The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into Boeing after a panel on one of the company’s planes exploded on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, a person familiar with the matter said.
The airline said it was cooperating with the investigation. “In such a case, it is normal for the Department of Justice to conduct an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are cooperating fully and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.” Boeing had no comment.
On January 5, a panel on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet exploded in mid-air, exposing passengers to outside air thousands of feet above the ground. There were no serious injuries in this incident, but it could have been catastrophic if the plate had exploded at a higher altitude minutes later.
The panel is called a “door plug” and is designed to fill a gap created by an unneeded exit door. A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the plane may have left the Boeing factory without the connector screwed into place.
The criminal investigation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The Justice Department has previously said it is exploring a 2021 settlement of a federal criminal complaint against the company stemming from two fatal crashes aboard its 737 Max 8 aircraft. Under that agreement, Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion, most of it in compensation to its customers. The Justice Department agreed to drop charges that accused Boeing of defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration by withholding information relevant to the approval of the Max. It was not immediately clear whether the criminal investigation was related to the review of the 2021 settlement or a separate investigation.
The agreement was criticized for being too lenient on Boeing and for being reached without consulting the families of the 346 people killed in those crashes. The first occurred in Indonesia at the end of 2018. After the second one in Ethiopia in early 2019, the Max was banned from flying worldwide for 20 months. The aircraft resumed service at the end of 2020 and has since been used on several million flights, mostly without incident – until the Alaska Airlines flight on January 5th.
On Friday, Boeing told a congressional panel that it had been unable to find a potentially important record about its work on the later disbanded panel.
The company was asked to provide any documentation it had related to the removal and reinstallation of the panel. In a letter to Senator Maria Cantwell, chairwoman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Boeing said it conducted an extensive search but could not find records of the information sought by the Senate panel and the Safety Committee.
“We also told the NTSB what became our working hypothesis: that the documents required for our processes were not created when the door plug was opened,” the Boeing letter said. “If this hypothesis is correct, there would be no documentation to produce.”
In the letter, Boeing also said it provided the NTSB with all names of people on the 737 door team on March 4, two days after the request.
According to a document reviewed by The New York Times, the door plug was opened in September at Boeing’s Renton, Washington, plant to repair damaged rivets on the plane’s fuselage. Rivets are commonly used to connect and secure parts on aircraft. The request to open the plug came from contractors at Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier that makes the bodywork for the 737 Max in Wichita, Kan.
According to the document, on September 18, a Spirit AeroSystems mechanic was hired to begin repairing the rivets and the door plug was opened so the repairs could be made. The document shows the repairs were completed two days later and permission was given to close the door again.
The document did not indicate who was responsible for reinstalling the door stopper or whether it was inspected after replacement. It does not provide further information about which Boeing employees were involved in removing and replacing the door stopper.
The Jan. 5 flight bust sparked renewed scrutiny of Boeing’s practices, with lawmakers publicly criticizing the company. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the incident, but suggested in a preliminary report that Boeing may have delivered the plane to Alaska without installing the screws needed to secure the door stopper.
The FAA has since increased inspections at the factory where Boeing makes the Max and limited the number of planes the company can produce each month. An FAA audit found quality deficiencies at Boeing, and the agency gave the company several months to develop a plan to improve quality control.
Last month, a panel of experts assembled by the FAA released a long-awaited report on the Max crashes. It concluded that Boeing’s safety culture was still lacking despite improvements in recent years.
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2024-03-10 00:30:32
www.nytimes.com
