Boeing shares fell sharply, and more than a thousand flights have been canceled since Saturday

Boeing shares fell sharply on Monday, January 8, following an incident that saw a door come loose during an Alaska Airlines flight on Friday. In early Wall Street trading, the aircraft maker fell 8.38%. Its main subsidiary Spirit Aerosystems also fell 13.74%. It was a fresh setback for the planemaker, whose stock has rebounded since the start of the fall after an acceleration of its deliveries, long marred by technical issues. Alaska Airlines was punished on Wall Street, shedding 5.56%.

Also, the door of the 737 MAX 9 plane was found on Sunday, announced Jennifer Homendi, head of the US agency responsible for transportation safety, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). A teacher has recovered part of a crashed plane in his garden in Portland, Oregon. “We'll get it and start analyzing it.”The NTSB chairman announced during a press conference.

On Sunday, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun decided to cancel a conference earlier in the week that would have brought together the group's leaders and replace it with Tuesday's meeting on safety, which was open to all employees.

The NTSB, Boeing, Alaska Airlines and the US Civil Aviation Regulatory Agency (FAA) are trying to establish the exact circumstances of the incident, which caused a few minor injuries but may have ended. “In a very sad way”According to M^me Homandy.

A series of setbacks for Boeing

The flying door is condemned, a configuration that Boeing offers to its customers when the number of emergency exits relative to the number of seats in the aircraft is already sufficient. According to the NTSP, no one was sitting in the two seats next to the door. According to passengers cited by US media, a young man sitting in line had his shirt torn by decompression and suffered minor injuries.

After this extremely rare malfunction, the FAA “Some Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft will require immediate inspection before resuming flights”This is about 171 airlines in the world. She clarified on X. As a result, airlines have some Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft waiting for testing. Grounding these planes has already led to the cancellation of more than a thousand flights since Saturday, according to data from specialist site FlightAware, mainly to Alaska Airlines and United, which operate 144 of the 218 737 MAX 9 planes in circulation.

Aeromexico, which operates twenty-one of these planes, Copa Airlines – and Turkish Airlines, which owns five – have also reported grounding their planes. On the other hand, the European Aviation Safety Agency clarified that no operator in Europe is operating the 737 MAX 9 with the relevant technical options.

The incident marks a new chapter in a series of setbacks for Boeing. The most serious of these were two 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia in October 2018 and Ethiopia in March 2019, which killed a total of 346 people. After these accidents, all 737 MAXs were grounded for twenty months, with MCAS integrated into the piloting software.

But Boeing has held up deliveries of its long-haul 787 for a total of nearly two years, on several occasions, due to manufacturing and inspection flaws.

Most recently, the 737 MAX made headlines once again after the discovery, in the fall, of faulty workmanship in the plane's rear watertight bulkhead and then, in December, a bolt in the rudder control that was at risk of loosening. system.