Boeing, Boeing, gone! Plagued by daily mechanical failures and warnings a deadly disaster is inevitable amid a ruinous obsession with diversity targets… just what IS going on at world’s most famous aviation firm?

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 made an emergency landing at Denver International Airport on Sunday after part of the engine blew off – the latest in a litany of safety disasters for the aviation giant.

Indeed, it seems like every day beings a new mechanical failure for the firm, employing 170,000 people worldwide, that has left it facing an existential crisis and shaken its reputation for safety.

Since the turn of the year and near-fatal blowout in early January on an Alaskan Airlines flight, the £90billion company has seen its troubled 737 Max line suffer one mishap after another.

The company has even had to deal with the death of a whistleblower who claimed the firm was hiding institutional malpractice – and who killed himself just days after giving evidence to a corporate lawsuit brought against Boeing.

It has also been accused of letting safety lapse as it obsesses over ‘woke’ diversity targets in staffing, as well as over-paying executives working from home.

Current CEO Dave Calhoun announced last month he would be stepping down at the end of this year in a management overhaul, with share prices plunging.

And passengers are said to be deliberately changing flights to avoid Boeing’s fleet or travelling with anti-anxiety medication.

A total of 246 people died in two crashes involving Boeing’s flagship 737 MAX aircraft, on a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October 2018 and one operated by Ethiopian Airlines the following March.

Those prompted the grounding of all Boeing 737 airlines for 21 months but hazardous glitches have continued to affect journeys on a near-daily basis, the latest coming yesterday when an engine cowling fell off a plane in the US.

Series of safety alerts since the start of 2024 

Boeing’s turmoil follows the Alaska Airlines emergency on January 5, when an emergency exit on a 737 MAX 9 jet blew off mid-flight in front of horrified passengers.

Some 171 planes among the firm’s fleet were grounded pending safety investigations and the Federal Aviation Administration capped production of the aircraft.

About £24billion of market value was wiped out in a matter of days, while share prices have fallen by 25 per cent.

Boeing has also had to pay £127million to Alaska Airlines in ‘initial compensation’ due to the grounding and passengers on the plane have filed lawsuits, while the US Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation.

A door plug blew off on January 5 with 171 passengers and crew on board, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon.

The criminal probe will examine whether Boeing has met the conditions of the 2021 settlement reached after the 2018 and 2019 crashes that killed 346 people.

The first occurred when a MAX-8 operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea in October 2018.

The second was when an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crashed nearly straight down into a field six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa in March 2019.

Alaska Airlines also reported last month that the windshield of another Boeing 737 MAX-8 cracked as the plane descended into Portland International Airport.

That came not long after a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner over New Zealand plummetted 300ft, with more than 50 people hurt.

A Boeing 737 MAX-8 operated by United Airlines veered off the runway after landing in Houston, Texas, on March 8.

The aircraft, which arrived from Memphis, was said to have suffered gear collapse as it exited the runway at George Bush Airport, although the 160 passengers and six crew were not injured.

Earlier that same week there were two other incidents, one involving a 737 engine which caught fire after taking off from George Bush Airport bound for Fort Myers in Florida on March 4.

The second saw a 256lb wheel drop from a United Airlines plane, a Boeing 777-200, shortly after take-off in San Francisco and crushed cars parked below as it plummeted to the ground.

The United Airlines flight 35 was barely off the runway on its way to Osaka in Japan when it happened, prompting the plane carrying 235 passengers and 14 crew to be diverted to Los Angeles Airport.

Even more safety failures have followed, including when a Boeing jet had to make an emergency landing in LAX due to hydraulic issues, after taking off from San Francisco on March 9.

A United Airlines Boeing 777 en route to Japan from San Francisco was forced into an emergency landing in at LAX when it lost a tyre on March 11.

Another Boeing jet was forced to make an emergency landing in LAX after taking off from San Francisco due to hydraulic issues on March 9.

That same day, passengers on board a Latam Airlines from Sydney to Auckland were left traumatised after 50 were injured when their Boeing 787-9 plunged, throwing passengers against the ceiling, before landing safely.

An American Airlines Boeing 777 carrying 249 people was forced to make an emergency landing at LAX after a ‘mechanical problem’ on March 13.

Flight AA 345 was arriving from Dallas Fort Worth and landed in Los Angeles around 8:45 p.m.

The aircraft taxied along the runway and all passengers and crew onboard were able to disembark using a jet bridge, with initial reports suggesting the issue was a blown-out tyre.

And on March 29 another Alaska Airlines plane, flying from from Hawaii to Alaska, was forced to turn around after a bathroom flooded filling the aisles of the Boeing 737 MAX-9 jet with water.

The flight from Honolulu to Anchorage was 90 minutes into its flight when the forward bathroom of the aircraft suddenly began to malfunction, prompting the captain to turn back to Hawaii for the problem to be fixed.

The airliner previously suffered a near-catastrophe in January as a 737 MAX-9 plane door blew out at 16,000ft over Portland, Oregon, forcing an emergency landing.

Shocking footage showed the plane lying flat on its wings on grass by the side of the runway, while passengers were hurried off from an emergency gate ladder.

That same month Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, chair of the US Senate’s sub-committee on aviation safety, delayed the certification of two new Boeing models – the MAX-7 and the MAX-10.

The US’s Federal Aviation Authority raised alarm over an anti-ice system on all MAX aircraft said to be at risk of overheating and causing engine damage if used continuously for more than five minutes.

Those aircraft are not the only Boeing products to have caused concern.

More than a decade ago, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner – a long-range widebody aircraft that can seat up to 335 passengers – was grounded after lithium-ion batteries burst into flames on two separate occasions.

One battery sparked a fire on a plane parked at Boston’s Logan International Airport in January 2013.

Days later, an All Nippon Airways flight made an emergency landing on Shikoku Island in Japan after smoke was detected in an electrical compartment.

A National Transportation Safety Board probe faulted the battery manufacturer, Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration for faulty design and testing.

Investigations into 2018 Indonesia and 2019 Ethiopia crashes highlighted problems with new software called MCAS, Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.

It had been put in all MAXs in 2017 to prevent the aircraft from climbing too quickly and stalling out, forcing the nose of the plane down without pilot input. 

But the pilots of those Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights were not trained to disable MCAS.

Suicide of whistleblower involved in lawsuit

Boeing lost £3.2billion in value last month its stock slumped to a five-month low after news broke that whistleblower John Barnett was found dead in a hotel parking lot.

Mr Barnett, 62, had been in the middle of a deposition in a lawsuit related to production of the 787 Dreamliner, according to his lawyer.

The suit alleged under-pressure workers were deliberately fitting ‘sub-standard’ parts to Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 737 MAX models and bosses were sweeping defects under the rug to save money. 

Mr Barnett, a former quality manager at the company’s North Charleston plant, was said by police to have died following a ‘self-inflicted’ gun shot.

Boeing said in a statement at the time: ‘We are saddened by Mr Barnett´s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.’ 

Mr Barnett had previously said in January, after that month’s Alaska Airlines incident: ‘This is not a 737 problem – this is a Boeing problem.

‘I know the FAA is going in and done due diligence and inspections to ensure the door close on the 737 is installed properly and the fasteners are stored properly.

‘But my concern is, what’s the rest of the airplane? What’s the condition of the rest of the airplane? 

‘What we’re seeing with the door plug blowout is what I’ve seen with the rest of the airplane, as far as jobs not being completed properly, inspection steps being removed, issues being ignored.

‘My concerns are with the 737 and 787, because those programs have really embraced the theory that quality is overhead and non-value-added.’

Other critics of the firm have included Richard Aboulafia, managing director of consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, who said: ‘It’s become an extreme embarrassment.

‘The board seems weirdly absentee, investors seem weirdly complacent, and the government doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for dealing with this.’

Concerns about ‘woke’ workplace sacrificing safety 

A Boeing insider has also claimed the firm is failing because profit-hungry executives are working from home and the manufacturer has become too fixated on diversity. 

The anonymous source described Arlington, Virginia-based Boeing as a ‘company under caretakers’ who have lost touch with its workforce.

They told City Journal: ‘We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week – except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings.’

The individual also claimed the company has become obsessed with diversity and inclusion policies, known in the US as DEI.

They added: ‘The DEI narrative is a very real thing and at Boeing DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power.

‘It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture and was tied to compensation. Every HR email is: “Inclusion makes us better.” This kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.’

And Federal Aviation Administration head Michael Whitaker last month blasted Boeing for focusing on ‘production’ instead of ‘safety and quality’, after visiting some of its facilities.

He told NBC Nightly News: ‘My impressions were similar to the culture survey that just got completed at Boeing and our audit, which is that there are issues around the safety culture at Boeing.

‘Their priorities have been on production and not on safety and quality, so what we really are focused on now is shifting that focus, from production to safety and quality.’ 

Pressure on departing chief executive

Boeing stock has lost 43 per cent of its value since Mr Calhoun took the top job in January 2020, while rival Airbus added more than 26 per cent to its market cap during the same period.

But experts say his exit package could amount to as much as £55million, including a guaranteed £19million thanks to shares he owns and additional stock options. 

Announcing his planned departure in a letter to staff last month, Mr Calhoun described January’s Alaska Airlines debacle as ‘a watershed moment for Boeing’.

He said: ‘We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We also must inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.

‘The eyes of the world are on us, and I know we will come through this moment a better company, building on all the learnings we accumulated as we worked together to rebuild Boeing over the last number of years.

‘We have been working together for the last five years to address some of the most significant challenges our company and industry have ever faced in our 108-year history.

‘I am confident that the way we have confronted these challenges, and how we are responding to this specific moment, is establishing standards for future generations of employees and will be woven into the fabric of how we operate for decades to come.’

MailOnline has approached Boeing for comment.