About 70% of U.S. airline passengers are wary of traveling on Boeing’s 737 Max once the grounded airliner resumes flights, a new survey shows, but most will never know they’re on it.
The reason: Although airlines disclose the make and model of planes they use, more than 66% of people never check what kind of aircraft they’re boarding, according to data from 1,000 people gathered by the Swiss lender UBS.
The numbers offer fresh insight into how much passenger resistance Boeing and its U.S. airline customers face once the Federal Aviation Administration allows the Max back into service, which UBS predicts may happen in late July.
The best-selling model in Boeing’s history, the Max was sidelined worldwide in March after two crashes that killed more than 340 people. Subsequent investigations found new anti-stall software, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, played a role in both cases, and the FAA is now reviewing a patch designed by the Chicago-based planemaker.
“With the plane now nearly three months grounded and still spurring front-page new stories, it still front and center for the public,” said UBS analyst Myles Walton. Still, only 12% of people worried about the Max said their concerns wouldn’t be allayed if the plane is operated safely on a continuous basis.
“The net result is the survey suggests 8% of the flying public would never fly the 737 Max, but when coupled with booking habits also captured in the survey, the percentage drops to about 3%,” Walton said.
Since airlines typically wait years for delivery of airplanes, temporary passenger concerns are unlikely to significantly curb Boeing’s share of the worldwide market that the company and rival Airbus have long dominated, he said.
Still, the beleaguered Max suffered another blow this week, when the FAA announced that some tracks supporting slats on the forward edge of aircraft wings — which are typically extended during take-off and landing — may suffer premature cracks due to manufacturing flaws. The agency said 33 Max aircraft are affected, along with 32 Next-Gen 737s, the previous version of the single-aisle jet.
Complete failure of a slat track wouldn’t cause a crash, the FAA said, though it could damage the plane during flight. Boeing has already begun shipping replacement parts to customer bases, and replacement takes one to two days, the company said. Boeing has also made simulators with its software patch available to airline pilots to prepare them for the changes.
“We know that lives depend on what we do and that demands a sense of excellence in how we do it,” CEO Dennis Muilenburg said at a conference in New York last week. “That’s at the very core of who we are, and that really sets the frame for everything else we do in our business.”
In the first Max crash, in Indonesia in October, a malfunctioning sensor fed incorrect data on the airliner’s ascent vector to the computer system, which attempted to lower the angle at which it was ascending to avoid a stall, officials said. That prompted a struggle between the new computer software and the pilot, who ultimately lost control of the aircraft.
Boeing began working on a patch afterward, but it hadn’t been completed at the time of the second crash, which occurred outside the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa in March. It wasn’t until data transmitted to satellites from the flight showed abrupt climbs and descents during takeoff, similar to those before the Indonesia crash, that the FAA ordered carriers to park the planes.
Regulators in the European Union, China, and Canada had already done so.
“We are taking all actions necessary to make sure that accidents like those two accidents that have occurred never happen again,” Muilenburg said. “We know more broadly that the public’s confidence has been hurt by these accidents and that we have work to do to earn and re-earn the trust of the flying public and we will do that.”
Boeing shares have fallen 19% to $343.73 since the second crash, which forced the planemaker to slow production and delivery of the Max. The S&P 500 gained less than 1% in the same period.
