Southwest Airlines is seeking passenger feedback on Boeing’s 737 Max to prepare for travelers wary of a jetliner that crashed twice even after regulators allow it back into the sky.
The latest version of an airline industry workhorse flown since 1967, the 737 Max has been sidelined since mid-March following crashes of Ethiopian and Lion Air flights that killed more than 300 people and were blamed partly on new anti-stall software.
The grounding has snarled the schedules of Southwest and rivals American and United for the foreseeable future — a challenge that Boeing executives attempt to address in almost-daily conversations with customers — and prompted Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to seek a review of the jetliner’s initial approval for commercial flights.
While both Boeing and Southwest, which flies only 737s, are optimistic that the Federal Aviation Administration will allow carriers to resume flights with the jet by late summer, “there’s certainly going to be some people that I expect will probably book away for some period of time,” Thomas Nealon, president of the Dallas-based company, said Thursday. “We’re doing a lot of work understanding what our customer’s perceptions are, what their understanding is of the issues, what their awareness is of the issues, what their concerns are.”
Still, booking enough passengers on flights with the 34 737 Max aircraft that Southwest operates, which represent less than 5% of its 753-plane fleet, shouldn’t be a problem, said CEO Gary Kelly.
“We’ll fill them up like we always do,” he told investors on an earnings call that focused heavily on the grounding’s impact on operations from January through March. “I don’t think it’s going to be a massive issue for us. I think that our customers know us and trust us. They know we know the 737.”
Flight cancellations after the 737 Max was pulled from service, along with those due to inclement weather and a spike in maintenance requests during contract talks with the mechanics’ union, curbed profit by about $150 million during the quarter, Southwest said. Net income dropped 16% to $387 million, or 70 cents a share.
The impact has been more severe for Boeing, the Chicago-based planemaker for whom the single-aisle jet is a cash-generation engine. CEO Dennis Muilenburg has prioritized the aircraft’s safe return to service and said Wednesday that pilots from 90% of the 50 carriers that bought the 737 Max have already used flight simulations to test a patch to the anti-stall software.
Feedback has been excellent so far, he said, which is a pivotal step toward rebuilding faith once the FAA and its regulatory counterparts around the world allow the plane to resume commercial flights.
“We have to earn and re-earn the trust of the flying public,” Muilenburg told investors. “The key voices in all of this will be the pilots of our airlines; their voice is very important. That bond between passenger and pilot is one that’s critical.”
In the Indonesian crash, a malfunctioning sensor fed incorrect data on the airliner’s ascent vector to a computer system that attempted to lower the angle to avoid a stall, officials said. That prompted a struggle between computer software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, and the pilot, who ultimately lost control of the aircraft.
All 189 people aboard were killed. The fact that Boeing hadn’t yet completed a software patch that the FAA mandated afterward was part of what prompted the high level of concern when the Ethiopian Airlines crash outside the capital of Addis Ababa in early March killed all 157 passengers and crew.
The agency initially expected to approve a software patch by April, but Boeing stretched out the timeline to ensure all “pertinent issues” were addressed.
The planemaker has garnered more than 4,600 orders for the single-aisle jetliner, though just 67 of the aircraft are flown in the U.S. and fewer than 400 worldwide. Boeing only began delivering the plane in 2017 and was working to ramp production up to 57 a month, which would have netted a potential $30 billion in sales this year, prior to the Ethiopian crash.
