Last Saturday, February 20th, a Boeing 777 was flying from DIA to Hawaii. Immediately after takeoff, the plane had an engine failure causing debris to land all over Broomfield. The crazy part is that this has not been the first time a Boeing plane has malfunctioned.

In fact, there have been roughly 95 Boeing plane crashes dating back to the year 2000. The two most recognized and recent were the Indonesia crash and the Malaysia crash. This raised many questions about Boeing and the safety of their planes. 

David Gelles from the New York Times reports, “In October,  Lion Air Flight 610 crashed just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing 189 people. Then later in March, another flight, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, crashed minutes after takeoff; all 157 people on board died.”

Not only were these two flights four months apart, but they were also the same model, the 737. Because of the frequent occurrence of 737 crashes, many people began blaming Boeing. According to the black box data from the New York Times, it shows that the system designed to help the plane avoid stalls appears to malfunction, causing the accidents. Boeing was behind these devastating accidents.

To correct their mistakes, Boeing halted the production of the 737 models and researched ways to fix it. Crashes died down and Boeing seemed to be out of the public eye. Boeing said that “Unprecedented levels of collaborative and independent reviews by aviation authorities around the world have been made.” 

Trust has slowly been rebuilt. As a country and to the state of Colorado, Boeing has been off the public’s radar since the problems were thought to be eliminated. All was well in the aviation world until Saturday.

But this time Boeing’s mistakes hit home. They once again managed to get a lot of people thinking about them, and not for good reason. This time the model was a Boeing 777. Previously Boeing’s only problem was the 737 model, but it turns out Boeing may still continue to have issues, even with their 777 models which might be their newest failure.

Denver 7 went into more detail about the malfunction: “Plane parts rained down on Colorado as an engine exploded.” 

Boeing did not have extensive levels of collaboration and research. They aren’t working hard enough on their planes because the problems have come up on multiple models. 

“Amazingly, Boeing’s reputation has managed to hit a new low,” said Natalie Kitroeff from The Week. 

Dominique Gates, a Seattle Times writer, also heard a disgruntled employee say, “Boeing is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys.”

It is finally time for Boeing to make a change. This cannot keep happening. Hard efforts need to be made to protect our civilians in order to guarantee safe travel. Boeing not only put the lives of the people on the plane at risk but also the people who were out and about in Broomfield. Boeing will lose money as a company, but hopefully, this will be the final learning experience that will push them to design safe planes for the future. Thankfully no one was hurt, but this will be a day that all of Colorado remembers for a very long time.