It was a Pyrrhic victory for Boeing when the failed Starliner spacecraft returned to Earth empty.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched the spacecraft on June 5 for an eight-day test flight.
Now NASA has decided to extend the mission until 2025 and has brought back the Starliner without the astronauts. They will return to Earth in February aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
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“Starliner is a very capable spacecraft and the bottom line is that a higher degree of certainty is needed to perform a crewed return,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a statement.
“Our efforts will help prepare for unmanned re-entry and will greatly benefit future corrective actions for the spacecraft.”
Recent Incidents Involving Boeing Jets
The Starliner saga is one of many recent setbacks for Boeing, which continues to struggle with technical problems with its planes.
Last month, the company halted flight tests of its 777-9 fleet after a technical defect was discovered where the engine attaches to the plane.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Association (FAA) has also ordered an inspection of the pilot seats of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner after a LATAM Airlines flight from Sydney, Australia, to Auckland, New Zealand suddenly lost altitude in March, injuring 50 people.
In addition to these incidents, August marked the end of two days of U.S. National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) hearings into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, which landed after an emergency door became detached mid-flight due to a faulty electrical connector.
The NTSB will need up to 18 months to complete its investigation into the Alaska Airlines incident. The investigation will include recommendations on how to improve aviation safety.
300 fatal Boeing accidents in the past decade
Boeing describes itself as a “leading global aerospace company” headquartered in the U.S. Since 1916, the company has manufactured commercial aircraft, defense products and space systems.
According to the company, there are currently about 10,000 Boeing jets in service worldwide, which represents half of the world’s total fleet.
An internal Boeing accident report from 2023 found that there were 2,123 accidents during their flights between 1959 and 2022, with about one in three accidents considered “fatal,” either due to the loss of an aircraft or the loss of to live.
Boeing said 300 of these accidents occurred in the past decade alone, with about one in 10 accidents being fatal, despite the fact that the number of flying hours has nearly doubled since the early 2000s.
Despite this, a recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that the number of plane crashes has fallen by an average of 7.5 percent per year since 1968. Today, the chance of dying during a flight is about one in 13 million.
Bjorn Fehrm, an aerospace and economics analyst at consulting firm Leeham Company LLC, says there are “no unknowns” in building airplanes today. Aircraft manufacturers “shouldn’t make any mistakes if we follow the rules and do it the right way.”
What causes turbulence at Boeing?
Richard Aboulafia, president of consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, said the only major turning point that explains Boeing’s recent technical problems is its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas Corp., one of its largest competitors.
Boeing’s C-suite acquisition of former McDonnell Douglas executives has changed the company’s culture from an engineering-focused to a profit-driven one, Aboulafia argued, and “little has changed” in the Boeing of 2024, he added.
“You have to cut costs and get results, otherwise you will be fired,” Aboulafia said.
“In the aircraft industry, that’s potentially disastrous. And if we’ve allowed that to happen for decades, it’s seriously damaged the capabilities of the company.”
According to Fehrm, this means that engineers who identify technical problems are not heard in the production environment and their results are ‘swept under the carpet’.
“It’s a huge failure of their project management culture,” he said.
According to Fehrm, the same problems occurred in the 2018 Lion Air 737 Max crash.
In 2012, a group of Boeing engineers noted that the 737 Max’s flight stabilization software needed further testing and raised it as a concern, but company executives ignored them, Fehrm said.
A report from the Seattle Times found Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Association (FAA) failed to inform pilots about the software in their training manuals for the 737 Max, even though the company expected pilots to know what to do if the system malfunctioned.
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Euronews Next asked Boeing questions about the Starliner aircraft and the company’s management.
Boeing “remains focused first and foremost on the safety of the crew and the spacecraft,” said a brief statement from NASA on behalf of Boeing about the Starliner mission.
Boeing declined to answer questions about the company’s management.
New Boeing CEO, possible new culture
Both Aboulafia and Fehrm believe that no changes are needed across the aircraft industry because the problem lies with Boeing.
The only way to solve their technical problems is to start by addressing the culture problem at the top, Fehrm and Aboulafia agreed.
Boeing named Kelly Ortberg as the company’s new CEO in July, just days before the U.S. Transportation Committee hearings into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.
Ortberg began his career in 1983 as an engineer at Texas Instruments, a semiconductor company in Texas, after which he went to work as a program manager at Collins Airspace.
He eventually rose to the position of president and CEO of the company in 2013.
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Ortberg’s training as a mechanical engineer from the University of Iowa and his experience as an executive make him “the right person” to change Boeing’s course, both experts agreed.
Both sides have different views on how long it will take for Boeing to feel the change of new leadership.
Aboulafia thinks it will take “months, not years” for Ortberg to turn things around at Boeing, but Fehrm estimates it will take closer to five years, based on his own experience revamping the company’s culture.