Emirates’ Clark says blowout illustrates Boeing’s quality lapses

Emirates President Tim Clark, a powerful voice in the aviation community as the biggest buyer of widebody aircraft, said the accident on a Boeing Co. 737 Max aircraft on Jan. 5 marks a setback for the manufacturer just as it seeks to improve operations. “They’ve had quality control problems for a long time now, and this is just another manifestation of that,” Clark said in an exclusive interview at his office in Dubai. “I think they’re getting their act together now, but this doesn’t help.” While Emirates doesn’t fly the the Boeing 737 or the similar Airbus SE A320, Clark is known for holding both manufacturers and engine suppliers accountable for perceived engineering shortfalls. At the same time, he acknowledged that there’s no option for airlines to go elsewhere for the time being, given the civil aviation world is essentially controlled by a duopoly. What Clark called “the wannabes” have got a lot of catching up to do if they want to be on equal footing with the two main players, he said. Clark was speaking days after a Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft operated by Alaska Airlines was forced into an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon, after a large panel broke loose during flight, leaving a gaping hole in the left part of the fuselage at 16,000 feet. The aircraft returned safely and nobody was seriously injured, but regulators have ordered the grounding of the variant to perform inspections. The Emirates president has reserved some of his harshest recent criticism for engine maker Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc, saying it’s produced what he called a “defective” engine for Airbus’s largest aircraft, the A350-1000. By contrast, Emirates gave Boeing a glowing endorsement at the recent Dubai Air Show with a large order for the company’s wide-body aircraft. <br/>