Boeing’s Nightmare Continues: A Boeing Aircraft with 263 Passengers Drops Mid-Flight
Originally Published in April 2024
On a flight from Sydney, Australia, to Auckland, New Zealand, a LATAM Airlines flight dropped in mid-air, injuring 50 passengers, of whom 10 were hospitalized.
On March 11, the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner was smoothly cruising until the aircraft abruptly nosedived about 500 feet, forcefully sending individuals to the ceiling and back of the plane. Despite the pilot’s successful attempt at gaining control of the plane and landing in Auckland according to their schedule, the flight was greeted by paramedics and more than 10 emergency vehicles to treat several passengers’ injuries.
According to an unofficial report from the Wall Street Journal, the Journal speculates that the incident was caused by a flight attendant accidentally hitting the seat-back switch, which controls the movement of the pilot’s cockpit seat. Since the incident, Boeing has reached out to airlines to perform quality checks on their Dreamliner 787 aircraft and told the New York Times that the seat switch was a potential hazard that was previously recognized in a circulated inspection report, which dated back to 2017.
Despite the fact that the LATAM Airlines incident was likely caused by the human error of a flight attendant, Boeing’s aircrafts still face a challenging recovery from their reputation of poor compliance with aviation industry safety standards. Earlier this year, on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, a rear door plug flew out of a Boeing plane due to missing bolts—an almost fatal accident had there been passengers seated next to the door plug. A couple of years prior, the same aircraft, the Boeing 737 Max, was responsible for 346 deaths in Ethiopia and Indonesia due to faulty sensors that caused two 737 Maxes to fatally nosedive and crash. In March alone, eight flights operated on Boeing planes had emergency landings, hydraulic leaks, diversions from the original route, or missing pieces.
In response to Boeing’s latest safety woes, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) barred the manufacturing company from expanding the production of its Boeing 737 Max, and an FAA audit and expert panel review identified new concerns for the company and its products. On the surface, Boeing failed 33 product audits out of 89 tests and showcased almost “comical actions” during the manufacturing processes of their aircraft. The New York Times found that Boeing’s fuselage makers at Spirit AeroSystems used a “hotel key card to check a door seal” and applied “liquid Dawn soap to a door seal to use as a lubricant.”
At its core, Boeing’s expert panel report showed severe miscommunication issues and a lack of internal controls that incentivize safety reporting or input from pilots, even in dire situations where human lives could be at risk. According to the panel, there was “a lack of awareness of safety-related metrics at all levels of the organization.” CFO Brian echoed the sentiment in his statement at a Bank of America Global Industrials Conference, “The other things that we’re working on to get after…are around things like training, tooling, our quality management system and how that links with our safety management system, picking up the signals on the factory floor, and incentive compensation, to name a few.”
Undoubtedly, Boeing’s systemic failures serve as a major lesson for airline manufacturers worldwide. However, its history also proves to be important for students right here on the Hilltop. At Georgetown University, Boeing’s dangerous and fatal equipment failures have served as a valuable lesson for the students at the McDonough School of Business, with numerous business cases citing the management failures of the organization in core courses. Professor Kitching, a professor at the McDonough School of Business’s Accounting Department, shared that Boeing’s history of placing compensation-based performance targets ahead of passenger safety was a structure that “placed a heavy emphasis on a narrow measuring tool that can misalign company objectives with individual objectives.” Additionally, over the years, she taught students that Boeing rewarded employees when the number of problems reported on the assembly line dropped, which disincentivized defect reports from employees.
While Boeing’s challenges appear wide-ranging, at their core, they point back to a similar theme and a lesson that is an ethos of a business education at Georgetown:
“You get what you measure.” - Professor Kitching