Irishwoman Naoise Connolly Ryan, whose husband died in an avoidable Boeing air crash, has called on the Irish Aviation Authority to demand a full investigation after a section of the fuselage blew out mid-air on an Alaska Airlines jet shortly after take-off last Friday.
US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), grounded a number of Max 9 planes after the incident, saying immediate inspections were needed after the eight-week-old plane made an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon. No-one was injured, but passengers said they would have serious concerns about the plane.
Ms Connolly Ryan, however, is worried not just about the Max 9, but all Boeing Max planes. The incident, she says, is just one in a long series of problems with the model.
“Clearly there is something wrong here. This was a brand new plane. US Government data highlights routine safety issues with Boeing 737 Max airplanes (models 737-8 and 737-9), but that clear pattern is being ignored,” she said.
Mick Ryan, her husband and the father of their two young children, died on March 10, 2019, when a defective Boeing 737 Max crashed minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Ryan, deputy chief engineer at the World Food Programme, and 156 others were killed.
Another defective Boeing 737 Max crashed just five months previously. It went down into the Java Sea 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta airport in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.
Since then, Naoise Connolly Ryan and other families of the victims have been monitoring incidents with similar Boeing models. She says that US service difficulty reports — mandated reports designed to share and fix problems to prevent accidents — show that airlines have filed more than 1,300 safety reports on the new Boeing Max planes.
Since Alaska Airlines began flying Max planes in 2021, it submitted over 1,000 reports on an array of aircraft system malfunctions, according to the Foundation for Aviation Safety. By contrast, the airline also flies 10 Airbus A321 Neo airplanes, but submitted just 25 reports on Airbus planes.
“This is data that could prevent fatal or near-fatal incidences, but it is being ignored,” says Ms Connolly Ryan.
She has called on the Irish Aviation Authority to demand an investigation into this incident. She also wants the US air regulator to explain if this incident would have happened if it had paid attention to the data in safety reports.
Boeing share prices fell yesterday and now there is speculation about the longer-term effect on the air industry. Ryanair placed the world’s largest orders for Max 10 planes last year and is expected to take delivery from 2027.
Separately, a deal known as the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, which exempts Boeing executives from criminal prosecution for the deaths of 346 people in two air crashes in 2018 and 2019, timed out on Sunday.
Naoise Connolly Ryan and lawyers for the families of victims are now calling for a further criminal investigation. “Company leaders have withheld critically important safety information. They need to be held to account, not only to get justice for those who died, but to guarantee the safety of all those who fly.”