Boeing published its latest deliveries figures on Tuesday after a bad week for the aviation company. After a 737 Max 9 jetliner suffered a mid-air ‘door-plug’ blowout during an Alaska Airlines flight, both United Airlines and Alaska Airlines discovered loose parts on a number of their grounded planes.
It’s not the first time that the safety of Boeing’s planes has been called into question. The previous model, the 737 Max 8, was grounded in 50 countries around the world between March 2019 and December 2020, following two crashes that together killed 346 people. The first disaster took place on October 29, 2018, when the domestic passenger flight Lion Air 610 crashed into the sea just 13 minutes after takeoff from Soekarno–Hatta International Airport, in Jakarta, Indonesia, while the second happened on March 10, 2019, when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed just six minutes after departing from Bole International Airport, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
In light of the incidents, Boeing temporarily halted production of the model from January 2020 to May 2020. 2019 had already seen fewer deliveries by the company and by 2020, its deliveries dropped to a low 157 units. However, these figures started to pick up again in the years since, reaching 528 deliveries in 2023. Boeing also reported 1,314 net new orders last year, up from 774 in 2022.
It remains to be seen how deliveries figures will be affected this time round. Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are currently investigating the most recent incidents, and both Alaska and United (the only airlines in the U.S. to use these specific jetliners) have temporarily grounded their 737 Max 9 planes with the same door-plugs. While a full report is yet to be released, as reported by Stephen Brashear of Business Insider, the malfunctions causing the Max 8 crashes and the Max 9 panel blowout do not appear to be related.
