Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s CEO, finally has been fired. Many wonder why it took so long.
The last straw for Boeing’s board of directors came on Friday. The company’s much-vaunted new Starliner capsule designed to take American astronauts to the International Space station veered off course after liftoff and never made it into space.
This literally made Boeing look like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, and the fiasco joined a trail of others, including a military tanker program years late and way over budget, a new widebody jet program that is at least a year late—and, far more grave in its consequences, the deadly history of the Boeing 737-MAX.
More than 47 million people will take to the skies in the United States between December 19 and January 5—a record for the Christmas holiday break.
None of them will be flying on a Boeing 737 MAX, although thousands would have been, had the jet not been grounded.
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The grounding has created an unprecedented crisis for the aviation industry. It involves around 700 airplanes—300 already with airlines around the world and 400 parked waiting to be delivered.
Last week Boeing suspended production of the jet after being told by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that it is far from ready to certify it as safe.
Two crashes within six months, one in Indonesia and one in Ethiopia, killed 346 people. The FAA has faced tough questioning in Congress about why it did not ground the jets after the first crash, of Lion Air Flight 610 on Oct. 29, 2018.
After that disaster the FAA carried out an analysis that predicted that there would likely be at least 15 crashes of the 737 MAX over its expected lifespan of 45 years, killing more than 2,000 people—if the design were not subjected to a new certification review.
Yet the model was not grounded until after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 this year.
There have been so many alarms raised over many months about the handling of the crisis by Boeing and the regulators that the salient issues of concern to every airline passenger are often unclear. Here is a basic summation of those issues:
Will the 737 MAX ever fly again?
That’s a question with potentially huge consequences.
Boeing is, truly, too big to fail, but if this airplane were to be permanently grounded the financial costs would be calamitous. The company would likely be broken up, isolating the commercial division from the rest—defense and aerospace. The commercial division would declare Chapter 11 and be refinanced and rebuilt. This, in turn, would bring deep collateral damage to many thousands of jobs in Boeing plants and throughout long supply lines in companies beyond Boeing. Just suspending production, as happened this week, will instantly shave around 0.4 percent from the national GDP for every quarter the airplane remains grounded.
So it’s highly unlikely that it will be permanently grounded.
