January 9, 2021. Sriwijaya Air Flight 182. A scheduled domestic passenger flight from Jakarta to Pontianak on the Island of Borneo, Indonesia, gone horribly wrong. Four minutes after departing from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, the discontinued 26-year-old Boeing 737-524 aircraft, with overall good safety record, crashed into the Java Sea off the Thousand Islands. The aircraft, which took off amid a heavy monsoon season rain following a bad weather delay, plunged more than 3 km in less than a minute.
On January 12, the aircraft’s Flight Data Recorder (FDR) was recovered, along with wreckage, human remains and items of clothing. Search for survivors stopped on January 21. All 62 people on board presumed dead. Authorities are still looking for the cause.
The crash is yet another blow for Boeing, still struggling to restore its reputation after two fatal crashes that lead to the grounding of its notorious 737 MAX. The recertification process itself highly scrutinized.
The 737 MAX only recently regained certification and is slowly returning to international airspace despite ongoing speculation about the transparency of the whole recertification process. The plane that recently crashed in Indonesia lacks the faulty anti-stall software that plagued the Boeing 737 MAX. In other words, the plane that crashed is not another Max, and in no way relates to it.
The recent crash is just another reputation blow. Reputation blows are still costly, though, as the aviation industry is gasping for financial relief as the pandemic continues to paralyze international air travel. Even before the pandemic plummeted the industry, Boeing stated that grounding the MAX would cost it more than USD 18 billion. Speaking of costly reputation blows, Boeing recently agreed to pay USD 2.5 billion, including USD 500 million for a victims’ fund, to settle US criminal charges that it withheld critical information about changes to the MAX’s automated flight control system (MCAS) from safety officials. The faulty of MCAS is directly linked to the fatal MAX crashes.
Will Boeing survive constant public scrutiny and save its reputation eventually? Time will tell…
We extend our deepest sympathies to the families of those who lost their lives in the tragic crash…
That’s all for this month, peeps…
