John Oliver calls for new leadership of Boeing: ‘Fix the culture that you have destroyed’

John Oliver on Boeing: ‘At every point along the way, the FAA either delegated responsibility to Boeing, or gave them the benefit of the doubt, which hopefully they will never do again.’ Photograph: Max

John Oliver dug into commercial air travel and specifically the troubled recent safety record of Boeing, a few weeks after a door popped off a Boeing 737 Max-9 flown by Alaska Airlines mid-flight.

A few passengers were injured in the incident, and that was luck – if someone had been sitting in the exit row seat without a seatbelt, or if the door had fallen off at a higher altitude, the injuries could have been catastrophic. The plane was also new – it had been delivered by the manufacturer Boeing to Alaska Airlines two months earlier. “That’s too soon for a sneaker to fall apart, let alone a multimillion-dollar aircraft,” the Last Week Tonight host explained.