The dangerous blowout of an exit door plug on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Jan. 5 once again has Boeing in an unwanted spotlight.
On Jan. 9, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun acknowledged that the aerospace giant would have to reckon with the incident. His statement came a day after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) revealed that the door plug, which was recovered from a schoolteacher’s backyard in Portland, Ore., was missing four bolts that are responsible for locking it in place.
"We are going to approach this, No. 1, acknowledging our mistake," Calhoun said at a staff meeting that the company made available to the media. "We are going to approach it with 100% complete transparency every step of the way."
There were no fatalities on Flight 1282. The Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft had ascended to 16,000 feet several minutes after departure from Portland when the door plug dislodged. The flight was able to return to Portland, where it made an emergency landing.
Alaska was using the plug in place of the emergency exit door that would be required if the plane was configured with a larger number of seats.
The incident caused the FAA to ground approximately 171 Max 9 aircraft, pending inspections of door plugs.
Preliminary inspections by United and Alaska, which have a combined 144 Max 9s in their fleets, turned up what the carriers said were loose bolts and hardware on some door plugs.
The NTSB is now investigating to determine why the bolts on the blown-out plug fell off and if the plug even had bolts to begin with. The aircraft is new, having been delivered from Boeing in late October.
Quality-control issues have long plagued the 737 Max family. Most significantly, the smaller Max 8 aircraft was grounded globally for 20 months beginning in the spring of 2019 following the second of two crashes that killed a combined 346 people. The crashes were caused by a faulty sensor, which transmitted erroneous information to the planes' automated flight-control system, causing the aircraft to nosedive.
Boeing also delayed some Max deliveries last April after it discovered that parts supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which also supplies the Max 9 door plugs now under scrutiny, used a nonstandard manufacturing process on fittings near the rear of dozens of planes.
Then in August, Boeing encountered another problem with Spirit-supplied parts, this time involving improperly drilled holes on rearward bulkheads. And late last month, Boeing, in consultation with the FAA, urged 737 Max operators to look for a loose bolt in the rudder control system after an unnamed airline discovered a bolt with a missing nut while performing routine maintenance of a 737.
Manufacturing defects also led to the suspension of Boeing 787 widebody deliveries for the lion's share of the 22-month period between October 2020 and August 2022.
Despite the repeated failures, analysts don't expect the Max 9 grounding to cost Boeing much business from airline customers.
"It's a duopoly, and the costs of switching suppliers are very huge and the wait for any kind of new-generation narrowbody is very long," said Richard Aboulafia, managing director of the aerospace consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory.
Bloomberg Intelligence aviation industry analyst George Ferguson said that even when accounting for ordinary order book attrition, the Boeing Max backlog is approximately four or five years. The backlog on orders of aircraft in the Airbus A320neo family, which compete with the Max family, is approximately six or seven years.
"I think if you're in Boeing's backlog right now, there's minimal chance that they lose any of those orders," Ferguson said. "But I think there's a risk that if you have a dual fleet and you're looking at a new order, you might think, 'I'm not going to put anymore into the Max.'"
Still, both analysts said that the Max 9 grounding points to ongoing structural failings at Boeing and within its supply chain.
"There's the long-term question of how many more incidents is Boeing going to experience before it reforms itself," Aboulafia said. "This is no way to run a company."
Since Calhoun took over the embattled manufacturer in 2020, Aboulafia said that Boeing has failed to promote engineers and technicians to senior leadership. Meanwhile, the company moved its corporate headquarters from Chicago in 2022, but rather than getting closer to its manufacturing base in Everett, Wash., Boeing instead relocated its corporate suite to the Washington, D.C.-area.
Both Ferguson and Aboulafia said that Boeing has yet to recover from the staffing brain-drain caused first by the grounding of the Max fleet and then the pandemic.
"Now the challenge for management teams is employee training and oversight for these backfilled positions and it hasn't gone well," Ferguson said.
Spirit AeroSystems, and suppliers throughout Boeing's supply chain, have faced a similar dynamic. Notably, in October Boeing agreed to pay higher prices to Spirit AeroSystems and also to provide $100 million in financing in an effort to shore up the supplier's resources.
As the NTSB moves ahead with its investigation into the Alaska Flight 1282 incident, one thing it will seek to determine is where the issue with plug bolts originated.
Spirit Aerosystems delivered that Max 9 fuselage to Boeing, including the door plug, from its plant in Wichita, Kan. But Boeing might have later removed and re-installed the plug as it further prepped the aircraft for delivery, Ferguson said.
"At the end of the day, it's Boeing's responsibility to push an airworthy aircraft out the backdoor," he added.