Boeing faces more questions after mid-air blowout

John Strickland, Director of JLS Consulting spoke to CGTN Europe on the latest Alaska Airlines mid-air Boeing blowout.

Transcript

00:00 We were certainly fortunate that this accident happened as the aircraft was climbing out of

00:04 Portland and not reached higher than 16,000 feet, which is less than half the typical altitude

00:11 an aircraft of this type would typically cruise at once it's well underway in its flight.

00:16 Had it been higher and the same structural separation had happened, the decompression

00:23 would have been much more forceful and quite probably passengers would have been sucked out

00:28 of the aircraft. It would have been also much more difficult for the pilots to maintain

00:32 control of the aircraft given the suddenness of such an eventuality.

00:37 Now the National Transportation Safety Board says that it mentioned pressurization warnings

00:44 on three flights in the month preceding this incident. Why wasn't that noted or anything done

00:51 about it? It's difficult to comment on the fact that there were some pressurization warnings.

00:58 They were actually recorded by flight crew of Alaska Airlines and reported to the airline. We

01:04 do know that the airline took that aircraft off long over water flights without knowing precisely

01:12 what the reason for the pressurization warning indication was. It's said they believed that way

01:19 the aircraft would be able to come back more quickly if there was any problem. It's fair to

01:24 say they obviously didn't imagine the problem was going to be this serious. But we have to wait for

01:29 the investigation to see if any more commentary is made on that, whether anything else could have

01:33 been done at that point or should have been done in terms of engineering and inspection of the

01:40 aircraft and all aspects of the pressurization system. This is not the first accident to befall

01:48 Boeing of this kind though, is it? Boeing did have a very challenging period. The aircraft,

01:55 the 737 MAX, though a different version, the 737 MAX 8 of the same family, was grounded 18 months

02:03 from early 2019 following two fatal crashes of 737 MAX 8 aircraft. The root cause of those two

02:12 crashes was software, faulty software in the flight deck of the aircraft as used by pilots

02:20 as part of the control process. A lot of rectification work was inevitably done to

02:26 ensure that when the aircraft came back to service it could do so safely. There was a lot of

02:31 reputation rebuilding for Boeing itself and restoration of confidence and trust. This is

02:36 a slightly different model. The issue we see without knowing all the details of what the

02:41 causal factors were was different, but certainly Boeing will be very mindful of needing to protect

02:47 its regained reputation and trust and not to go back down that path again. The charge against

02:53 Boeing from its critics is that, you will know well, it faces widespread accusations of putting

03:00 profits above the safety of passengers, is it? There's certainly been a variety of views expressed

03:09 in the industry. The CEN at the time of the two fatal crashes in the ground had lost his job.

03:15 The current CEO has been opposed to stress the safety culture of the business, but it is a big

03:23 organisation. It's also fair to say that coming out of Covid and coming out of the grounding of

03:28 this type of aircraft family, they have faced challenges in ramping up production. There have

03:34 been supply chain issues in the industry as a whole, but that is not in any way a justification

03:41 for a relapse in performance or any degradation of quality. Safety has to be paramount.

03:47 Well, if they're getting on top of it, it can't be terribly comforting for people who nearly face

03:54 being sucked out of an aircraft window. Certainly, it was a shocking experience for all on board to

04:01 go through. We should never expect such an event to happen to an aircraft. Rarely, we have had

04:07 similar occurrences, but it should never happen on a well-maintained aircraft in commercial service,

04:14 and particularly in the case when this aircraft was practically brand new. This was only a two-month

04:18 old aircraft, fresh off the production line.