Boeing 737 Max 9: How will Boeing's latest woes impact a company still recovering from a series of crashes?

Shares dropped sharply in Boeing following the incident, which comes in the wake of fatal crashes involving the company’s Max aircraft in 2018 and 2019

When David Calhoun was brought in to head up aeroplane manufacturer Boeing in 2020, he was handed a company in turmoil.

Fatal aircraft crashes involving its Max aircraft in 2018 and 2019 had forced a 20-month global grounding of affected models and resulted in the century-old firm reporting its first annual loss in more than two decades.

Now, four years later, Boeing’s chief executive is again facing questions over the safety of his planes after an incident in which a section of the fuselage fell from an Alaska Airlines plane on Friday.

Plastic covers the exterior of the fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX. A door-sized section near the rear of the Boeing 737-9 MAX plane blew off 10 minutes after the flight 1282 took off from Portland, Oregon on January 5 on its way to Ontario, California.

All passengers and crew escaped safely following the incident, which saw the plane return to make an emergency landing in Portland. It was discovered a plug covering an unused exit door blew off the Boeing 737 Max 9 as it cruised at around 16,000 feet over Oregon.

Mr Calhoun accepted responsibility for the accident on Tuesday, saying the firm is "acknowledging our mistake" and pledged t work with investigators to find the cause of the accident.

He said: : "We're going to approach this number one acknowledging our mistake. We're going to approach it with 100 per cent and complete transparency every step of the way."

The explosive rush of air damaged several rows of seats and pulled insulation from the walls. The cockpit door flew open and banged into a toilet door, while the force ripped the headset off the co-pilot and the captain lost part of her headset. A quick reference checklist kept within easy reach of the pilots flew out of the open cockpit, while two mobile phones belonging to passengers have been recovered from the ground.

One of the pilots declared an emergency and asked for clearance to descend to 10,000 feet, where the air would be rich enough for passengers to breathe without oxygen masks.

Aviation experts have raised questions over what airlines – and the manufacturer – knew about the safety of the aircraft, which has been grounded by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in the US.

The plug, which landed in the garden of a house belonging to a science teacher, did not appear to have four “stop bolts”, which would usually be attached. United Airlines, which also uses the same type of plane, admitted safety inspections had uncovered bolts in need of "additional tightening".

Alaska Airlines says it has since found "some loose hardware" on some Max 9s.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, it emerged warning lights were triggered on three previous flights taken by the plane involved in the incident – and steps had been taken to reduce risk, should an accident occur.

Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said on Sunday that Alaska Airlines had decided to restrict the aircraft from long flights over water so the plane “could return very quickly to an airport” if the warning light reappeared.

Some aviation experts have branded the decision as illogical. “If you are afraid to take the airplane far from land, what is the reason for that? That has to be answered by Alaska Airlines,” said Steven Wallace, an air safety consultant and commercial pilot who once headed accident investigations for the FAA.

In October 2018, a Lion Air plane in Indonesia crashed, killing 189 people. Six months later, another Boeing plane, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed soon after take-off from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia for Nairobi.

The planes were a different Max model to the Max 9 in question.

The latest incident is also likely to hit the company hard financially. Shares in Boeing dropped sharply on Monday, while aviation lawyers have warned the company is likely to have to pay compensation to airlines forced to cancel hundreds of flights due to the grounding of the fleet.

In 2020, Boeing reported a loss of $636 million [£500m] the previous year as a result of the grounding of the Max aircraft – its first since 1997 and a stark contrast to the $10.46 billion [£8.23bn] profit it had posted 12 months earlier.

Mr Calhoun called a companywide webcast for Tuesday to talk about the incident with employees and senior leadership.

A 10-year Boeing board member, Mr Calhoun was brought in to replace Dennis Muilenburg, who was fired by the firm’s board after the debacle surrounding the 2018 and 2019 crashes.

In 2020, he said the costs associated with the grounding of the planes following the accidents, which killed 346 people, had risen to $18bn [£14bn].

Separately, on March 21, 2022, a Boeing 737 was involved in another crash, this time in China, carrying 133 people. The cause of the tragedy has not yet been established, although it is believed there were not any obvious problems with the aircraft.

A year later, the company extended its required retirement age of 65 to 70 to allow Mr Calhoun, who is now 66, to stay in the top job. Meanwhile in February last year, Boeing handed Mr Calhoun an incentive worth about $5.29m [£4.16m] to induce him to stay throughout the company's recovery from both the pandemic and the fallout from the crashes, weeks after the company reported its first positive cash flow – although continued losses – since 2018.

He will be hoping to minimise the reputational impact from the recent incident.

On Monday, the FAA approved guidelines for inspecting the door plugs on other Max 9 jets and repairing them, if necessary. That move could speed the return to service of the 171 planes that the FAA grounded.

Alaska has 64 other Max 9s, and United Airlines owns 79 of them. No other US airlines operate that model of the Boeing 737. However, Indonesia has also temporarily grounded three planes belonging to the Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air.

The decision was made by the country’s Transportation Ministry in co-ordination with the FAA to ensure the safety and security of flight operations.