The news has officially landed. Aerospace firm Boeing’s (BA) Starliner spaceship will be returning to Earth empty. The news did not sit well with investors, as they sent Boeing shares down fractionally in Monday afternoon’s trading.
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The new plan is to bring the Starliner capsule home without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams aboard. That, in turn, means that the mission, which was supposed to take just eight days and conclude in mid-June, will now be completed in February 2025. Wilmore and Williams will then board the SpaceX Dragon capsule that goes up in February and return home as part of the Crew-9 mission.
While originally, both Boeing and NASA were clear on plans to return aboard the Starliner, the minds seem to have changed as a result of “a commitment to safety.” Now, NASA will run a new phase of the Flight Readiness Review, which will provide insight on when to try and bring the beleaguered Starliner home.
A New Report Emerged about the Alaska Airlines Incident
Meanwhile, a new report emerged about the Alaska Airlines (ALK) incident that might be considered the linchpin of Boeing’s latest troubles. As it turns out, the whole thing can be traced back to a single four-day period that featured two separate manufacturing errors.
The first issue occurred sometime in a four-hour period on September 18, while a second error emerged the next day within a one-hour window. At that point, a crew of mechanics who had never been trained in one particular class of fuselage panel—the door plug—got to work and unleashed the mechanical error that sealed Boeing’s fate. While Boeing ultimately placed two workers on “administrative leave” as a result of the investigation, reports note that one of the employees involved accuses Boeing of making the two out to be “scapegoats.”
Is Boeing a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on BA stock based on 13 Buys, five Holds, and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 23.17% loss in its share price over the past year, the average BA price target of $216.59 per share implies 24.01% upside potential.
