This story came from David McClelland, the co-pilot of the Midland Airways Boeing 747-300 which crashed onto the M1 motorway embankment while attempting an emergency landing at East Midlands Airport in January 1989. 47 people died then or later of their injuries. Boeing blamed the pilots as they usually did. The plane had suffered an engine failure and the instruments led the pilots to shut down the wrong engine. Both pilots were fired, but McClelland subsequently won an out of court settlement for unfair dismissal. He never flew again. Subsequently, training on the aircraft was revised and engines were replaced on nearly 100 aircraft.
Then came the Lauda Air tragedy in which a Boeing 767-300ER disintegrated in mid-air after one of its engines unaccountably went into reverse thrust at 25,000 feet, shortly after take-off from Bangkok. None of the 223 passengers and crew aboard the faulty airliner survived. True to form, Boeing initially intimated that pilot error was to blame, but thanks to a robust stand taken by the airline’s owner and chief pilot, three-times Formula 1 World Champion Niki Lauda, the existence of the fatal flaw that had brought the aircraft down was made public - and changes were made to the thrust reverser system. Confronting Boeing’s Vice President in charge of aircraft safety, Cook was told his questions were “inappropriate” and that that their aircraft “were as safe as they were ever going to be”
And that was before the introduction of the fatally flawed - and subsequently grounded - 737 MAX 8, described by legislators as ‘flying coffins’ after two successive crashes that killed 346 people. An official report lambasted the company: the crashes “were the horrific culmination of design flaws and faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the Federal Aviation Authority”. If Boeing can eventually convince the authorities that the aircraft have been made airworthy, the next problem will be to convince passengers to fly on them. And safety problems continue to dog this once great company.
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Roger Cook Reports
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6 фев 2022
