U.S. airplane maker Boeing has been plagued by safety incidents in the past couple of years, including most recently the loss of a wheel from the landing gear during takeoff of a United Airlines Boeing 757-200 in Los Angeles in early July as well as the loss of a door plug on a Boeing 737 Max 9 of Alaska Airlines taking off from Portland in January. The plane headed from Los Angeles was still able to land safely in Denver, its intended destination, while the incident in Portland triggered an emergency landing. The affected airlines announced that they had found poorly screwed bolts on the doors of several aircraft of the same models. In May, one person lost his life when a Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 encountered severe turbulence during a flight between London and Singapore, while in June, 17 passengers had to be hospitalized at their arrival following a failure of the pressurization system of a Korean Airlines 737 Max. Of course, the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 Max airliners in Ethiopia and Indonesia in late 2018 and early 2019 have also seriously tarnished Boeing's safety record.
Looking only at safety incidents recorded on Boeing aircraft during scheduled flights in the United States, their number has not increased significantly in recent years despite high-profile cases in the media. In 2020 and 2021, when air traffic was strongly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of incidents recorded dropped. In other years since 2014, between 13 (in 2017) and 23 (in 2023) incidents were recorded each year in the country. The number of people injured in incidents on Boeing aircraft also does not show a clear trend.
Additionally, as mentioned above, unexpected turbulence is included in the data despite not being directly tied to a plane malfunctioning and was the most common cause for Boeing as well as Airbus safety incident in the country. In the first half of 2024, the National Transportation Safety Board in the U.S. recorded 12 incidents and 9 injuries on regularly scheduled Boeing aircraft, with half of incidents and all of injuries being turbulence-related.
