“It doesn’t matter which model, I don’t want to fly them.”

To her, she said, “The Alaska incident was further confirmation that Boeing is still not being thorough and not fixing its issues.”

Florida-based Estacio, who works in marketing, now checks the aircraft type before booking any flight. She’s made two trips since January.

“The whole thing of, ‘If it’s not Boeing I ain’t going,’ it’s totally the opposite now,” she said. “I’m very happy when I’ve seen I’ll be flying an Airbus.”

Ed Pierson was flying from Seattle to New Jersey in 2023, when he ended up boarding a plane he’d never wanted to fly on.

The Seattle resident booked with Alaska Airlines last March, purposefully selecting a flight with a plane he was happy to board – essentially, anything but a Boeing 737 Max.

“I got to the airport, checked again that it wasn’t the Max. I went through security, got coffee. I walked onto the plane – I thought, it’s kinda new,” Pierson told CNN. “Then I sat down and on the emergency card [in the seat pocket] it said it was a Max.”

He got up and walked off.

“A flight attendant was closing the front door. I said, ‘I wasn’t supposed to fly the Max.’ She was like, ‘What do you know about the Max?,’” he said.

“I said, ‘I can’t go into detail right now, but I wasn’t planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane.’”

Pierson made it to New Jersey – after some back and forth, he said, Alaska’s airport staff rebooked him onto a red-eye that evening on a different plane. Spending the whole day in the airport was worth it to avoid flying on the Max, he said.

Pierson has a unique and first-hand perspective of the aircraft, made by Boeing at its Renton factory in the state of Washington.

Now the executive director of airline watchdog group Foundation for Aviation Safety, he served as a squadron commanding officer among other leadership roles during a 30-year Naval career, followed by 10 years at Boeing – including three as a senior manager in production support at Renton itself, working on the 737 Max project before its launch.

But he’s one of a number of travelers who do not want to board the aircraft which has been at the heart of two fatal crashes, as well as the January 5 incident in which part of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane blew out mid-air.

The part – a door plug – was found to be missing four bolts that should have held it in place.

Further reports of “many” loose bolts and misdrilled holes have emerged from the subsequent investigations into the Max 9 model after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the grounding of 171 Max 9 aircraft with the same door plug.

Experts agree that the Alaska incident could have been worse, and the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has warned that “something like this can happen again.”

The previous model, the Max 8, was involved in two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people.

The crashes were widely attributed to the malfunctioning of MCAS, an automated system in the Max designed to stabilize the pitch of the plane, overriding pilot input in some circumstances.

Boeing accepted its liability in 2021 for one of the crashes.

Weeks after the Alaska incident, Boeing CEO David Calhoun told investors on a quarterly call: “We will cooperate fully and transparently with the FAA at every turn… This increased scrutiny, whether it comes from us or a regulator or from third parties will make us better.”

“We caused the problem, and we understand that,” Calhoun said.

“Whatever conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened. Whatever the specific cause of the accident might turn out to be, an event like this simply must not happen on an airplane that leaves one of our factories. We simply must be better.”

In February, in the wake of the Alaska incident, the company removed the head of the Max program from his position and reshuffled other senior management figures.

The move comes as critics have repeatedly said that the aircraft manufacturer is prioritizing profits over safety.

The FAA is now “taking a holistic look at the quality control issues at Boeing to ensure safety is always the company’s top priority,” a spokesperson for the government agency said.

Representatives are on the ground assessing the production lines at Boeing’s Renton factory and Spirit AeroSystems, whose Wichita, Kansas factory made the door plug that blew off mid-flight in the Alaska incident.

On February 28, the FAA gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to address quality and safety issues.

A spokesperson for Boeing said: “Every day, more than 80 airlines operate about 5,000 flights with the global fleet of 1,300 737 MAX airplanes, carrying 700,000 passengers to their destinations safely.  The 737 MAX family’s in-service reliability is above 99% and consistent with other commercial airplane models.”

Of course, many thousands of people board Max aircraft with no concerns. But do other passengers care? It appears that enough do.

Most countries cleared the Max 8 to fly again by 2021, but three years on, there still appears to be negative public opinion about the Max.

“It’s unsettling that there have been so many issues with this specific type of plane,” Stephanie King, a passenger on the affected Alaska Airlines flight, said in January. “I hope something is done so that this doesn’t happen again.”

Then there’s flight booking site Kayak, which has seen usage of its filter to deselect Max aircraft (models 8 and 9) during the booking process increase 15-fold since January, the company said.

The site introduced the filter in March 2019, after the Ethiopian Airlines crash.

Doubts have also remained across the industry as a whole. Following the Alaska incident, a February AP-Norc poll regarding air travel safety found nearly a third of Americans surveyed answered “not at all” or “a little” when asked if they believe that airplanes are safe from structural faults.

While planes were generally viewed to be as safe as cars or trains for means of transportation, fewer than two in 10 surveyed strongly agreed that planes are fault-free.

Original Story By | Julia Buckley