What’s behind the wave of recent incidents on Boeing aircraft?

New York:

Boeing has been in the headlines recently for a number of problems with its aircraft, most recently in Turkey and Senegal.

The events that followed a near-catastrophic mishap on an Alaska Airlines plane in January point to production and maintenance problems, say experts, who see no obvious pattern behind the myriad incidents.

A flood of incidents

The US aircraft manufacturer has been under surveillance since January 5, when a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines was forced to make an emergency landing after a fuselage panel burst, somehow avoiding serious injuries in an incident that safety authorities say could have been catastrophic .

United Airlines has recently experienced problems on various flights using Boeing aircraft, as has Southwest Airlines, which suffered an engine fire on a flight in early April.

On Thursday, a Boeing 737-300 skidded off a runway in Senegal, leaving 11 injured, including four seriously.

This followed an incident in Istanbul on Wednesday in which a FedEx Boeing 767 cargo plane landed on its nose after the front landing gear failed to extend.

Such a coincidence of incidents is “quite rare” in air travel, said aviation expert Bertrand Vilmer, who described the countless “abnormal” problems as reflecting a “constellation of unfavorable planets.”

Alternative causes

Aviation experts typically look for three possible explanations for problems.

There may be a design flaw, as in the two fatal crashes of 737 MAX jets in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, which involved a fault in a flight stabilization system.

Aviation observers have pointed to a production error as the likely cause of the Alaska Airlines incident, which affected a Boeing 737 MAX 9 that was only delivered in October.

A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board released in February found that four screws that were supposed to secure the blown-off panel were missing.

A third possible cause would be inadequate maintenance.

While design and production are the responsibility of the aircraft manufacturer, the airline is responsible for maintaining the aircraft upon receipt.

“Once the aircraft is delivered, Boeing has nothing to do with maintenance,” said Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory.

Safest means of transportation?

Despite the recent spate of incidents, aviation experts point to an overall good safety record.

“For more than a decade, we have not had a single fatality across the entire U.S. aviation industry, despite millions of people flying,” Aboulafia said. “That’s incredible.”

Aboulafia calls modern flying “the safest form of transportation ever created by man” and points out that “hundreds of people die on the roads every day.”

Boeing’s competitor Airbus was not entirely spared from difficulties. Hundreds of the European company’s planes are being taken out of service to inspect Pratt & Whitney engines for microscopic metal “contamination.”

Airbus also had a public dispute with Qatar Airways over deterioration of aircraft exteriors.

However, according to experts, Airbus had fewer such problems and not a single incident that attracted as much attention as Alaska Airlines.

“Every incident that has occurred on Boeing aircraft this year has made headlines, suggesting that Boeing aircraft are unsafe,” said a note from equity research firm Bernstein.

“The reality is that the number of incidents in the U.S. involving Airbus and Boeing aircraft so far this year is proportional to the number of aircraft in U.S. airline fleets.”

According to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm, the U.S. commercial fleet currently numbers about 4,800 aircraft, with about 60 percent of them Boeing aircraft.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)