Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, recently sent a “message on safety” to United’s customers, acknowledging that the airline “experienced a number of incidents” — eight in two weeks, five of them on Boeing planes. The incidents, he said, were unrelated but “have our attention and have sharpened our focus.”
In many ways, what Kirby is describing is a paradox. Multiple aviation safety experts told The New York Times that there has been no rise in safety incidents overall, though they do happen. I found the same thing when I downloaded incident databases from the National Transportation Safety Board, where such things are meticulously logged, and checked last year’s news from sources that follow this topic. I didn’t notice a recent uptick or a systematic pattern.
The data show that commercial flying has never been safer. We’ve gone 15 years in the United States without a single fatal crash.
And yet there are alarm bells going off. The scandals and near-misses over the past few years are all signaling that things are not going in the right direction.
We’ve had the Boeing Max debacle, killing 346 people, and now the Justice Department is reported to be opening a criminal inquiry into the company after a hidden plug panel blew out midflight. (Nobody was hurt, but only luck prevented it from being catastrophic.) Boeing recently told Congress that it can’t find some potentially important records detailing work on the panel. Just recently, the FAA administrator, Michael Whitaker, told NBC News that Boeing’s “priorities have been on production, not on safety and quality.”
Safety, like trust, is a hard currency to gain but is easy to lose — and it’s what everything runs on.
To paraphrase Kirby, what these incidents have shown is that both United and Boeing have our attention, and we’ve sharpened our focus. Let’s hope things get better without getting worse.