| ON SUNDAY NIGHT, Bob
Sauer, a high school science teacher in the Portland, Oregon, area, took a flashlight into his backyard and spotted a 65-pound piece of white aerospace equipment. It was nestled at the foot of several trees, which softened its 16,000-foot fall out of the sky.
The specific piece of equipment, a plug door that broke off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft during Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from Portland on Friday night, in fact illustrates many of the broader trends in the airline industry today: the desire to cram more passengers into finite space, the standardization of production across outsourced subcontractors, and the lack of oversight from federal regulators into these increasingly dangerous schemes.
Many of these same problems led to Boeing’s infamous 737 MAX plane crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people. Those crashes involved a new semi-autopiloting software that malfunctioned, forcing the planes to nosedive against the pilot’s best attempts to correct course.
A faulty course change pretty well describes Boeing, which went through a restructuring during the 1990s from an “association of engineers” to a firm run by Wall Street shareholders. This catastrophic path has led to another systemic crisis for one of the world’s two major commercial aviation companies, underscoring the deterioration of Boeing’s product quality by financialization, cost-cutting, and
outsourcing.
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