In This Article:
Boeing (BA) is facing new setbacks after mis-drilled holes in the fuselages of some its 737 Max jets was discovered. The company is fixing the issue in 50 planes still awaiting delivery. This comes after the company was forced to temporarily halt plans to ramp up 737 production following a safety incident on an Alaska Airlines (ALK) plane last month.
Yahoo Finance's Seana Smith and Brad Smith breaks down the details.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: Boeing, the problems continuing here for the company. Now finding misdrilled holes in some fuselages of its 737 MAX Jets, and it's causing some reworkings here to 50 planes that have not yet been delivered. Now, this latest setback for Boeing could cause a further delay in deliveries, which is one of the reasons why you're looking at a loss of about 3% here ahead of the open. It is just another issue, another challenge that Boeing and its leadership team and its employees are having to navigate up until this point here.
Brad, we talk about the fact that they're still dealing with the fact that they're not able to expand production on the 737 Max 9 because of the issues stemming from the door that was blown off mid-flight on the Alaskan Airlines flight several weeks ago. We've heard more and more commentary from Boeing's earnings release last week, also from a number of the leading airliners, just about how they're thinking about the latest developments out of Boeing, how they're navigating those challenges. But again, this issue only affecting, so far, 50 undelivered planes from what we are learning here from Boeing. But certainly a challenge here that's just another setback for Boeing.
BRAD SMITH: What's also interesting is what's coming about in some of the lawsuits as well, and the clarity of the detail that we're getting about what's taking place at Spirit AeroSystems, which is the company that is responsible for some of the process to build this plane and, at the end of the day, is really the manufacturer or the supply chain part where the holes get drilled as well. And the fact that one of the employees who has since been let go it sounds like, as part of the lawsuit, had offered some additional context and color about the operations internally, about these pizza Fridays that were essentially driven by not having as many of the reported issues. So you think about days without incidents, well, days without a report. And what was driven by that, at the end of the day, it sounds like they were incentivized to not report certain things. And if they did, then, well, they would have some type of retaliatory effort, which in itself is retaliation. And anybody who's gone through an HR training course knows that you should not be let go for something like that, especially if it's within the realm of your job.
All that aside, Spirit AeroSystems, they're set to report earnings later on this week, I believe tomorrow. So we'll see what they have to say about this on the call. They still have their statement up from earlier this-- actually, in January as well.