Boeing not at fault—analyst

Press, 27 February 1989, Page 11

Boeing not at fault—analyst

NZPA-AP Seattle Boeing receives good marks from airline officials, industry analysts and safety advocates, despite recent crashes and two accidents involving jets it manufactured. It is a “pure set of coincidences that we’re having this rash of happenings,” said Paul Nisbet, an aerospace analyst with Prudential Bache in New York. “I don’t think that the market is paying an awful lot of attention to these events, because they have not been tied to any wrongdoing or fault of Boeing. "They have been older airplanes, in many cases, where the maintenance hasn’t been as thorough as perhaps it should have been,” he said. On Saturday in Hawaii, a large panel was torn from the right side of an 18-year-old Boeing 747 soon after it took off and nine people

were sucked out to their deaths. Nearly a year ago, a 737 lost so much of its fuselage near Hawaii that it resembled a convertible. A stewardess died in that accident. In December, a 727 was forced to land at Charleston, West Virginia, after a 35.5 cm hole opened in the fuselage at 10,668 metres. The first accident led to concern about the safety of aging jets. Tiny cracks were found in nearly half the older Boeing 737 s inspected in the months that followed. “A lot of us put the aging aircraft and the structures problem as the most significant in the whole area of aviation safety,” said John Galipault, the president of the Aviation Safety Institute, a non-profit research group in the United States. “We put it above security matters, air traffic control matters.

pilot training and human factors,” Mr Galipault said. “I don’t think that Boeing has or should be accused of any malfeasance in this regard at all. By and large, we have always found that Boeing has maintained a high level of integrity.” In addition to the fuselage blowouts and crashes, the world’s biggest maker of commercial jetliners also has had problems with improperly wired emergency systems in some newer planes. That problem arose after a 737 crash in England in January. “What you have here is a series of events, and the only correlation is that they’re happening in the same time frame, but if you dissect each one you will find that they’re totally unrelated,” said David Jimenez of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, a subsidiary.