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Investigators will question Boeing officials during a hearing starting on Tuesday about the midflight blowout of a panel from a 737 Max, an accident that further tarnished the company’s safety reputation and left it facing new legal jeopardy.
The two-day hearing could provide new insight into the 5 January accident, which caused a loud boom and left a gaping hole in the side of the Alaska Airlines jet.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has said in a preliminary report that four bolts that help secure the panel, which is call a door plug, were not replaced after a repair job in a Boeing factory, but the company has said the work was not documented. During the two-day hearing, safety board members are expected to question Boeing officials about the lack of paperwork that might have explained how such a potentially tragic mistake occurred.
“The NTSB wants to fill in the gaps of what is known about this incident and to put people on the record about it,” said John Goglia, a former NTSB member. The agency will be looking to underscore Boeing’s failures in following the process it had told the Federal Aviation Administration it was going to use in such cases, he said.
The safety board will not determine a probable cause after the hearing. That could take another year or longer. It is calling the unusually long hearing a fact-finding step.
Among the scheduled witnesses is Elizabeth Lund, who has been Boeing’s senior vice-president of quality – a new position – since February, and officials from Spirit AeroSystems, which makes fuselages for Max jets.
Spirit installed the door plug – a panel that fills a space created for an extra exit on some planes – on the Alaska Airlines jet, but the panel was removed and the bolts taken off in a Boeing factory near Seattle to repair rivets.
The NTSB’s agenda for the hearing includes testimony about manufacturing and inspections, the opening and closing of the door plug in the Boeing factory, safety systems at Boeing and Spirit, and the FAA’s supervision of Boeing.
The FAA administrator, Mike Whitaker, has conceded that his agency’s oversight of the company “was too hands-off – too focused on paperwork audits and not focused enough on inspections”. He has said that is changing.
Tension remains high between the NTSB and Boeing. Two months after the accident, the board chair, Jennifer Homendy, and Boeing got into a public argument over whether the company was cooperating with investigators.
That spat was largely smoothed over, but in June a Boeing executive angered the board by discussing the investigation with reporters and – even worse in the agency’s view – suggesting that the NTSB was interested in finding someone to blame for the blowout.
NTSB officials see their role as identifying the cause of accidents to prevent similar ones in the future. They are not prosecutors, and they fear that witnesses will not come forward if they think NTSB is looking for culprits.
So the NTSB issued a subpoena for Boeing representatives while stripping the company of its customary right to ask questions during the hearing.
The accident led to several investigations of Boeing, most of which are still under way.
The FBI has told passengers on the Alaska Airlines flight that they might be victims of a crime. The justice department pushed Boeing to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit fraud after finding that it failed to live up to a previous settlement related to regulatory approval of the Max.
Boeing, which has yet to recover financially from two deadly crashes of Max jets in 2018 and 2019, has lost more than $25bn since the start of 2019. Later this week, the company will get its third chief executive in four and a half years.
Testimony from NTSB hearings is not admissible in court, but lawyers suing Boeing over this and other accidents will be watching, knowing that they can seek depositions from witnesses to cover the same ground.
“Our cases are already solid – door plugs shouldn’t blow out during a flight,” said one of those lawyers, Mark Lindquist of Seattle. “Our cases grow even stronger, however, if the blowout was the result of habitually shoddy practices. Are jurors going to see this as negligence or something worse?”
