After a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner operated by Alaska Airlines in January, depressurizing the cabin shortly after its takeoff from Portland, a flurry of subsequent mishaps kept airlines in the spotlight.
Last month, a landing gear tire detached from a United Airlines jet during its ascent from San Francisco. The next day, a United flight made an emergency landing after its engine belched flames during take off from Houston. Days later, a United-operated Boeing 737 lost an exterior panel that was discovered to have blown off mid-flight before landing in Medford. This month, a Boeing 737-800 operated by Southwest Airlines lost its engine cover during takeoff from Denver, prompting an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration.
No one was hurt in any of the incidents and the planes landed safely, extending the U.S. aviation industry’s record of safety. In terms of catastrophic crashes, injuries and fatalities, recent years have been some of the safest on record.
“We’ve been having a significant amount of safety events, but what that all means is really too early to tell,” Anthony Brickhouse, a professor of aviation aerospace safety at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University who also used to work for the National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s really too early to say whether there’s a systemic problem with aviation.”
Yet experts say that there are reasons to be concerned.
As the industry grapples with staffing shortages and aging fleets, it’s also coming to terms with alarming quality control issues at the hands of a leading supplier of commercial jets.
Jeff Simon, a pilot and certified mechanic with the Federal Aviation Administration’s authorization to inspect aircraft, said tens of thousands of flights take off and land each day without incident. But the recent aircraft malfunctions are noteworthy, he said, because they appear to have been caused by quality and safety issues during the manufacturing process.
“I think what we’re seeing here is kind of a perfect storm of challenges that when you put it all together, it’s not a healthy environment,” Simon said. “What’s being reported from the official investigations is concerning. Something has to change.”
Simon said significant reductions in the aviation workforce and supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a stress on the manufacturing and maintenance system that ensures safety in air travel.
“We’re just now exiting the demand change and adaptation the industry has ever seen,” he said. “When you totally stress the system … you have to expect problems and be especially vigilant. Otherwise, there’s going to be safety issues.”
System under stress
The last fatal U.S. airlines incident was in 2018, when a passenger died onboard a Southwest Airlines flight after part of an engine broke off and shattered a cabin window. Before, no one had died on a U.S. commercial flight since 2009, when a passenger plane crashed in New York and killed 49 people on board and one on the ground.
But the lack of fatal accidents doesn’t necessarily capture the overall state of air travel, said Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit aviation safety research group. The group maintains the Aviation Safety Network database, which tracks accidents and safety issues about airliners worldwide.
“The absence of accidents is not evidence of the presence of safety,” Shahidi said. “We have seen these runway incursions, near misses. ... It’s completely understandable why there is attention on these incidents.”
The nonprofit released in March its safety report for 2023, which warned of an “eroding safety culture” in aviation, which it attributed to the industry’s complacency. The report said that “failing to rigorously reinforce a strong safety culture can become the weakest link in the safety chain.”
The pandemic brought a steep decline in air travel, followed by a rapid rebound. The dynamic shifts rattled an industry that had enjoyed years of relatively stable growth.
Since the pandemic, front-line workers in the aviation industry have increasingly raised alarms, particularly about the working order and maintenance of aircraft.
Experts say confidential safety reports from aviation workers housed in a NASA database offer insight — though uncorroborated — into the real-time safety observations made by those on the front lines of aviation, from pilots and mechanics to flight attendants and air traffic controllers.
An analysis of the data by The Oregonian/OregonLive found complaints related to aircraft equipment reached an all-time high in 2022. (The database goes back to 1988.)
Among the complaints in the last year:
- “What else are we allowing to fly without correction. Please stop this practice,” a pilot reported to NASA in November after maintenance cleared a Boeing 737 to fly. “We should not be flying aircraft with known cracks in engines. Period.”
- “The fact that our frontline employees were forced to discover this plethora of discrepancies is incredibly concerning, especially after the aircraft was fresh from a heavy maintenance facility,” a captain reported to NASA in November after discovering issues with an aircraft that had just come from a mechanical workup.
- Another pilot reported in June refused to fly a plane after recurring equipment malfunctions have not been addressed. “The issue continues to be a reoccurring event on flights,” the pilot wrote to NASA. “We are not perfect pilots and we cannot have a reoccurring serious malfunction to be accepted as part of normal operations.”
Whether the increase in reporting systemic issues is unclear. Becky Hooey, a NASA official, said that because the reports are voluntarily submitted and subject to self-reporting biases, the database can’t be used to infer the prevalence of a problem.
Douglas Rice, an aviation expert and retired airline pilot, said the database is widely used within the aviation industry to detect problems and trends early, particularly recurring issues with a particular model of plane.
Short staffing, aging fleet
During the pandemic, many senior pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers, flight attendants and other aviation workers left the industry, as airlines offered early retirement or buyouts to reduce costs.
That, industry observers say, left the workers who remained scrambling as air travel quickly rebounded.
“There aren’t enough pilots to keep planes in the sky and not enough mechanics to get them off the ground,” Rice said. “We have also lost the edge on institutional knowledge.”
Rice, who retired in 2020 as a pilot with American Airlines after 35 years, said that many U.S. airlines are sending planes overseas for maintenance and repairs due to the lack of domestic mechanics.
The FAA is short of roughly 3,000 air traffic controllers, too. In June, the inspector general for the Department of Transportation reported that 77% of the FAA’s critical air traffic control facilities didn’t have enough workers.
“FAA continues to face staffing challenges without a plan to address them,” the report said, “which in turn poses a risk to the continuity of air traffic operations.”
The short staffing has led to widespread stress and fatigue among current staffers who are having to work mandatory overtime and grueling hours, according to the report.
The New York Times previously reported near misses and safety lapses resulting from human errors were occurring more often than previously known due to chronically understaffed air traffic control facilities. In October, an Alaska Airline flight veered into the flight path of a SkyWest flight near Portland.
Rice said U.S. airlines are also flying planes much longer rather than replacing them. He said pandemic-related supply chain disruptions resulting in a shortage of aircraft components and parts have hampered the production of planes globally.
While older aircrafts are still safe, they guzzle fuel and require more maintenance work.
“Flying old planes is not a safety issue as long as they’re properly maintained,” Rice said. “But that’s the thing, we don’t have enough mechanics and we can’t hire enough.”
Manufacturing questions
Recent revelations about an eroding safety culture at the nation’s largest aerospace company and aircraft manufacturer also have experts worried.
Following the door plug malfunction on the January Alaska Airlines flight, the FAA temporarily grounded all Boeing 737-9 Max jetliners and barred the aerospace company from increasing its production rate of Max planes. The federal agency also ordered Boeing to come up with a comprehensive plan to address “system quality-control issues.”
Boeing had been trying to recover after its reputation was tarnished following two deadly crashes of its 737 Max jets in 2018 and 2019 that killed a combined 346 people, which resulted in a temporary grounding of the jets. And over the last decade, the company has had manufacturing problems that have delayed deliveries of its 737s and 787 Dreamliners.
Subsequent probes by other federal agencies have revealed lapses in quality control in Boeing manufacturing process and a lack of oversight in the company’s reporting systems have resulted in problems going undetected.
The U.S. Department of Justice has also launched a criminal investigation into the Alaska Airlines incident.
Various regulatory scrutiny and audits have provided some clarity on the levels of quality deficiencies in the manufacturing process for various Boeing aircraft, which have significant implications for aviation safety, according to Daniel Kwasi Adjekum, professor of aviation and aerospace science at the University of North Dakota.
“Unfortunately, Boeing has not cleaned up its act,” Adjekum said. “In my opinion, Boeing’s credibility seems to be undermined due to a perception of not being transparent in the quality assurance process.”
Adjekum, professor of aviation and aerospace science at the University of North Dakota, said Boeing’s safety record should not be conflated with the overall state of safety in airline travel.
Still, it’s a concern, Adjekum said, since Boeing’s troubles will have a cascading effect on the supply chain for aircraft.
“It all ties with the culture of safety. … How they value safety basically seeps down to the shop level and production,” he said. “If the forces are tacitly pushing to ramp up production without safety considerations on the shop floor, you might end up with products with quality deficiencies.”
Since the Alaska Airlines door plug incident, Boeing officials have acknowledged quality-control issues and the need for additional safeguards in its manufacturing process.
“We’re undertaking comprehensive actions, so that we can move forward to strengthen quality and build confidence. There’s changes that need to happen,” Brian West, chief financial officer and vice president of finance at Boeing, told analysts at a conference in March. “There’s no doubt about it. But we’re going to do so diligently and expeditiously. But we won’t rush or go too fast. In fact, we’re deliberately going to slow to get things right.”
The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a cap on the production of 737s to less than 38 a month while it investigates Boeing’s manufacturing operations. West told analysts the company welcomed the restriction.
“The events of January the 5th in Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 and everything we’ve learned since, we acknowledge that we need to improve upon safety and quality and conformance,” West said.
The biggest concerns used to come from older planes in airlines’ fleets.
But Simon, the pilot and mechanic who also inspects aircrafts for the FAA for airworthiness, said he’s seeing more in the maintenance industry about newer planes, products and equipment with issues that occurred during the manufacturing process.
“We’re seeing significant quality issues,” Simon said. “When you have a problem like that, it’s only a matter of time before it’s going to show up in incidents, accidents, or things that can really generate the public’s attention.”
-- Kristine de Leon covers the retail industry, small business and data enterprise stories. Reach her at kdeleon@oregonian.com.
Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today.