Boeing’s new line of jets had a huge problem: They kept crashing.
The press blamed the planes, and many passengers were afraid to fly on them. The jet was supposed to set the company on a path to success, because it was the type of transport thatairlines had been demanding. But if panic persisted and airlines were unwilling to buy it, the future of Boeing would be in jeopardy.
That could describe Boeing’s current crisis. A pair of fatal crashes of its 737 Max jets led to the grounding of all 371 of the jets worldwide.
But the crisis described above was much worse than Boeing’s 737 Max troubles, and it happened more than 50 years ago.
During a four-month period in late 1965 and early 1966, four new Boeing 727 jets crashed. Three of the crashes occurred while the planes were attempting to land at US airports, and two of them happened within three days of each other in November 1965.
While the exact cause of the 737 Max crashes have yet to be determined, there is evidence that pilots were not prepared to deal with an automatic safety system designed to prevent stalls. Investigators suspect the plane’s safety system forced the nose of the 737 Max jets lower before the crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia.
But the crashes in 1965 and ’66 proved that passengers will get over their fear of certain jets fairly quickly if Boeing can prove they’re safe.
Anxiety over flying on Boeing’s 737 Max planes reached a fever pitch after the crash in Ethiopia. The travel site Kayak added an option to screen out flights using the 737 Max jets. Boeing’s decision to request a grounding of the jets was partly “in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft’s safety.”
If history is a guide, nervousness over the 737 Max should recede.
Those four 727 crashes provoked even more concern among the traveling public. Air crashes were far more common then and many more people had little experience with air travel.
But the concerns about the 727 faded quickly, and the plane became a major success for Boeing (BA).
The 727 had three jet engines on its tail, the first commercial plane with fewer than four engines. That made it more fuel efficient than the four-engine Boeing 707, the industry’s first commercial jet. The 727 also had innovative wings that could slow the plane faster, which allowed it to land on shorter runways. That allowed the plane to land at airports that previously had only been served by propeller planes, a key selling point.
But the pilots at the controls of the four doomed jets were apparently unprepared for how quickly the planes would descend with the new wings.
One of the planes bound for O’Hare Airport in Chicago crashed into Lake Michigan miles away.
“The headlines in the papers called it the ‘Deadly 727.’ There were a lot of calls for grounding it,” said Bill Waldock, professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and head of the school’s crash lab. “You had travel agents booking passengers away from the airplane. It could have killed the airplane.”
