Crash clouds Boeing name
This 737 isn’t the Max, but plane hails from same troubled family
In the past 15 months, more than 600 people have been killed flying variations of Boeing Co.’s 737 family of narrow-body, twin-engine passenger planes.
To put that sobering number in perspective, the total number of deaths from flying major passenger airliners of all types worldwide last year was 257.
Boeing is already coping with a world of worries after two crashes of its latest-generation 737, the Max, within six months of each other, not long after that aircraft went into service. The Max has been grounded worldwide since the second of those crashes, last March.
The catastrophic loss of a Boeing 737-800 in Iran on Wednesday with all lives lost, including 63 Canadians, is a major blow to Boeing’s turnaround hopes, already so slight that the Chicago firm sacked its CEO last month.
Boeing stock dropped as much as 2.3 per cent on Wednesday, erasing $4.3 billion (U.S.) in shareholder value. Boeing investors can expect a bumpy ride until Boeing’s role in the latest disaster is determined.
At press time, the cause of the latest crash, in which all 176 passengers and crew perished, was unknown. It may turn out to be pilot error, an external factor or possibly mechanical failure.
It is clear, however, that the investigation to determine the cause will drag on longer than is usual in such cases, due to the heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S.
Which means Boeing and its 737-800 will remain under a cloud, complicating Boeing’s efforts to get its reformulated 737 Max recertified by world aviation regulators.
In the 10 months that the 737 Max has been grounded, there has been no sign from regulators in the U.S., Canada or Europe that they are prepared to recertify the Max, which accounts for about half of Boeing’s total revenue.
Max operators WestJet Airlines Ltd. and Air Canada have repeatedly pushed back their planned dates for restoring Max service, cancelling thousands of flights as a result.
Boeing has already lost $8 billion in revenues from unshipped Max aircraft, and in December suspended production to preserve cash flow.
Now comes the Iranian crisis, the fourth deadly Boeing 737 crash since October 2018.
On Wednesday, a 737-800 operated by Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) exploded into flames in mid-air less than six minutes after takeoff from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport.
Iranian authorities have cited an engine fire caused by “mechanical”
issues as the likely cause. But that conclusion borders on sheer speculation, based in part on amateur videos of the doomed aircraft’s last moments.
UIA Flight 752’s flight recorders, or black boxes, were quickly retrieved. But it will be a long time before they are examined.
Iran refuses to hand them over to either Boeing or U.S. regulators, notably the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the world’s most respected air-crash investigator. Another awkward fact for Boeing is that Ukraine Airlines International, the 26-year-old flagship carrier of Ukraine, had a superb safety record until Wednesday, having never lost a passenger or crew member in a crash.
By contrast, Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, operators of the ill-fated Max planes that crashed with total loss of life, had poor safety records.
The 634 people who died in Boeing 737 crashes in the past 15 months, crashes in which the death toll exceeded 100 passengers and crew, lost their lives in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Cuba and Iran.
Those are low-income economies, of course. Boeing and its rival Airbus SE rely on emerging markets, where air travel is growing fastest, for more than a third of their commercialaircraft revenues.
But if Wednesday’s crash was caused by a mechanical failure, there will be more reason than ever to question the use of 737s, whose basic design hasn’t changed since the first 737 went into service 55 years ago, in markets characterized by substandard training and aircraft maintenance and penny-pinching carriers.
UAI is confident in the plane it lost Wednesday and in its crew. “It was one of the best planes we had, with an amazing, reliable crew,” Yevheniy Dykhne, president of UIA, told a briefing after the crash.
But while the 737-800 — predecessor to the 737 Max — has a respectable safety record, it’s not spotless.
There are about 7,000 “Next Generation” (NG) 737s in service. The 737-800 that crashed Wednesday is the most common variant. The Canadian carriers with 737-800s in their fleets are Air Transat, Flair Airlines, Sunwing and WestJet.
The 737-800 is the most popular aircraft in use today. But Wednesday also marks the seventh fatal crash of a Boeing 737-800 since 2006. During that time, crashes in Brazil, Cameroon and India each took the lives of more than 100 passengers and crew.
Ironically, Boeing’s reputational damage coincides with a near-peak in air-transport safety.
The number of fatalities from crashes of large commercial airplanes dropped by more than 50 per cent in 2019. Indeed, the skies have been getting steadily safer even as the number of passengers flown has significantly increased.
The aviation industry doesn’t have a safety problem. It doesn’t have a Boeing problem, as Boeing’s state-of-the-art Dreamliner attests.
It does, however, have a 737 problem.