- A hole in a plane, government investigations,
aircraft being grounded,
$12 billion wiped from the stock price
and airlines reexamining their aircraft
to find yet more manufacturing faults.
This wasn't exactly the start to 2024 that Boeing wanted.
See, after spending years enduring the fallout
from the MAX crisis where two Boeing planes crashed
due to a flight control design flaw
killing hundreds of people,
the company was finally showing signs of a full recovery.
- They had normalized production levels,
they were getting some more respect on Wall Street.
- But then a door plug
from an Alaska Airlines Boeing aircraft,
which had only been delivered months before,
fell off in midair,
triggering yet another crisis for the company.
- What does Boeing look like in the next few years
if it has to deal with another crisis?
- [George] So can Boeing afford another setback?
While nobody was killed or seriously injured
in the Alaska Airlines accident-
- We coulda ended up with something so much more tragic
and we're really fortunate that that did not occur here.
- [George] The door plug,
which is a panel used to plug up the space
where an emergency exit would be,
fell off early in the flight.
- It was shortly after takeoff,
passengers were still in their seatbelt,
the plane was ascending
and there was no one seated
right next to the door plug that blew off.
- If somebody had been in that seat,
it's likely they probably would've died.
That's at least what we're told by the NTSB.
And that's really what's triggered this massive panic
and investigation into what actually happened.
- [George] One major question
in the accident investigator's probe
is whether this was a one-off accident
for the singular door plug,
or a manufacturing issue
that could affect many of Boeing's aircraft.
The door plugs are manufactured
by a company called Spirit Aerosystems,
which actually used to be part of Boeing
until the division was spun off in 2005.
Spirit has said it's working with Boeing
to determine what went wrong,
but a crucial piece of evidence,
the bolts that are supposed to hold the door plug in place,
remain missing,
- And we have not yet determined if they existed there.
- Figuring out what happened with the bolts
is a key piece of this.
- The accident led to the FAA grounding
around 170 MAX 9 aircraft
and ordering the inspection of the planes.
But it wasn't long before the reputational damage
to Boeing and the FAA began to spread further
than the MAX 9's door plugs.
See, when it comes to recommendations, inspections,
and safety checks for Boeing
and other American made aircraft,
airlines and regulators across the globe
typically follow the lead of the FAA.
However, around the same time
that both United Airlines and Alaska Airlines
announced they'd found loose bolts on their aircraft-
- What we saw was airlines saying, "You know what?
We're gonna check our aircraft, our Boeing MAX aircraft,
even though they're not the models
that the FAA has stipulated need to be checked."
- Despite having no MAX 9 aircraft,
South Korea, China, and India all ordered their airlines
to examine their fleet of MAX 8 aircraft,
though they found nothing.
And Indonesia ordered Lion Air
to inspect the doors on its MAX 9 aircraft.
- It's certainly a sign that Boeing doesn't have
full, full confidence of safety regulators
or its airline customers.
- That really speaks to this idea
that there may be a loss of faith, not just in Boeing,
but also in Boeing's oversight by the FAA.
- The FAA's administrator, Mike Whitaker, said
"The agency showed its global leadership on safety
by immediately grounding the MAX 9,"
and said, "Regulators would make sure the planes were safe
before they fly again."
That potential loss of faith
could impact the range of planes
that Boeing is able to offer in years to come.
And to understand why,
you need to go back to the MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019.
- An Indonesia passenger plane crashing into the sea
minutes after takeoff.
- [Reporter] Rescuers have located debris,
but they do not expect to find any survivors.
- The new Boeing 737 crashing,
just minutes after takeoff in Ethiopia.
- 157 people from more than 30 countries were killed.
- [George] The crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft
led to the grounding of hundreds of jets
for nearly two years.
The FAA began increasing its oversight
of Boeing's manufacturing
and the company had to pay billions
to compensate airlines due to the MAX grounding
and problems that emerged with other aircraft.
- It slowed everything down.
It took up resources, it took up time.
And so Boeing arguably wasn't able to focus
on developing the next new aircraft
in a way they could have been.
- [George] Fast forward to 2023,
and Boeing now has a far narrower selection of planes
than European rival Airbus,
who's offering ranges from the 100-seat A220,
all the way up to the massive A350-1000.
Airbus also has the A321NEO,
which can fly a greater number of passengers farther
than Boeing's 737 MAX 10,
a plane which still isn't certified
because of delays related to the MAX crisis.
And that's partly why Airbus, who overtook Boeing
as the world's largest plane maker in 2019,
was able to post record orders in 2023,
far outstripping Boeing's orders.
- And there's a question here.
Does this difference between the orders
speak to maybe the fact
that Boeing's management are distracted?
You know, they're focused on other things.
Where Airbus is able to go out there
and just focused on winning orders
and, you know, working with customers
and being able to deliver a more nuanced product lineup
that can really take away
some of the market share that Boeing has.
- So even though the plane landed safely,
could the Alaska Airlines incident disrupt the duopoly
between Boeing and Airbus in the long run?
Well, both Airbus and Boeing
have huge manufacturing backlogs.
So Airbus is unlikely to gain much of an advantage
in the short term.
- They're pretty much sold out for the next,
you know, eight to nine years.
If you wanna buy a big chunk of new orders from Airbus,
you're really looking at the early 2030s
before Airbus can even start delivering them.
- And handling the MAX crisis may have made Boeing better
at dealing with its current woes.
- We're seeing the company
already start to do things differently.
They've said that they will open their factories up
to airlines if the airlines wanna send crews in
to inspect the process.
- But how Boeing goes about restoring faith
in its products and its manufacturing
over the next few months
could dramatically reshape the company in the years to come.
- If they're able to come back very strongly,
confident in the fixes,
show that they have, you know,
not only addressed the underlying issues,
but manage to win back the confidence
of the global industry, maybe this is just a blip.
- But if there's a lack of faith in the company
and its products, we could see Boeing's orders
and its position in the market,
start to slip further in the long run.