that cuts corners and ignores faults. Salehpour told lawmakers that he found gaps between parts on 787 Dreamliners and "severe misalignment" of parts on 777s. "I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align," he said. The shortcuts, he has noted, could lead to structural failure in some 1,000 787s and 400 777s. Yet Salehpour said that when he alerted higher-ups at Boeing about his concerns, he was punished. "I was sidelined. I was told to shut up. I received physical threats." Boeing, which is under a criminal investigation over the Alaska door blowout, said it is "fully confident" in both planes and that allegations about risks to structural integrity were "inaccurate."
Is anything being done to boost safety?
The FAA has given Boeing until the end of the month to develop a plan to address "systemic" quality-control issues. As part of that plan, Boeing has opened talks about buying Spirit AeroSystems — a key supplier that makes the bodies of 737 Max Jets and which was responsible for fitting the Alaska door panel. Spirit was spun off from Boeing two decades ago, and bringing it in-house would give Boeing more control over manufacturing quality. Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun is also set to step down at the end of the year, but critics argue that replacing one person won't right the company. To regain trust, Boeing should "fire the entire C-suite," said University of Pennsylvania business professor Gad Allon. Many experts say the reform process must go beyond Boeing and also include a shake-up at the FAA.
What's wrong at the agency?
While working at Boeing's "chaotic" 737 Max production facility in Renton, Wash., in 2018, Pierson said, he never saw an FAA presence — even though the agency's Northwest headquarters was 20 minutes down the road. Former FAA engineer Joe Jacobsen told Congress that the agency's relationship with the company must shift. "The attitude right now is Boeing dictates to the FAA," he said. Pierson worries another dangerous attitude is widespread across the industry: that U.S. aviation is so safe that nothing needs to change. "There's a sense of overconfidence," he said. "That's not the right mindset. That's the mindset that gets people killed."
Boeing's problem supplier
Santiago Paredes spent about a decade on the production line at Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, doing final inspections on 737 fuselages before they were shipped to Boeing. He said he'd find hundreds of defects that needed fixing each day — missing fasteners, dents in the skin, parts containing debris — which led his bosses to nickname him "Showstopper" because of the resulting delays to deliveries. Managers pressured him to keep his reports to a minimum, Paredes told CBSNews.com, and in February 2022 asked him to be less specific about where exactly he was finding the mistakes on the fuselages. After emailing his managers to say the request was "unethical," he was stripped of his leadership position, before being reinstated after he filed an ethics complaint. Spirit calls his allegations of quality failures "unfounded." Paredes resigned from the company in the summer of 2022. "I was tired of fighting," he said. "I was tired of trying to do the right thing."
