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During busy summer season, carriers seek to fill holes created by grounded aircraft
The global grounding of Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX jetliners has upended air travel, but one little-noticed corner of the aviation industry is benefiting from the problems: companies that rent out planes and staff.
Regulators in March stopped MAX planes from flying because of safety concerns following two fatal crashes in less than six months. Almost overnight, airlines parked more than 370 planes. Boeing was forced to stop delivering the MAX, which it had been producing at a rate of around 50 each month.
Airlines that had ordered the MAX, the newest version of the 737, suddenly faced the busy summer travel season with hundreds fewer planes available than they had expected to operate.
In other industries, customers might turn to a competing supplier. But tapping Boeing’s European rival Airbus SE wasn’t an option. Even if airlines were able to manage all the pilot training and logistical complexities of switching between jetliner brands—a feat few carriers can handle—Airbus couldn’t supply the planes. Its production lines are booked for several years.
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Boeing isn’t the first manufacturer to miss critical problems when certifying a new aircraft.
Frenzied headlines aside, the recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes fit a long pattern in the imperfect history of aircraft-certification programs, which sometimes miss fatal flaws.
Start with the de Havilland Comet, made in Britain. While the Boeing 707 popularized jet travel, the Comet was the world’s first commercial jetliner, entering service in 1952.
Less than two years later, a Comet broke apart 20 minutes after taking off from Rome and plunged into the Mediterranean for undetermined reasons. The fleet was grounded temporarily, but a few months later a second Comet broke up over the sea. This time the fleet was grounded permanently, and the aircraft was extensively redesigned to combat a problem then little understood: metal fatigue.
The aircraft-certification program had failed to detect that. It hadn’t known what to look for.
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Each design choice may be imperfect, but it takes a piling up of circumstances to create a fatal defect.
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s comments at the company’s annual meeting last month left many baffled. Why not acknowledge that Boeing had screwed up with its now-notorious MCAS software that contributed to two fatal crashes of its new 737 MAX jets? His performance left a different taste in the mouths of specialists: The lawyers are in charge now.
An accepted duty of management nowadays is to facilitate eventual liability settlements by not using words that acknowledge faulty decisions. In a better world it would be otherwise, but word-parsing is what lawyers advise. CEOs and boards can themselves be sued by shareholders if they put a foot wrong or even if they don’t.
Less deservedly, Mr. Muilenburg was also derided for his insisting that a “chain of events,” and not a specific defect, was behind the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines disasters. He was right in a way that bears reflection given the many complex systems and imperfect machines we rely on.
Excerpt from WSJ
Boeing Co.’s MAX plane could return to service this summer, yet convincing passengers the plane is safe will be one of the aviation industry’s toughest consumer-relations challenges in decades.
The aircraft has been grounded world-wide since March after two MAX jets crashed within five months of each other. The crashes, and what some carriers and pilots have described as Boeing’s lack of transparency in their aftermath, have undermined confidence in the plane maker.
Industry officials expect U.S. regulators may lift the flying ban for the MAX in June, but it increasingly looks like late summer before the planes start flying passengers again.
Lance White, a 39-year-old radiologist who flies a few times a year, says he has no plans to board the jets once they do.
“I just don’t know there’s anything Boeing could do to re-instill my confidence in this plane,” Mr. White said. The St. Louis resident said he would want to see the jet fly safely for at least five years before he considered boarding one.
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Icelandic low-cost carrier WOW Air, which specialized in linking cities in the U.S. with European destinations, has collapsed, adding to a string of airlines overseas that have faltered in recent months amid stiff competition and rising costs.
The carrier, founded in 2011, had been trying to steal business from established airlines such as American Airlines Group Inc. and Delta Air Lines Inc. It targeted the trans-Atlantic market by offering cheap fares while funneling passengers via its Icelandic hub. It said Thursday it had cancelled all flights, stranding thousands of passengers.
WOW Air served such U.S. destinations as New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston. It had previously announced plans to cut flights to Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Excerpt from WSJ
In the aftermath of a Boeing Co. 737 MAX jet crash in Indonesia in October, much of the American aviation industry—the plane maker, the FAA, U.S. airlines and their pilots—closed ranks to reassure the public the model was safe to fly.
Even after evidence emerged implicating a new automated flight-control system in the Indonesia disaster, the industry message was that pilots would be able to overcome glitches by following common emergency steps.
“Our pilots are trained to deal with any of these issues,” United Continental Holdings Inc.Chief Executive Oscar Munoz said at a March 7 aviation event in Washington. “Just fly the darn airplane—that’s what they’re taught.”
Three days later, a 737 MAX flown by United code-share partner Ethiopian Airlines nose-dived into the ground after six minutes aloft, an eerie replay of Indonesia’s Lion Air crash.
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Tension is simmering between U.S. and Ethiopian officials as investigators prepare to release in the coming days an interim report about the Boeing Co. 737 MAX jetliner that nose-dived after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, according to people from both countries.
U.S. investigators, according to people familiar with their thinking, have privately complained that Ethiopian authorities have been slow to provide data retrieved from the black-box recorders of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.
American air-safety officials also have described what they view as an aloof attitude among the Ethiopians toward other investigators and say the Ethiopians have provided often limited access to relevant crash information, these people said.
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It’s been 50 years since the first Concorde took her maiden test flight, inaugurating the era of supersonic passenger travel, and almost 16 years since that era drew to a close, back in 2003. Since then we’ve had indulgent A380s and efficient 787s, but the truth is, we never really got over the Concorde. It’s still the one that got away, memorably beautiful if rather high-maintenance. Now several manufacturers are planning to eclipse those memories with planes that are cleaner, quieter, and yes, quicker than the Concorde. Up first: Denver-based Boom Supersonic, which is hoping to fly a prototype this year, and if all goes well, by 2025, have their 55-seat Overture craft whizzing passengers from Tokyo to San Francisco, typically a 9½-hour journey, in 5½ hours. Perhaps precipitously, Japan Airlines has taken an option on 20. Until this jet arrives, here’s a look at how its speediness will compare with the original Concorde and other brisk vehicles, existing and theoretical, that make our hearts beat faster.
3,400 MPH: Boeing NeXt Hypersonic Concept
Seats: N/A
First Flight: No earlier than 2029
This still very-much-theoretical hypersonic aircraft could make Mach 5 (about 3,400 mph) travel possible at altitudes of 100,000 feet.
Excerpt from WSK