Business News/ Industry / One plane breaks apart, another burns: air travel’s rough 2024 start
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A burning inferno on the runway, followed four days later by a mid-air emergency involving a gaping hole in the side of the plane, isn’t the way the airline industry wanted to start 2024.
A burning inferno on the runway, followed four days later by a mid-air emergency involving a gaping hole in the side of the plane, isn’t the way the airline industry wanted to start 2024.
After a fraught 2023, in which safety specialists and regulators raised alarms about mounting risks, the air-travel business has experienced two near-catastrophic accidents already this year—one with multiple casualties.
After a fraught 2023, in which safety specialists and regulators raised alarms about mounting risks, the air-travel business has experienced two near-catastrophic accidents already this year—one with multiple casualties.
The accidents are different, and occurred on opposite sides of the world, but come as the industry is under stress while it pushes to recover to pre-pandemic norms.
“I think the system is under strain," said Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. The industry faces an important test, he said, to maintain its safety record while adding thousands of new pilots, flight attendants and air-traffic controllers. “We have enough information based on what’s occurred to be concerned," he said, referring to the post-pandemic period.
Meanwhile, investigators are piecing together what caused two aircraft to collide at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and how 379 passengers and crew on Japan Airlines’ Airbus aircraft managed to escape the resulting blaze.
U.S. regulators are starting to look at Boeing’s production process and supply chain to pinpoint what might have caused a metal panel to fling off the side of an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX mid-flight on Friday evening, while Portland, Ore., residents are helping to comb the city for where the metal piece might have fallen.
Authorities say that, in both cases, the accidents could have been more severe. For the Alaska Airlines accident, which only caused some minor injuries, the impact would have been worse if the incident had occurred at cruising altitude instead of during the jet’s climb, or if either of the two seats closest to the fuselage panel had been occupied.
“We could have ended up with something so much more tragic, and we’re really fortunate that that did not occur here," NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said at a briefing on Saturday night.
In Japan, the collision caused the death of five on board the coast-guard plane that had encroached onto the runway. Still, the incident risked being one of the most deadly in history had the evacuation of the passenger jet been less successful, or had the flames that engulfed the aircraft spread more quickly.
Commercial aviation is still one of the safest ways to travel, far outstripping accident rates in most other transport modes. Global accident rates in 2022 were still below pre-pandemic levels despite rising 14.5% from 2021. Between 2013 and 2022 the rate of accidents has fallen nearly 17% from 3.9 per million flights to 3.25, according to the latest available data from the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body.
The industry credits the general decline in accidents to an obsession with safety, from processes that carefully manage the movement of aircraft on runways and in the skies, to regulations that pinpoint the exact sizing of every nut and bolt that is installed on a commercial aircraft.
Safety specialists and regulators have been on guard since the dropping of travel restrictions as passengers rush to get back into the skies and airlines push to make up for the tens of billions of dollars lost during the pandemic lows.
ICAO’s annual data for 2023 haven’t been released, but records kept by the Hamburg-based Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre, show the total number of cases—from smaller incidents to fatal accidents—reached 1,033 last year, higher than the 10-year average of 869. That accounts for all civilian aircraft with 19 seats or more.
As Covid-19 spread across the globe in 2020, airlines put thousands of aircraft into storage, birds and wildlife moved into unused airports, and aircraft-manufacturing facilities that had reached record production levels just months earlier were staffed by skeleton crews.
Millions of jobs were cut in the biggest-ever retrenchment drive across both the aviation and aerospace industries. The subsequent recovery, meanwhile, has led to the quickest period of hiring, leaving aircraft manufacturers, maintenance specialists, air-traffic controllers, ground-handling firms and airlines complaining about the battle to fill jobs.
“Both accidents will, at some level, be attributed to human error. Somewhere in the chain of events a human has made a mistake," said Conor Nolan, a board member at the Flight Safety Foundation.
He said there is a huge demand for traffic at the same time the labor pool is becoming tight, adding that airlines are working “harder than ever" on safety because of that pressure. “The availability of talent is not just bodies. We need suitably qualified and experienced personnel in so many aspects of aviation and they’re drying up."
The loss of experienced workers, from the retrenchment of experienced factory workers to the early retirement of pilots, has weighed on skill levels. Pilots are speeding through career milestones, moving from regional airlines to national carriers or being promoted more quickly from first officer to captain; specialists say injuries among maintenance and manufacturing workers have increased; air-traffic controllers are facing dangerously low staffing levels; and baggage handlers have died in grisly accidents that authorities have apportioned in part to insufficient training.
Those challenges, and a general rustiness across the industry after nearly two years of depressed flying, have reared their head across the sector, mostly in incidents that have been less severe than those in the past week.
In September, a turboprop aircraft rolled across the runway at Malta’s airport after a ground worker removed the tow bar from his tug vehicle before it had been properly parked. In October, a JetBlue aircraft at John F. Kennedy International Airport tipped onto its rear when baggage handlers removed the plane’s cargo before the passengers at the back had all disembarked. In March, a United Airlines pilot damaged the tail of an aircraft after hitting it against the runway during landing; it flew several more flights before crew and maintenance teams noticed the damage.
In the U.S. and Europe, the Federal Aviation Administration and its European counterpart spent much of 2023 trying to identify the causes behind a surge in near misses on runways across the country that could have led to collisions similar to that seen in Tokyo. In the first 10 months of last year, rates of serious incursions on U.S. runways had jumped to 0.41 from 0.34 in 2022 and 0.24 in 2019, according to FAA data.
The FAA flagged early-warning signs of general fatigue and errors across the system as early as the summer of 2021. The agency urged airlines to be on the lookout for fatigue-related mistakes among employees and across the wider system.
At the same time, Boeing and Airbus have been battling to rapidly recover their manufacturing capacity after slashing production over the pandemic. With airlines now rapidly trying to snatch up availability for new jets, boasting some of the biggest-ever orders for commercial planes, both companies have lamented that they can’t build planes fast enough to meet airline demand.
At Boeing, that dynamic has come amid a battle with quality control across the company. For most of 2022, deliveries of its bestselling 787 Dreamliner were halted by the FAA because of repeated lapses in production quality. Last summer, the production of the MAX was all but paused after holes in new fuselage sections were found to be misdrilled. And as recently as Dec. 28, the FAA issued a new directive—unrelated to Friday night’s incident—asking airlines to inspect newly built MAX jets for missing nuts in the plane’s rudder system.
Jefferies’ aerospace analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu said though it is too soon to know the cause of the issue, pressure on Boeing and suppliers to ramp up has heightened the risk of manufacturing flaws.
“Given the pressure on production, this is one thing that’s going to be top of mind," she said.
As part of its investigation after Friday night’s accident, the NTSB is likely to investigate a number of possibilities, including whether the emergency-exit door cover wasn’t installed or manufactured correctly. Authorities are now parsing through Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, which supplies those panels, to assess where any fault might have been introduced.
Spirit, a critical supplier to Boeing and Airbus, has been thrust into its own crisis after a series of manufacturing snafus led to the ouster of its former chief executive.
Sharon Terlep contributed to this article.
Write to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com and Alison Sider at alison.sider@wsj.com
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