Boeing has been in the headlines recently for a series of problems with its aircraft, most recently in Turkey and Senegal.
Experts say the incidents, which follow a near-catastrophic panel explosion on an Alaska Airlines jet in January, point to problems with production and maintenance, but they see no clear pattern behind the numerous incidents.
The U.S. plane maker has been under scrutiny since Jan. 5, when a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines made an emergency landing after a fuselage panel exploded, somehow avoiding a serious accident. The injuries, safety officials said, could have been catastrophic.
United Airlines has recently experienced problems on several flights involving Boeing aircraft, and Southwest Airlines also experienced an engine fire on a flight in early April.
A Boeing 737-300 skidded off a runway in Senegal on Thursday, injuring 11 people, four of them seriously.
An incident occurred in Istanbul on Wednesday when a FedEx Boeing 767 cargo plane landed on its nose after the nose landing gear failed to deploy.
Aviation expert Bertrand Wilmer said it was “quite rare” for so many events to occur simultaneously in air travel, describing the numerous “unusual” problems as an “unfavorable alignment of planets”.
Aviation experts typically look for three possible explanations for the problem.
There may be design flaws, such as the two fatal crashes of 737 MAX jets in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, which involved flaws in the flight stability system.
Aviation observers pointed to production defects as a possible source of the Alaska Airlines incident involving a Boeing 737 MAX 9 that was only delivered in October.
A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board in February found that four bolts holding the blast panel in place were missing.
The third possible reason is insufficient maintenance.
While design and production are the responsibility of the aircraft manufacturer, airlines are responsible for maintaining the aircraft after receiving it.
“Boeing no longer has anything to do with the aircraft once it’s delivered,” said Richard Aboulafia of Aerodynamics Consulting.
Despite the recent spate of incidents, aviation experts point to a good overall safety record.
“Despite millions of people flying, the entire U.S. aviation industry has not had a single fatality or injury in over a decade,” Aboulafia said. “That’s unbelievable.”
Aboulafia called modern flight “the safest form of transportation ever created by man,” noting that “hundreds of people are killed on the roads every day.”
Boeing’s rival Airbus isn’t entirely out of the woods either. Hundreds of planes produced by the European company are being grounded to check for microscopic “contamination” of metal in engines made by Pratt & Whitney.
Airbus is also involved in a public dispute with Qatar Airways over deterioration of the plane’s exterior surfaces.
But experts say Airbus has had fewer such problems, and none has attracted the same level of concern as Alaska Airlines.
“Every incident on a Boeing aircraft this year has made headlines and shown that Boeing aircraft are unsafe,” said a report from equity research firm Bernstein.
“The reality is that the number of accidents involving U.S. Airbus and Boeing aircraft so far this year is proportional to the number of aircraft in the U.S. airline fleet.”
The U.S. commercial fleet currently has about 4,800 aircraft, about 60% of which are Boeing aircraft, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
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