The aviation industry is bracing for another year of turbulence, as delivery delays at Boeing and supply chain problems are set to continue into 2025, say aviation consultants. Sunday marked one year since a door panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines, an event that reignited a firestorm of questions about Boeing's quality and safety standards. The entire board of directors should have been fired, he said.
The new CEO and new people in there say they're doing something, but this is such a deep problem. Without aircraft deliveries from Boeing, airlines such as Southwest, Wizz Air and Ryanair are spending money they had not wanted to spend to overhaul airplanes they were going to retire, Boyd said. Boeing is going to be losing a lot of territory to our friends at Airbus. There's just no question about it, he said, adding that the company may become more of a secondary player to Airbus in the future. The culture change at Boeing is something that is a real work in progress, he said. The only way to fully assess it will be to see they can consistently improve results. John Grant, chief analyst at the aviation intelligence company OAG, said tangible improvements at Boeing are unlikely to come before the end of 2025, at the earliest. With the regulators crawling all over the company and new processes being established, it's perhaps too early to say that things are improving, he said. The good news is that things haven't gotten any worse from an operational perspective, a seven-week strike that ended in November. The spokesperson highlighted a dozen actions Boeing took in 2024, from leadership changes to its board and the acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems to the expansion of its South Carolina site for increased production of its 787 aircraft. Problems in the aviation industry go well beyond Boeing, said Brendan Sobie, an independent analyst at Sobie Aviation