A series of aviation mishaps in recent months have sharpened the scrutiny on flight safety, with
Boeing under the spotlight over quality control issues. In an alarming incident in January, the door plug of a commercial Boeing 737 Max 9 tore off as the aircraft was climbing, leaving a gaping hole on the side of the plane. No one on board the Alaska Airlines flight was seriously injured. This week, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s sudden mid-air nosedive left at least 50 passengers injured. An investigation into the Latam Airlines flight on Monday is reportedly focusing on the movement of a flight deck seat. Despite these anxiety-inducing incidents, experts say commercial air travel is still very safe. “Would I get into a Boeing plane? Yes, I would,” said Dai Whittingham, chief executive of the
UK Flight Safety Committee and a former RAF pilot. “They are as safe as anybody else’s.” According to recent analysis by Airlines Ratings on the world’s safest planes, using data from a Boeing report on accidents and incidents on commercial flights, the Boeing 787 and the Airbus A220 were on the list of 10 aircraft with no fatalities. Geoffrey Thomas, editor in chief of Airline Ratings and an aviation safety expert, said flying is “incredibly safe”, particularly on a top class airline such as
British Airways, Virgin Atlantic at the premium end of the market, or Ryanair and easyJet in the low-cost sector. While attention has been focused on Boeing, Mr Thomas said Boeing and rival planemaker Airbus have “similar incident rates across their respective range of aircraft”. On Monday, a United Airlines Boeing 777-300 aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing in
Sydney after suffering a mid-air fuel leak, the fifth incident the airline reported in a week . It came after the airline diverted its Airbus 320 plane during a flight from San Francisco to
Mexico City last Friday due to an issue with the jet’s hydraulic system. In January, hundreds of passengers escaped the burning
Japan Airlines Airbus A350 after it struck a Bombardier Dash-8 , a plane operated by the Tokyo Coast Guard, in a runway collision that killed five people in the smaller aircraft. “Some of the incidents that have been reported have nothing to do with the aircraft but were operational or pilot related such as runway or taxiway overruns,” Mr Thomas told i , adding that many of the systems on a plane, such as engines, undercarriage, cockpit avionics, are “common to both Airbus and Boeing aircraft”. “Airbus and Boeing do not make engines, or undercarriages, wheels, cockpit systems, galleys, and seats and the list goes on and on,” he said. “So in reality a Boeing problem is also an Airbus problem in many cases and vice versa – it’s an industry problem.” Experts did, however, acknowledge issues with quality control at Boeing , with Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 drawing fresh scrutiny to the company’s 737 Max planes, which were involved in two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. 737 Max 9s have been temporarily grounded after the Alaska Airlines flight suffered a cabin panel blowout seven minutes after take-off from Portland, Oregon on 5 January, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing. Read Next 'I would not fly that plane': Inside the Boeing crisis Last Friday, Boeing acknowledged in a letter to US
Congress that it cannot find records for work done on the panel. Ziad Ojakli, the executive vice president of government operations at Boeing, said employees looked “extensively” and failed to turn up any paperwork about the “opening and closing of the door plug”. Boeing’s working hypothesis is that “the documents required by our processes were not created when the door plug was opened”, he said in a letter to
Washington senator Maria Cantwell. In a preliminary report released last month, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said four bolts to prevent upward movement of the door plug were missing. Investigators believe the bolts were removed and appear not to have been replaced while the plane underwent repair work at Boeing’s factory in Washington state last year. “Clearly there has been some quality control issues,” said Mr Thomas. “On a production line, nothing happens without paperwork, nothing happens without it being signed off, so for something like that to happen and not be signed off, is a serious lapse on the production line and that sort of thing just should never happen. “They’ve got to look at quality control oversight, and put more checks and balances in place, maybe require more training, but to me not filling out the paperwork is one thing, not putting the bolts back is another. It’s just inexcusable.” A six-week audit by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of Boeing’s 737 Max manufacturing processes found “dozens” of quality issues, the
New York Times reported, with many of the problems involving the company not following “approved manufacturing process, procedure or instruction”. The FAA’S grounding of the plane is not the first time it has been kept out of the skies. 737 Max 8s were grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 after 346 people died in two crashes – Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019. It has prompted Kayak, a leading online travel agent, to add filters to let users exclude flights that use 737 Max planes. “Boeing has come in for some criticism over recent years,” said Mr Whittingham. “The formal investigations in the US following the Max accidents were pointing to an issue with culture, where they were more focused on the production side of it, in terms of the bottom line of getting aircraft out, and less about the quality of what was being produced. “Even with that said, the quality of what was being produced was still very high.” A spokesperson from Boeing said: “Based on the FAA audit, our quality stand downs and the recent expert panel report, we continue to implement immediate changes and develop a comprehensive action plan to strengthen safety and quality, and build the confidence of our customers and their passengers. “We are squarely focused on taking significant, demonstrated action with transparency at every turn.” Mr Whittingham emphasised that flying is one of the safest modes of transport, and that aviation safety has significantly improved compared in the decades since the 60s and 70s, with no passenger jet crashes in 2017 making it the safest year in the history of commercial airlines. In its annual safety report for global aviation, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) states there were no hull losses or fatal accidents involving passenger jet aircraft in 2023, and there was just a single fatal accident involving a turboprop aircraft in Nepal in January last year, resulting in 72 fatalities. This compares with five fatal accidents in 2022, and an improvement on the five-year average between 2019 and 2023, which stood at five. Read Next Boeing Dreamliner's mid-air nosedive linked to 'pilot induced seat movement' The fatality risk improved to 0.03 in 2023 from 0.11 in 2022, and 0.11 for the five-year average between 2019 and 2023. IATA said at this level of safety, on average a person would have to fly every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident. According to a study by Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the period between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.4 million. To put that into context, you are more likely to die in a shark attack or give birth to quadruplets,
CNN reported . The risk was one in 7.9 million boardings in the period between 2008 and 2017, compared with one death in 350,000 in the 1968 to 1977 period. “The record is pretty astonishing, given where it was even 20 years ago,” Mr Whittingham told i . “Thirty years ago it was a different order of magnitude. It really has dropped to almost base level. “In the 70s and 80s it was not uncommon for planes to bump into mountains and other terrain, normally with bad results.” Mr Whittingham said the Alaska Airlines incident was “yet again a reminder of why you should be strapped in”. One passenger who sat one row behind the door panel that blew off claimed his seat belt saved his life , saying he felt his body being lifted out of his seat. He reportedly lost his shoes and socks, and was left with bruises and an ankle sprain . Witnesses on the Latam Airlines flight said people not wearing seat belts were thrown from their seats and some crashed into the plane’s ceiling when it suddenly dropped mid-flight from Sydney to Auckland,
New Zealand. Mr Whittingham said injuries on flights can occur due to turbulence caused by a strong wind current, and seat belts can greatly reduce the risk of getting hurt. Of the 104 turbulence accidents in the six years up to and including 2022, just two people were injured while wearing seat belts, he explained. “Quite often in clear air, it looks fine, suddenly, you’re getting thumped around all over the place,” he added. “That is why most airlines these days are recommending to passengers that if they are in their seats, they should be strapped in.” i has contacted Airbus for comment.