A London-bound Air India plane struck an Ahmedabad medical staff hostel shortly after takeoff on 12th June and erupted into flames, killing at least 265 people. This is among the greatest air disasters to hit India in recent memory. The jet crashed into buildings inside the BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital complex, killing multiple persons on the ground as well.
Several bodies charred to a degree that rendered them unrecognizable. According to Air India, the flight was headed for London’s Gatwick airport and included 169 Indian passengers, 53 British, seven Portuguese and a Canadian. There were 242 individuals on board, including 10 cabin crew members and two pilots, on board the doomed Boeing 787 Dreamliner (AI 171).
Vijay Rupani, the former chief minister of Gujarat was among the fatalities. 40-year-old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, one of the British passengers miraculously survived the massive tragedy and was taken to hospital. “One half of the plane crashed into the residential building where doctors lived with their families. The nose and front wheel landed on the canteen building where students were having lunch,” a person told AFP, according to New India Abroad.
The plane’s communication was lost at 1:38 pm local time, less than a minute after takeoff from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad, based on preliminary data. The aircraft achieved a maximum height of 625 feet, in contrast to the airport’s altitude of roughly 200 feet. The plane’s rapid loss of altitude prior to its collision is unclear.
Notably, the catastrophic incident has once again highlighted Boeing’s association with yet another tragic aviation event. Its stock was down about 5% on 12th June when New York stock markets closed. Last year, the company struggled with a safety crisis, quality control problems and a disastrous seven-week strike by the wrokers that cost it around $1 billion each month.
Boeing continues to cope with the fallout from two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft in 2018 and 2019, which claimed 346 lives. Last month, the firm and the Department of Justice came to an agreement that would exempt it from criminal liability for the crashes.
The airplane manufacturer consented to pay a fine, invest in safety and quality initiatives, acknowledge that it obstructed federal oversight and donate to a fund for the family members of the deceased. However, the families have opposed the deal which needs a judge’s permission. The company has encountered significant safety concerns in last few years.
Social media calls out Boeing
The largest airline in Japan, All Nippon Airways received the first Dreamliner in 2011. Air India reportedly runs about three dozen of the more than 1,100 that are currently in operation. The ill-fated aircraft involved in the latest incident was delivered in January 2014.
Netizens pointed out the severe performance shortcomings of its aircraft as the company continues to operate in a dubious manner. Journalist Surya Kanegaonkar noted the questionable history and conduct of the American corporation. He remarked that it uses counterfeit titanium in its aircraft, neglects to address software bugs, persists with defective engineering designs and has disregarded safety standards for years.
He underscored that whistleblowers who exposed Boeing were later discovered dead and how the company give “blood money” to the DoJ to mask offenses and escape legal action. He added that it has a “cushy agreement with Washington to arm twist countries into purchasing their substandard planes. This is Boeing in a nutshell.”
A leaked video from 2014, posted by Sputnik India, reveals Dreamliner assembly workers expressing critical views about the safety of the plane. Al Jazeera released hidden camera footage of Boeing’s Charleston in South Carolina, assembly factory last year. 15 persons were asked if they would fly on the plane they are developing by the person wearing the camera and shockingly ten of them refused.
“I wouldn’t fly on one of these planes because I see the quality of the f***ing sh*t going on here,” one worker expressed candidly. The employee with the wire stated that after witnessing the severity of the situation at the facility, he went to the media. An unidentified whistleblower voiced, “With all the problems reported on the 787, there’s 90% that’s getting swept away and hushed up. It’s an iceberg.”
A netizen referred to Boeing as a “flying coffin” and questioned why the company was not facing inquiries, considering its past performance.
Another journalist emphasized that Boeing whistleblower John Barnett had warned of critical quality issues in the company’s 787 aircraft that could lead to a fatal accident, right before his death.
An account wrote that Boeing sues the pilot if they manage to survive and blame them if they do not, implying at a repetitive cycle of deflecting accountability.
There have been quality issues with the Dreamliner. The plane’s deliveries were suspended for over a year until the Federal Aviation Administration authorized a Boeing proposal in the summer of 2022 to make minor repairs, including replacing some titanium parts that were produced with the wrong material and closing in paper-thin gaps in its body.
According to Boeing at the time, those issues did not immediately affect safety of Dreamliners. Notably, earlier this year, a Dreamliner with registration number N819AN experienced numerous flight cancellations in a 25-day period as a result of hydraulic leaks and flap issues.
Boeing’s troubled legacy
Over the past few years, Boeing has been embroiled in a number of scandals. The two deadly incidents involving the 737 MAX aircraft served as the most important trigger but the effects have gone well beyond that. 346 people were killed when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in 2019 and Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018 crashed minutes after takeoff.
Lion Air Flight JT 610 went down in the Java Sea off the Indonesian coast on 29th October 2018 and took the lives of all 189 passengers, including many children and crew members. The authorities concluded that one of the primary reasons of the tragedy was the Boeing plane’s design flaws, following a protracted inquiry. MCAS activated during the flight.
A Boeing 737 MAX 8 run by Ethiopian Airlines heading for Nairobi, carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew members, crashed six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian agency’s conclusion that a major contributing factor in the accident was Boeing’s new flight control software, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System which repeatedly pushed the jet’s nose down.
It was also confirmed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis. As a result, the 737 MAX fleet was grounded worldwide for more than 20 months.
The Boeing 737-800 operated by China Eastern Airlines crashed and caught fire in Guangxi province when it was en route from Kunming to Guangzhou, in March of 2022. President Xi Jinping ordered a swift investigation to find out the reason behind the instance which stunned the country. Afterward, every 737-800 operated by China Eastern Airlines was grounded.
According to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), Beijing disagreed with Boeing’s initial explanation of pilot error and blamed the crashes on a malfunctioning Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) design.
A Jeju Air flight 7C2216 belly-landed and went off the end of the runway at Muan International Airport in December 2024, smashing into a wall and exploding. Four of the six crew members and all 175 passengers on board were killed while two crew members were hauled out unharmed. South Korean authorities then declared that they would conduct an urgent safety check on every Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines.
Last November, a cargo plane crashed close to Vilnius airport in Lithuania, resulting in at least one fatality and three injuries. During its final approach for landing, the Spanish cargo airline Swiftair, operating a Boeing 737 for DHL (Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn) crashed close to a residence.
Older commercial aircraft models remain in use in Europe because of Boeing’s production delays and dependability issues with its more recent models. Airlines are reluctant to fully rely on newer aircraft models owing to safety concerns and continuous reliability issues, while the compnay’s manufacturing issues create backlog.
A Boeing 737 Max 9 plane’s unused cabin door fell off in midair in January, generating a stir in the aviation industry. The event raised concerns about safety on Boeing aircraft even though no one on the Alaska Airlines flight was gravely hurt. The majority of Boeing 727 Max 9 aircraft were grounded for inspection by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Subsequently, it was revealed that Boeing has been implementing organizational changes to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the previous two years.
No end to Boeing’s contentious track record
In March 2013, two fuel leaks caused a Japan Airlines 787 to be grounded. Likewise, a United Airlines 787 aircraft was reported to have problems with its primary batteries. While conducting a thorough investigation, the governments of the United States and Japan both grounded their aircraft fleets.
The Dreamliner was withdrawn from service on the Delhi-Tokyo route after Boeing warned Air India not to fly the aircraft close to high-level thunderstorms in India due to a higher risk of engine icing.
An Air India Delhi-Kolkata 787 airliner returned to Delhi due to a cracked windshield as part of the ongoing safety assessment by the FAA and two further 787 aircraft were grounded since their GE (General Electric) engines were part of the same series that was under probe.
Air India’s Dreamliner fleet experienced 136 minor issues in the 14 months after it was introduced. According to the Ministry of Civil Aviation in the Rajya Sabha, Air India had to replace other aircraft on its route and pay an additional Rs 1.43 crore per day for aircraft financing and pilot maintenance, which resulted in an additional expenditure of Rs 60 lakh per day.
Boeing responded by implementing a 10-day maintenance grounding of all Dreamliner aircraft as part of a “modification package” that included modifications to aircraft software and components.
32 incidents involving engine shutdowns, flight control issues, non-retraction of gear, smoke inside the cabin, communication failure, cracked windshields, cabin pressure problems, severe turbulence, altitude drop, slat malfunction, tire bursts and hydraulic leaks were reported on Air India’s 787 aircraft between 2015 and 2024. Technical problems even caused accidents on two occasions, injuring multiple passengers.
Whistleblowers expose Boeing
Sam Salehpour, a Boeing engineer, expressed serious concerns in 2024 over the Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s structural integrity. He suggested the American aircraft manufacturer cut corners when producing the fuselage of the plane and cautioned that this could eventually result in disastrous failures.
He charged in a January 2024 complaint to the FAA that crews had neglected to fill in spaces when assembling separately made fuselage components, reducing the aircraft’s lifespan by increasing wear. He added that engineers were under pressure to approve uninspected work. The FAA is examining these allegations right now.
Salehpour stated, “I want to make clear that I have raised these issues over 3 years. I was ignored. I was told not to create delays. I was told, frankly, to shut up.” He even told US lawmakers that he was threatened and harassed after his accusations on Boeing.
“I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align. By jumping up and down, you’re deforming parts so that the holes align temporarily and that’s not how you build an airplane,” he further outlined.
A similar concern about incorrect assembly had previously been raised in 2021, which caused the FAA and Boeing to stop the delivery of Dreamliners. However, the deliveries were restarted following an FAA investigation and Boeing’s confirmation that it had implemented modifications to its manufacturing process. Over the course of the procedure, no Dreamliners were grounded.
Concerns regarding the South Carolina factory that has been assembling the Dreamliner for years have been publicized by other whistleblowers. One of them was John Barnett, a former quality manager who worked with Boeing for nearly thirty years and came forward in 2019 to voice his worries about subpar standards. He maintained that employees working under duress had been purposefully installing inferior parts on the production line.
After a years-long legal struggle with the corporation, which he claimed was retaliating against him for articulating his concerns, he committed suicide last year. Boeing and Barnett’s family reached a settlement in their lawsuit last month over his passing.
Joshua Dean who served as a quality auditor for Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier for Boeing also passed away. He had complained to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about “serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management of the 737 production line” at Spirit.
Santiago Paredes, a former Spirit AeroSystems inspector, whose repeated warnings of quality and safety hazards were ignored, went public following the death of Dean.
“But, you know, I’m always looking behind my mirror to make sure nobody’s car’s following me. I’m not saying that I’m scared, but at the same time, I can’t put a blind eye to the reality of what could be. I have to prepare myself for that. I’m picking up the mantle of where he left off and I have to carry on and see it through,” he stressed.
Designed by clowns, supervised by monkeys
According to more than a hundred pages of internal communications provided to congressional investigators in 2020, Boeing employees made fun of federal regulations, discussed misleading regulators and played jokes about possible defects in the 737 Max while it was being developed, reported The New York Times.
Conversations between Boeing pilots and other staff members regarding software bugs and other difficulties with flight simulators for the Max, later involved in two catastrophes in late 2018 and early 2019 that killed 346 people and rocked the firm, were among the damaging texts.
The workers talked about situations where the corporation failed to disclose such issues to the FAA when the regulator certified the simulators used in the creation of the Max and in training pilots who had never flown a 737 before. Employees questioned the Max’s design and even disparaged their own coworkers in another set of messages.
An employee stated, “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” in 2017. Employees of Boeing repeatedly mocked FAA officials who were examining the aircraft. An investigation by the media house in 2019 used internal emails, documents, and employee interviews to show that Boeing had coerced employees into not reporting safety problems.
DoJ protects Boeing
Boeing and the Justice Department conveniently came to an agreement in May 2024 that would spare the airline giant from criminal punishment for falsifying information to US authorities on the 737 Max airliner prior to two of the planes crashing and killing 346 people. Boeing had to pay or spend more than $1.1 billion under the “agreement in principle,” including an extra $445 million for the family members of the deceased.
The DoJ announced that Boeing would pay more than $1.1 billion in fines and confess to “conspiracy to obstruct and impede” an investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration, much to the horror of the families of the victims.
A Unites States Senate panel looking into Boeing criticized the aircraft manufacturer’s quality control procedures and the Federal Aviation Administration’s monitoring, September of 2024. It cited papers gathered during the probe. According to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Boeing employees were under pressure to put production speed ahead of quality.
The commitee mentioned, “Given the depth and history of Boeing’s safety deficiencies, its lack of candor with the FAA, and the agency’s reactive regulatory posture, the newly released information raises questions about the effectiveness of the FAA’s oversight of the company.” The FAA initiated multiple inquiries into Boeing.
97 Boeing allegations of noncompliance were detailed in the 116-page FAA letter which covered “issues in Boeing’s manufacturing process control, parts handling and storage, and product control.” According to the memo, the audit uncovered 23 instances in which staff members “failed to follow processes or lacked proficiency.”
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stated that over 200 reports were filed by Boeing whistleblowers in a 12-month period last year. Boeing has a “culture of concealment,” announced US congressional investigations.
Boeing’s market capitalization declined dramatically in the last five years, falling by over 30% due to regulatory scrutiny, financial losses and safety issues with its 737 MAX and 787 Dreamliner aircraft, among other reasons. Over the past few years, Boeing’s top executive team has experienced a rather major shake-up. A year ago, Kelly Ortberg, the company’s new boss stepped out of retirement to try to turn around the struggling corporation.
