Boeing’s terrible year is ending with the worst aviation tragedy of 2024

New York (CNN) — Boeing’s very bad year ended tragically on Sunday, as a 737 flown by Korean discount carrier Jeju Air crashed, killing 179 passengers and crew on board.

It’s not yet clear what caused the jet to crash, and the investigation could take months. There’s no evidence at this point that Boeing’s manufacturing was to blame.

“We are in contact with Jeju Air regarding flight 2216 and stand ready to support them,” said Boeing in a statement. “We extend our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones and our thoughts remain with the passengers and crew.”

Even if it turns out this latest incident wasn’t Boeing’s fault, it marks the end of a year of events for the embattled aircraft maker that ranged from embarrassing to horrifying. And unlike the Jeju crash, most of those problems were clearly Boeing’s fault.

Boeing’s (BA) stock plunged by about a third this year, after closing down more than 2% on Monday following the crash. Its CEO and several other prominent executives were ousted. And its seemingly unending string of bad headlines raised serious questions about the company’s ability to get its safety and quality problems under control.

Alaska Air incident

The year began with a door plug blowing off the side of a 737 Max flown by Alaska Airlines minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon. Passengers’ clothing and cell phones were ripped away and sent hurling through the gaping hole in the plane’s fuselage as air from the cabin rushed out.

Fortunately, no one was seriously injured on the plane, which landed minutes later without incident. The seats next to the door plug didn’t have passengers sitting in them.

But the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary investigation found that the plane had left a Boeing factory two months earlier missing the four bolts needed to hold the door plug in place.

Before the January 6 incident, it had made 153 flights, some long flights over the Pacific between Hawaii and the mainland United States, and it was a matter of luck that the door plug had not blown on an earlier flight that might have led to a fatal crash.

The incident led to numerous federal investigations, not just by the NTSB but also by Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Justice Department. The FBI notified those on the plane that they might be considered crime victims, and the FAA’s probe led to increased oversight of Boeing by the agency, including limits on how many of the planes it could produce. The FAA also delayed any possible certification of two new versions of the Max that Boeing had planned to start delivering to customers this year.

The investigations and hearings brought testimony from numerous Boeing whistleblowers, who testified as to problems with the company’s quality and procedures used to build airplanes, as well as pressure to put speed of production ahead of the safety of the aircraft and retribution against employees who complained. Boeing insisted it has taken steps to improve quality and safety, and to encourage employees to raise any concerns.

Criminal plea

The Alaska Air incident reopened Boeing to new prosecution in case it had agreed to settle three years earlier. In July, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to federal charges that it had deceived the FAA during the initial certification process for the 737 Max. Under the deal, it agreed to pay up to $487 million in fines, double what it originally paid under a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement.

The most serious consequence for Boeing was agreement to operate under the oversight of a new government-appointed monitor.

But in October, a federal judge rejected the plea partly because of questions about how a government-appointed monitor would be selected, leaving the ultimate punishment still uncertain.

Stranded astronauts

In June, Boeing finally launched a crewed mission with its Starliner spacecraft, taking NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station.

The mission was a long-overdue after years of development and test flight problems left it far behind the rival SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in carrying astronauts to the ISS.

But the success proved short-lived: Soon after Starliner’s arrival, NASA disclosed that helium leaks and thruster outages meant it wasn’t safe to have Starliner return the two astronauts to Earth after eight days in space as originally planned.

The spacecraft eventually returned to Earth without anyone aboard, and Wilmore and Williams are waiting for a ride home on a SpaceX Dragon sometime in early 2025. When Boeing’s Starliner will again be able carry astronauts and fulfill the company’s contract with NASA remains unknown.

Crippling strike

In September, 33,000 members of the International Association of Machinists started a strike that halted production of the 737 Max and the company’s freighter aircraft. Union members had voted nearly unanimously to reject a tentative agreement that had been reached between the company and union leadership about a week earlier.

Many union members were still angry over the loss of a traditional pension plan 10 years earlier, and they stayed on strike nearly two months. They rejected a subsequent offer before finally voting in favor of a third offer that gave them an immediate raise of 13% and raises of 9% for each of the next two years, and then another 7% in the fourth and final year of the contract. Combined, that raised hourly pay by 43% over the life of the contract.

Beyond the cost of the new labor deal, the work stoppage was the most costly American strike of the 21st century, costing the company, its workers and its suppliers more than $11.5 billion, according to Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan research firm with expertise in estimating the cost of work stoppages. experts. And it took Boeing about a month to resume production once the strike ended.

During the strike Boeing announced it would be forced to cut 10% of its global workforce of 171,000 employees in a cost-saving move to limit losses going forward.

Mounting losses

In October, Boeing announced one of its worst financial quarters in years, with its core operating loss surging to $6 billion in the third quarter. It was poised to report its biggest annual loss since 2020, when it was dealing with both the Max grounding and the Covid-19 pandemic – sparking massive losses across the global airline industry.

Quarterly losses were not just from the strike, which only affected the last two weeks of the period. It included a $3 billion pre-tax charge for further delays in its next-generation commercial jet, the 777X, which encountered problems during test flights and now won’t be delivered to customers until 2026.

Boeing warned that losses are likely to continue throughout 2025 as it seeks to get production back to profitable levels. The company has lost $39.3 billion since early 2019, when the second fatal crash of its key passenger jet, the 737 Max, led to a 20-month grounding of the plane. Boeing has reported losses in virtually every quarter since then. Its credit rating is on the verge of being downgraded to junk bond status for the first time in its history.

Jeju Air

Boeing’s year ended in tragedy. The Jeju Air plane’s landing gear appeared not to be extended as it attempted to land. There had been reports of a bird strike causing the plane’s pilots to issue a distress call as it upon approached the airport in Muan, South Korea.

The plane, a 737-800, has a very strong safety record, unlike its successor 737 Max model. The 737 Max has had numerous problems, including fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 347 people and led to a 20-month grounding to fix a design flaw.

Data from Boeing shows that the 737-800 has had one of lowest rates of fatal accidents in the industry when compared to the number of flights they’ve flown.

A 15-year-old plane, like the one that crashed Sunday, is unlikely to have problems caused by a design flaw or production problems attributed to Boeing. But it is too soon to say why the Jeju Air plane’s landing gear was not extended.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.