- Flight AA 345 was arriving from Dallas Fort Worth and landed in Los Angeles around 8.45pm local time Wednesday
An American Airlines Boeing 777 with 249 people on board was forced to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles after a tire blew out after take off in Dallas, an FAA spokesperson told various news outlets.
The airline initially said that the plane suffered some kind of ‘mechanical failure’ with going into specifics.
The aircraft was able to land safely a LAX, which was its destination, and all passengers and crew disembarked via jet bridge without incident. The plane landed around 8:45 pm local time.
This is not the first tire incident to impact Boeing this week, after 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 tire during take off.
A few days before that, another Boeing jet was forced to make an emergency landing in LAX after taking off from San Francisco due to hydraulic issues.
Boeing has suffered a number of setbacks in recent months with the beleaguered airplane building behemoth recently subjected to a federal government safety audit.
Those problems became further magnified following the mysterious suicide of John Barnett, 62, last Saturday. Barnett was a former quality manager at the company’s North Charleston plant. He died following a ‘self-inflicted’ gun shot, police said.
Further afield, passengers on board a Latam Airlines from Sydney to Auckland were left traumatized after 50 were injured when their Boeing 787-9 plunged from the sky, throwing passengers against the ceiling, before landing safely.
In response to a federal audit in the US, Boeing said Tuesday that it would work with employees found to have violated company manufacturing procedures to make sure they understand instructions for their jobs.
The aircraft maker detailed its latest steps to correct lapses in quality in a memo to employees from Stan Deal, president of Boeing’s commercial plane division.
The memo went out after the Federal Aviation Administration finished a six-week review of the company’s manufacturing processes for the 737 Max jetliner after a panel blew off during Alaska Airlines flight on January 5.
The FAA reviewed 89 aspects of production at Boeing’s plant in Renton, Washington, and found the company failed 33 of them, according to a person familiar with the report.
The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that have not been publicly released – although they were reported earlier by The New York Times.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company has seen its price on Wall Street drop by over ten percent over the last week.
Barnett was a longtime Boeing employee and worked as a quality-control manager before he retired in 2017. In the years after that, he shared his concerns with journalists.
‘John was deeply concerned about the safety of the aircraft and flying public, and had identified some serious defects that he felt were not adequately addressed,’ Barnett’s brother, Rodney, said in a family statement on Tuesday.
‘He said that Boeing had a culture of concealment and was putting profits over safety.’
Rodney Barnett said working at Boeing created stress for John.
‘He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing, which we believe led to his death,’ the brother said.
Boeing, in a one-sentence statement, said, ‘We are saddened by Mr. Barnett’s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.’
Experts say the reasons people take their own lives are complicated, and that recent increases in suicides could be driven by several factors, including higher rates of depression and limited access to mental-health services.
In 2019, Barnett told The New York Times about quality issues at Boeing’s factory in South Carolina, where the 787 jetliner is assembled.
Barnett said he found discarded metal shavings near wiring for the flight controls. He said it could have been ‘catastrophic’ if the sharp pieces had pierced the wiring. He said after he complained to superiors, they moved him to another part of the plant.
Barnett told the BBC that same year that up to a quarter of the oxygen systems on the 787 – a two-aisle plane that airlines use mostly for international flights – might not work because of faulty parts installed at the Boeing plant. Boeing denied the claim.
Barnett filed a whistleblower complaint with the government, which is still pending. A hearing on the case was scheduled for June.
Boeing’s production practices have been questioned both on the 787, a model called the Dreamliner, and the company’s best-selling plane, the 737 Max.
The company has come under increased scrutiny since a panel blew off a 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
