Boeing grilled on midair blowout at marathon safety hearing

(Bloomberg) -- The head of the US National Transportation Safety Board grilled Boeing Co. executives on why the planemaker didn’t address quality lapses in its factories well before a midair blowout on one of its jets early this year. 

The issues “have been known for years,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters during the first of two days of hearings on what caused an almost-new Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft to lose a large fuselage panel during flight. “Why does it take a serious tragedy, which could have been so much more serious, for change to occur?” 

The NTSB released thousands of pages of information at the start of the hearing about the Jan. 5 accident, which involved a jet flown by Alaska Airlines. Interviews with Boeing workers show an at-times overstressed workforce that was well aware of 737 Max fuselages arriving from key supplier, Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc., with defects. One employee told investigators that “the planes come in jacked up every day” while another said the aircraft have issues “with structures, skins, open holes.” 

In separate interviews, crew on the Alaska Airlines flight described the terrifying moments after the fuselage panel — known as a door plug — blew off while the plane was still ascending. That prompted the cabin to lose pressure and the cockpit door to swing open.

“It was chaos,” the flight’s first officer told safety investigators, according to a transcript. The first officer said she could see cabin tubes hanging from the ceiling through the open door, “and at that point my focus was forward, and I yelled ‘get down, get down.’” 

While nobody was seriously hurt in the accident, the episode has plunged Boeing into crisis, prompting a management shakeup and comprehensive review of the company’s safety culture. Elizabeth Lund, a Boeing senior vice president of quality testifying at the hearing, said the planemaker is only now starting to step up its rate of aircraft production again, which she said had fallen precipitously after the accident. 

Homendy told reporters that Boeing has “a long way to go — just based on what I’ve looked at — on safety culture.”

Boeing has sought to show how the company has learned from the episode, as it tries to dig itself out of the crisis that has drained billions of dollars from its balance sheet and has weighed on the stock price. Homendy has taken a tough line, and interactions between agency officials and the company have boiled over at times in the past few months. 

“This isn’t a PR campaign for Boeing,” Homendy said at the hearing, after Lund touted the improvements the company made following the accident. “What is very confusing for a lot of people who are watching, who are listening, is what was going on then. This is an investigation on what happened on Jan. 5.” 

Boeing is still struggling to leave the accident behind. It announced a new chief executive officer last week, and has agreed to buy back supplier Spirit to gain greater control of its manufacturing. The company also pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge by US prosecutors stemming from two previous 737 Max crashes. 

Its stock has lost more than a third of its value this year, and the company burned through more than $1 billion in cash each month as it slowed output. 

Missing Bolts

Despite the lack of serious injuries, the accident attracted huge public interest. The panel was found in a yard shortly afterward, and investigators quickly identified it had been missing four bolts to keep it in place. In a twist, an anonymous tipster published a lengthy online account, documenting the breakdowns that led to the jet leaving the factory without the bolts.

A preliminary report released by the NTSB corroborated parts of that account. It found evidence suggesting the door plug was removed prior to leaving the facility to fix damaged rivets and then reinstalled without being properly attached. Boeing has said it’s missing formal documentation on the panel’s removal, a serious violation of its manufacturing protocols. 

The jet’s fuselage arrived from Spirit with defective rivets on the mid-exit door, Boeing’s Lund said during a reporter briefing in June. As it wound through the factory, Boeing and Spirit representatives in the Renton, Washington, factory debated what should be done and who was responsible.

The jet was at the end of the line before the companies agreed on a plan that would require removing the door plug for the repair. But while the rivet work was entered into Boeing’s formal record system, there was no mention of the door removal. 

At the hearing, Lund said workers believe they temporarily pushed the door plug in place to prepare the aircraft to move outside. But Nils Johnson, an aviation accident investigator at the NTSB who conducted some of the interviews, said that action would have occurred the day before the panel was closed for the final time and that the agency still doesn’t know who was responsible for the ultimate reinstallment.

In the absence of documentation, the team that prepared the plane for delivery was unaware the bolts were missing, and quality inspectors wouldn’t have known to check the workmanship, Lund has said. 

Boeing did identify two employees who were likely involved in opening the door plug and moved them into a “lateral position” at the company, Lund said, adding that they were now on paid administrative leave at their own request. The building they were first moved to was described by one Boeing employee in an interview with investigators as “a jail.” 

Homendy expressed concern when she talked to reporters about written statements the NTSB has received from Boeing employees who may have played a role in the door plug’s removal, noting they all seem to end with a comment about having zero knowledge of what happened. “It’s the same actual line so I have some questions about that,” she said. Homendy also said the NTSB hasn’t had a chance to interview the door crew manager, who is on medical leave.

‘Traveled Work’

Since the accident, the planemaker has slowed work to a crawl in its factories as it retrained mechanics and managers. It stepped up inspections, including at Spirit, in an effort to tackle defects and missing parts that lead to so-called “traveled work” where tasks are completed out of the normal sequence. 

Lund said at the hearing that Boeing engineers are working on design changes that would prevent the door plug from being closed until it’s firmly secured. She said she expects those could be implemented within the year and then made available for retrofit in the fleet once the design is certified.

Boeing has also encouraged employees to submit safety concerns through an internal program called “Speak Up.” 

But Lloyd Catlin, a business representative for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said at the hearing that the union — which represents thousands of Boeing workers — still doesn’t have confidence in that program.

“It’s in its early phases,” he said. “It needs help.”