Families of Indonesian Lion Air crash victims welcome Boeing resignations, call for more safety accountability
- Victims’ families say few lessons have been learned since the 2018 crash, with Boeing aircraft continuing to suffer serious safety malfunctions
- The resignations of the Boeing leadership do not go far enough as there remains a sense of lack of accountability and willingness to improve safety standards, they add
Families of Indonesians who were killed in the Lion Air Flight 610 crash in 2018 had mixed reactions to the news that Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun would step down at the end of the year, with some welcoming his resignation and others questioning whether such a move would bring about genuine safety improvements.
Neuis Marfuah, whose 23-year-old daughter Vivian Hasna Afifa was on board the ill-fated Lion Air flight, told This Week in Asia that Calhoun’s resignation was “probably for the best”.
“Perhaps it was a decision that had to be taken in order for there to be improvement. I feel an emptiness about the events and incidents that occurred while those people were involved in the company,” she said.
The plane had been en route from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang when it crashed into the Java Sea on October 29, 2018, killing all 189 people on board.
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Calhoun, 66, was appointed in 2020 following two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets, including the Lion Air crash, but he has been accused of failing to steer the company in a safer direction since the incidents.
The Lion Air crash was found to have been caused by the malfunction of a sensor on the outside of the plane that incorrectly indicated that the nose was too high, causing the on-board flight Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to automatically try to stop the plane from going into a stall by forcing it down towards the sea.
The MCAS also malfunctioned just five months later on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed six minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa Airport en route to Kenya, killing all 157 people aboard.
In the wake of the crashes, a US congressional report accused Boeing of overseeing a “culture of concealment” and lambasted the 737 Max planes as being “marred by technical design failures”, including the MCAS system.
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Boeing Max plane grounded globally after mid-air blowout leaving hole the size of a door
Yet, serious safety malfunctions with Boeing aircraft have continued to take place. On January 6, a door panel of a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane, operated by Alaska Airlines, blew out while flying at an altitude of 14,000 feet, sucking the clothes off passengers as the cabin rapidly depressurised.
On January 18, a Boeing cargo plane made an emergency landing in Florida after the engine caught fire, while two days later, a nose wheel fell off a Boeing 757 operated by Delta Air Lines that was getting ready to take off from Atlanta’s international airport.
In a letter sent to Boeing employees on Monday, Calhoun characterised the Alaska Airlines incident as “a watershed moment for Boeing”.
“The eyes of the world are on us,” he wrote. “We are going to fix what isn’t working, and we are going to get our company back on the track towards recovery and stability.”
In addition to Calhoun, board chair Larry Kellner and the head of the company’s commercial business, Stan Deal, are also leaving.
For Marfuah, however, few lessons appear to have been learned since the Lion Air crash that killed her daughter, with Boeing executives making “constant mistakes”.
“I do think that resigning was the best solution,” she said. “Perhaps it is better to replace them and give the opportunity to someone who is more competent.”
Anton Sahadi, whose wife lost her two cousins, 24-year-olds Riyan Aryandi and Ravi Andrian, on the Lion Air flight, described the resignations as “good” but said they did not go far enough.
“What we need from Boeing is for them to stop flying the planes that are vulnerable and the ones in countries where there have been issues such as the door panels blowing off.”
He added that he did not feel fully satisfied with the resignations, as 64 of the 189 passengers on board the Lion Air flight had not been recovered, despite extensive search and rescue efforts by the Indonesian authorities, denying some of the families any form of closure.
Following the crash, Ravi’s body was recovered from the Java Sea while Riyan has not been found, something Sahadi said was extremely difficult for his family as they had been unable to have a proper burial or visit his grave.
Sahadi added that there was a continued feeling of a lack of accountability and willingness to improve safety standards at Boeing, and of continued optics rather than action.
“Even though Boeing reached a financial settlement [with some of the families after the Lion Air crash] it wasn’t comparable to the lives that were lost,” Sahadi said.
Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association in the United States, told This Week in Asia that the change in leadership at Boeing needed to be measured “on safety and quality of production output, not on words and clever slogans”.
“We must see real change in how they do business, and that business is keeping people safe and alive,” said Tajer, a 737 Max 8 pilot with more than three decades of experience in the aviation industry.
Tajer added that Boeing needed to leave behind its shareholder economy philosophy and focus instead on engineering and quality excellence. He questioned why Calhoun would continue to work at the company until the end of the year despite his recent resignation.
“The CEO captain’s seat won’t change for some time, so we don’t expect any Boeing quality of product and output change for some time. We hope we’re wrong,” he said
“With the CEO remaining, these moves seemed to be made more to protect Boeing’s share price than repair Boeing’s safety culture.”
