Note: I’ve delayed the publication of this essay a few days until my daughter returns home from a transcontinental trip she is on with multiple stops. Some of those trips include both Alaska Airlines and Boeing aircraft, and I didn’t want her to read it while getting ready to fly.
Happy New Year one and all. May the anxiety we all feel at the start of this year go completely unrewarded and fall from the sky like…parts of a 737 Max 900 (Too soon?).
Speaking of…
On New Year’s day, I was reading through aviation news and caught a clip from the Seattle Times about Boeing’s latest M.O.M. A multi-operator message is a memo sent out to airlines by Boeing letting them know about some issue, most of the time benign, that they may want to pay attention to. M.O.M.’s are commonplace, of course, but in recent years, Boeing has had a number of them. You can see them on their website or Google them yourself and see all the wonderful aviation idiosyncrasies. A note of caution: If you’re a nervous flyer, I do not recommend doing this.
But the latest M.O.M. was regarding the new(ish) version of the 737, the 900 Max. There were possible loose screws, or perhaps screws missing altogether, in the flight control surface area of the tail. It was one of many such memos on the troubled airplane that has included such things as mistakenly drilled holes, brackets attached incorrectly, and others. The fact is, the Max series of 737’s (the 800 and 900 variants) has been troubled since it rolled off the assembly line. There are good theories as to why this is so, but it’s evidence of a really important issue at Boeing, one of America’s oldest, most stalwart and innovative companies. The fine aviation journalist John Ostrower wrote about it in Air Current and it’s worth the long read, though it’s behind a subscription wall.
You can also get some excellent insight in the Av-Talk podcast (one of my favorite wonky listens when I’m walking with the beagle on our daily rounds), episode 250 from flightradar24.com, and it’s not behind a subscription wall.
My own belief (and that’s all it is…) is that the Max series of aircraft is another abject example of what happens when complex technologies are rushed to market. That is certainly the case for the Max, quite literally rushed by Boeing in order to compete with Airbus’s popular A-320/321 NEO’s, which airlines were purchasing more frequently. The half-century old 737 design was reworked to make room for larger engines, and this meant changing the landing gear to make room for them, among other things. The plane was so front heavy, that an automated system, the MCAS (maneuvering characteristics augmentation system) was added and its faulty operation appears to be the culprit of two fatal Max crashes that happened in 2018 and 2019.
So, as I read the Seattle Times piece, I was a little disconcerted because lo, and behold, I was due to fly out the next day from Seatac to Fresno on an Alaska Airlines 737 900 Max. I showed the story to Sue, and she took a second look and joked, “hm. lots of prayers.” But I have to admit, it wasn’t a joke for me, and I did pray from then right through the flight. As it happened, the flight was fine, quite good even, and I occupied a rare and welcome entire row of seats to myself on the way down, and an empty seat next to me on the way back two days later.
It was the next day after I returned, Friday, Jan. 5, that Alaska’s flight 1282, another 737 Max 900, left Portland International for Ontario International in Southern California and at just above 14,000 feet on its climb out, had an explosive decompression event caused by a chunk of the airplane coming loose and being sucked out of the fuselage. This had nothing to do with the aforementioned M.O.M. It was a totally separate issue.
The culprit was known as a “plug” for what would have otherwise been an over-wing door. In some configurations of the Max 9 (and other planes), that door need not be installed because the airline using it does not have the plane configured to hold its maximum capacity of something like 220 passengers. Alaska’s was designed to hold 189, and on flight 1282, there were 177 aboard. The plug appears to have had, you guessed it… “loose, or non-existent” bolts that were to hold it in place. In other words, yet another case of careless workmanship appears to have led to the accident. If the explosive decompression had happened at cruising altitude, the outcome would have been catastrophic.
By God’s grace, no one was killed (many were hurt, particularly with bleeding eardrums after the explosive decompression). The passenger on the aisle seat of that row, like I did, had the row to himself. The crew climbed the plane to 16,000 feet and expertly returned it to Portland. Everyone got off safely. But all of Alaska’s 737-900 Max’s that have the door plugs have been grounded indefinitely now by the airline, and the FAA has grounded much of the rest of the fleet in service.
I’m an av-geek going back to my childhood. My dad was a frequent flyer for business, and it was the heyday of the 1970’s and 80’s when flying was a bit more comfortable, a bit more fun. I loved just going to the airport to pick him up from trips, and oftentimes would get there early so I could watch the airplanes come and go. I knew every one of them by sight from DC-8’s, 9’s and 10’s to L-1011’s to 727’s and the rest of the Boeing line, and I kept a library in my head of each one.
In those early days, dad had a copy of an annual publication that featured the flight schedule of every airline in the United States (there were also global ones). Those were the heady days of airlines like Continental, TWA, Braniff, Eastern, PSA, Hughes Airwest (“Top banana in the west!”), World Airways and so many others. It detailed point of origin, destination, type of aircraft, time of flight and other information. I began to memorize it and became an annoying savant (some might say idiot savant…) that could tell you what airlines flew to Denver from Los Angeles, what kind of aircraft and time of travel. Obnoxious, yes? But fun. For me at least. These days, I listen to aviation podcasts and read about the industry, though I take a lot less pleasure in actually traveling by plane.
Like so many others, flying no longer holds that allure for me. That could be simply that I’m older now, less idealistic about it all—though I confess I have daydreams about answering the call of airlines looking to fill the gaps of the pilot shortage by offering to pay for flight school training all the way up to becoming a first officer aboard one of their aircraft for a prescribed number of years. After training, I think I could get maybe a few years of flying in before I was forced to retire at age 65 or 67, whatever the FAA is currently demanding. But I digress…
From massive passenger transit loads through overcrowded airports to smaller and smaller seats on airplanes, fewer and worse food and drink options while onboard, and passengers who, afflicted by these things, lose their cool and make it worse for everyone, flying is nothing more than a ‘necessary evil’ for most of us. And for someone like me, flying is not necessary to make a living, but only to get where I want quickly—and quickly is quickly leaving my vocabulary, since I don’t need to be terribly quick getting from point a to point b these days. So more often than not, I choose not to fly.
In light of Boeing’s current problems, though, flying is even less attractive now. Boeing is rivaled only by Airbus, its chief rival, and they are, of course, European. These problems are not minor (read Ostrower’s piece) and getting back to a culture of safety is going to take more than fine speeches and rhetoric. It’s going to take a serious revolution in Boeing’s culture for them to turn this around. There isn’t a choice—if Boeing doesn’t survive this, there is no American commercial aviation alternative.
We, the flying public, are being impacted on a daily basis by this. The 900 Max is a popular plane with two of the U.S.’s major airlines, United and Alaska, owning some 144 of the aircraft between them. Most of those aren’t in service right now, and frankly that’s in all of our best interest, though it is responsible for a large number of cancelled flights. It’s my belief that we must move from being observers of this to actively interested parties whose very livelihoods and lives are on the line.
Boeing is one of the U.S.’s most heavily government subsidized companies, which means that our tax dollars go directly to the company. The past few years have seen mistakes, errors, bad craftsmanship, and sadly catastrophic accidents resulting in the deaths of passengers. Boeing’s people know the stakes, and they’re committed to the work they do. That one fact gives me some hope, and is worth knowing. The question is, will they ante up and correct the problem(s), or will they acquiesce to a culture of mediocrity and complacency?
What Willy Loman said with irony in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, I’d say here quite frankly. “Attention must be paid…”
https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/elon-musk-dings-boeing-after-alaska-airlines-scare-prioritized-dei-hiring
https://thepostmillennial.com/revealed-united-ceo-scott-kirby-is-drag-queen-pushes-drag-and-dei-on-staff