Boeing said Tuesday it plans to make design changes to prevent future cabin panel ruptures in mid-air like the one that occurred on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 jet in January, marking the company’s second major crisis in recent years.
Boeing’s senior vice president of quality, Elizabeth Lund, said the company is working on design changes that it hopes to implement by the end of the year and then roll out to the entire fleet.
Investigators said the plugs on the new Alaska MAX 9 were missing four key bolts.
“We’re working on a design change so that if there’s a problem, the door plugs won’t close until they’re securely in place,” Rand said on the first day of a two-day National Transportation Safety Board investigative hearing in Washington.
Lund’s comments came in response to a question about why Boeing did not use a type of warning system for the door plugs that is installed on regular doors and that sounds an alarm if the door is not fully secure.
The incident has severely damaged Boeing’s reputation, leading to a two-week grounding of the MAX 9, a ban on expanding production by the FAA, a criminal investigation and the resignations of several key executives. Boeing has vowed to make major quality improvements.
The committee also released 3,800 pages of factual reports and interviews from its ongoing investigation.
Boeing has said it has no documentation to prove the removal of the four missing critical bolts. Lund said Boeing put bright blue and yellow signs on the door plugs when they arrived at the factory that read “Do Not Open” in large letters, adding redundancy “to ensure that the plugs cannot be opened accidentally.”
A flight attendant described the terrifying moment when the door plug blew off: “Then all of a sudden there was this huge, loud bang, like the door had just been slammed open, and then there was this huge gust of wind,” she said. “I saw the masks coming down and the galley curtains getting sucked into the cabin.”
Lund and Doug Ackerman, Boeing’s vice president for supplier quality, are scheduled to testify Tuesday at a hearing that is expected to last 20 hours over two days. Boeing has 1,200 active suppliers for commercial airplanes and 200 supplier quality auditors, Ackerman said.
Lund said Tuesday that Boeing is still producing only “in the 20s” of Max planes per month, far fewer than the 38 the company is authorized to produce per month. “We’re working to increase production, but I think at one point we were down to as low as eight,” Lund told the NTSB.
Terry George, senior vice president and general manager of Boeing programs at Spirit AeroSystems, and Scott Grabon, senior director of 737 quality at Spirit, which makes the MAX fuselage, also testified Tuesday.
Boeing last month agreed to buy back Spirit AeroSystems, from which it spun off its core manufacturing operations in 2005, for $4.7 billion in stock.
The hearing will examine issues surrounding the 737’s manufacturing and testing, safety and quality control systems, FAA oversight, and the opening and closing of door plugs.
“Fusal defects”
In June, FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said the agency had been “too hands-off” in its oversight of Boeing before January, and FAA officials told the NTSB that Boeing officials had not always followed required procedures.
FAA air safety inspector Jonathan Arnold said the systemic problem he witnessed at Boeing factories was employees not following instructions.
“The deviations from instructions appear to be systematic, and typically we see this most often in tool control,” Arnold said.
Lund said that before the Jan. 5 accident, all 737 fuselages delivered to Boeing had defects, but the key was to make them manageable. “What we don’t want are really major defects that impact our production system,” Lund said. “We were seeing more and more of those kinds of problems right around the time of the accident.”
National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy at one point expressed frustration with Boeing: “This is not a PR campaign from Boeing,” she said, calling for clarification of the company’s policies before the accident.
The interview also touched on the issue of factory culture that has been criticized in congressional hearings, where whistleblowers have alleged that Boeing retaliated against people who raised safety concerns on factory floors.
Boeing executive Carol Murray outlined a variety of issues with the Spirit AeroSystems-built plane leading up to the accident. “There were deficiencies. The sealant was one of the biggest deficiencies that was listed in the report,” she said. “There were multiple failures around the window frames, and there were also defects in the skin.”
Michelle Delgado, a structural mechanic who worked for a Boeing contractor on modifications to the Alaska MAX 9 planes, told the NTSB that the workload was heavy and required long hours.
“When work is piling up and there’s been a reduction in staffing, I feel pressured. I think it’s better to work 12-13 hour shifts and get everything done so I don’t have to deal with a worse situation tomorrow. That way I won’t have to deal with people the next day.”
The NTSB also said in June that Boeing violated investigation rules by providing nonpublic information to the media and speculating about possible causes.
Last month, Boeing pleaded guilty to fraud conspiracy charges and agreed to pay at least $243.6 million in fines to resolve a Department of Justice investigation into two fatal 737 Max crashes.
