Is It Actually Safe to Fly a Boeing Right Now?
Two Boeing headlines landed ten days apart this month. One of them looks much worse than it is, and the other one is the reason I’m not worried.
Pilot Nick - 9 min read
Is It Actually Safe to Fly a Boeing Right Now?
Two Boeing headlines landed ten days apart this month. One of them looks much worse than it is, and the other one is the reason I’m not worried.
Pilot Nick - 9 min read
You booked the flight weeks ago. Last night you opened the seat map, saw the aircraft type in small grey letters (737 MAX 8), and made the mistake of searching it.
Two stories came back, both from the past two weeks. One said the FAA is letting Boeing sign off on the safety of its own airplanes again. The other said 453 Boeing 737 MAX jets registered in the US may have passenger seats that were installed wrong.
So now you’re holding a boarding pass and trying to run a risk calculation with no instruments.
I fly for a living, and when both of those crossed my feed I read them the way pilots read everything, which is looking for the part the headline left out. Both stories are true. Neither one would move me off that flight. How I got there is more useful to you than my saying so, so that’s what the rest of this is.
The question is aimed at the wrong thing
“Is it safe to fly a Boeing” sounds like a question about metal. But the manufacturer is one of the weakest predictors of whether a given flight goes well.
One number in IATA’s 2025 safety report does most of the work here. Across 38.7 million flights there were 51 accidents, and the long-run rate has fallen from 3.72 per million flights in 2005 to 1.32 last year. Fine. Now look at how that risk sits. IATA member airlines ran 0.72 accidents per million flights. Non-members ran 3.09. Same skies, same weather, airplanes rolling out of the same handful of factories. The gap is a factor of four, and it’s about how the airline is run.
I won’t soften the other half of that report. 2025 was the worst year for airline fatalities since 2018, with eight fatal accidents and 394 people lost, and the worst single event was a Boeing 787. Air India 171 went down 32 seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad, killing 260 people. Anyone telling you aviation had a quiet year is reading a different document.
That report also shows how tightly those deaths concentrated. Air India 171 and the PSA Airlines midair over the Potomac accounted for more than 77% of everyone lost on board an aircraft last year. Fatal accidents involving large jets are rare enough now that two of them move the global number.
So the question worth asking isn’t about the badge on the tail. It’s what stands between a known problem and your seat.
What actually happened in July
On July 17 the FAA announced that Boeing can again issue airworthiness certificates for finished 737 MAX and 787 airplanes, effective the 20th. That restored a delegated paperwork authority the agency stripped in 2019 after the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes, and again for the 787 in 2022 over production quality. The scope is a lot narrower than the headline suggests, and I’ll unpack it below.
Ten days later the FAA proposed ordering airlines to inspect the seats on 453 US-registered 737 MAX jets. It had received a report that certain track-mounted seat assemblies were installed with the aft fitting shear plungers not lowered and not engaged in the seat tracks. In plain English, some seats might not be locked properly to the floor. In severe turbulence or a hard landing, the FAA said, they could injure people or block the aisle during an evacuation.
Read those two together and the second one looks like it demolishes the first. I read it the other way round. Somebody found badly installed seats, wrote it up, and within days the regulator moved to get hundreds of airplanes checked. One week after handing Boeing back a privilege, the same agency published a defect against Boeing’s best-selling airplane.
The part of my job passengers never see
Most of what keeps you safe is paperwork.
Every airplane I fly has a technical log, and every defect goes in it. Not the interesting ones. All of them. A flickering cabin light, a coffee maker that trips a breaker, a seatbelt buckle that won’t latch, a seat that shifts under my hand on the walkaround. Once it’s written down it belongs to the system, and that airplane doesn’t move until someone qualified either signs it off or defers it under the Minimum Equipment List, which spells out what’s allowed to be broken, for how long, and with what limitations. None of that depends on my judgment being sharp at 5 a.m., which is the entire point of it.
What the system can’t survive is a culture where writing things down costs you something.
That’s the real lesson of the Alaska Airlines door plug in January 2024, the panel that came off a MAX 9 at 16,000 feet with four bolts missing. When the NTSB finished in June 2025, the finding wasn’t about one careless mechanic. Boeing had failed to provide adequate training, guidance and oversight to prevent it, and the paperwork trail for that panel didn’t exist. Boeing then spent close to two years capped at 38 airplanes a month, because the FAA didn’t trust the factory to go faster than that.
Five things I check, and four you can check yourself
1. Find out which airplane you’re actually on. “A Boeing” covers a jet designed in the 1960s and one certified last year, and headlines almost never tell you which. Your booking email or the seat map in the airline app will name the exact variant: MAX 8, MAX 9, 787-9, 737-800. Look it up before you read another word about it. The MAX 8 entered service in 2017 and the MAX 9 in 2018, both went through a 20-month grounding, and both came back with mandated changes to the system behind the two crashes. Seven years of that kind of scrutiny isn’t nothing.
2. Read the fix, not the fear. When a story breaks, scroll past the headline until you find what’s being done about it. If there’s a specific part, a specific number of airplanes and a deadline, somebody has already found the problem, measured it and assigned it to people with tools. The seat story gives you all three: 453 jets, the aft fittings on track-mounted seats, inspections ordered. The stories that hold my attention are the ones where nobody can say yet what went wrong.
3. Who flies it matters more than who built it. The airline sets the maintenance standards, the training, and whether a tired first officer feels able to speak up. Here’s the one lookup I’d actually give you: IATA runs a public list called the IOSA registry, airlines that pass a recurring international safety audit. Type your airline’s name and “IOSA” into a search bar. Carriers on that registry ran 0.98 accidents per million flights last year. The ones not on it ran 2.55. Same airplanes, roughly two and a half times the rate.
4. If you’re reading about it, it already got caught. People get this one backwards. The seat problem reached your phone because somebody spotted it, wrote it up, and a regulator moved on it within days. That’s the machine working out loud. What hurt people on the Alaska door plug wasn’t a story in the news, it was a paperwork trail that didn’t exist.
5. The one I can’t hand you. Whether people inside get punished for reporting problems. It happens where neither of us can see it, and it’s the one I’d trade the other four for. In February an Air India crew wrote up a fuel control switch on a 787 that wouldn’t stay locked in RUN, and that airplane was out of service by the end of the day. Nobody had to be brave for that to happen. It’s just what the book says to do.
Every safety statistic in this article rests on people willing to write down inconvenient things.
The five checks are the whole method, and they’ll get you through most headlines on your own.
Below the line I run all five against the three Boeing questions filling my inbox this week: the seat inspection order on 453 MAX jets, the FAA handing certification authority back to Boeing, and whether it’s safe to fly a 787 while the Air India investigation is still open. Plus a check I use when a story breaks about an airplane I’m scheduled to fly.
