It’s been a bad month at Boeing.
Crack Shot
It’s been an astonishingly bad month for Boeing. First, a huge chunk of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet was blown off during an Alaska Airlines flight. In response, the US Federal Aviation Administration ordered more than 170 Boeing planes to be grounded, sparking a round of intense scrutiny around how its planes are built.
And now, another Boeing plane is in the news for all the wrong reasons. In Japan, Reuters reports that a Boeing 737-800 was forced to turn around during a trip after the crew found a crack in the cockpit window mid-flight.
On Saturday, an All Nippon Airways (ANA) flight headed to Toyama had to turn back to the Sapporo-New Chitose airport after crew members found the crack in the “outermost of four layers of windows surrounding the cockpit.”
The plane, which was carrying 59 passengers and a six-member flight crew, returned to the airport without incident.
“The crack was not something that affected the flight’s control or pressurisation,” an ANA spokesperson told Reuters.
Bad Trip
The trip in Japan was relatively calm compared to the harrowing Alaska Airlines January 5 flight of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 that saw a door plug ripped away, sending a rush of air into the cabin and the pressure to drop.
Thankfully, nobody was injured on board and the pilots managed to land the plane safely.
But that flight has sparked concerns about the safety of Boeing 737 Max jets, whose previous version had experienced two deadly crashes. Concerns about how Boeing planes have been built have been ongoing for years.
In 2001, a Boeing engineer pointed out risks of the company outsourcing parts of its manufacturing process.
Though the plane in the Japanese cockpit incident is not a Boeing 737 MAX 9, these are nightmare optics for the company’s execs — and we’ll be watching to see if they can turn the narrative around.
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