Well, let's get the latest on the situation with Boeing now. The head of the aviation giant has said the company must acknowledge its mistake after a number of its planes have been found to have loose parts. Investigations began after the cabin panel of a 737 MAX IX jet blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight last week. Well, addressing employees at a factory in Washington, where the planes are assembled, David Calhon said Boeing would approach the issue with complete transparency. Murdo Morison is head of strategic content at the aviation news site, Flight Global. I asked him whether he thinks this will be enough to convince staff and investors.

Yes. I mean, this is Boeing trying to be transparent, trying to get on the front foot with this, But it's already in a terrible pickle with this. The reputational damage to Boeing of this incident is just almost cannot be stated, and it really has to do a lot work to restore a reputation that was already damaged by the earlier grounding of the MACS after the accidents in 2019 and 2020.

Yeah, this isn't the first issue they had. Do you feel they have got on top of this quickly? It's quite a thing that the boss addressing staff there. Are they getting on top of it?

It is quite a big thing. As I say, they've tried to get on the front foot. They're trying to set the agenda on this. But I think the The problem is that it's largely out of their hands, and the damage really has been done to their reputation. Boeing, like all aviation manufacturers, has to have this impeccable reputation for engineering excellence and an obsession with safety. And this really looks like something has gone wrong somewhere. Whoever's fault it was, whether it turns out that this was a problem with one of its key suppliers or whether it was Boeing itself. Boeing has to take responsibility for this. And reputationally, it is just incredibly damaging.

I appreciate the fear is that this could be an issue with other aircraft as well. In your view, what you've picked up, is that a concern, or is the aviation world confident this is isolated to these particular models?

I think it's probably isolated to these models. It's an issue with the door plug, which is fairly unique to this model. It's an emergency exit that isn't used. To reduce the weight of the aircraft, they take out all the bits of equipment that are needed to operate it as an emergency exit. I think it's a particular feature of the MAX IX. There is really no suggestion that this is a wider issue for either Boeing or for the wider industry.