The National Transportation Safety Board issued a strong rebuke to Boeing late Wednesday, and said it will sanction the company.
The move follows comments by a senior executive who spoke to a media gathering on Tuesday and disclosed new information related to the cause of the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout in January.
Boeing is a party to the NTSB investigation. However, by long-established rules and signed agreements, only the lead investigating agency — in this case, the NTSB — is authorized to reveal details of an investigation and to provide analysis of an incident’s cause.
This protocol, acknowledged globally for all commercial airplane accidents, is designed to ensure that no party involved tries to skew the public perception of what happened before a final independent report. The national safety authority in the country where the accident happened is expected to be the sole source of new public disclosures.
In a statement, the NTSB said Boeing “blatantly violated the NTSB investigative regulations and Boeing’s signed party agreement with the NTSB by providing nonpublic investigative information to the media and speculating about possible causes of the Jan. 5 door plug blowout.”
The NTSB said “few entities know the rules better” than Boeing. Accordingly, it will impose “a series of restrictions and sanctions” on the jet maker.
Although Boeing will remain a party to the investigation, providing technical expertise where needed, it will “no longer have access to the investigative information the NTSB produces as it develops the factual record of the accident,” the federal agency said.
In addition, the NTSB said it will subpoena Boeing to appear at an investigative hearing into the Alaska Airlines incident that is scheduled for Aug. 6 and 7. But unlike the other parties to the investigation, Boeing will not be allowed to ask questions of other participants.
Ominously for Boeing, the NTSB also suggested that the violation of the investigation agreement may warrant the attention of the Department of Justice.
Noting that the DOJ is already weighing whether to charge Boeing criminally after it was found to be in violation of an earlier plea deal to avoid charges — the 2021 Deferred Prosecution Agreement — the NTSB said it “will be coordinating with the DOJ Fraud Division to provide details about Boeing’s recent unauthorized investigative information releases.”
The comments that drew this firestorm were made Tuesday morning by Boeing’s senior vice president for quality, Elizabeth Lund, to a gathering for about 50 journalists from around the world. It was part of a series of two-day briefings for those attending the Farnborough Air Show near London next month.
Boeing had placed an embargo on Tuesday’s briefings so that nothing could be published until 2 a.m. Pacific time Thursday. Such agreements are common to give reporters time to write on complex subjects.
The Seattle Times article describing the entire day of Boeing briefings and factory tour, including Lund’s presentation, was posted online at that time.
News of the NTSB action against Boeing was first reported Wednesday evening by The Air Current, an online aviation news service.
In an email Thursday, Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal offered Boeing’s apologies and said Lund’s remarks were made in the spirit of taking responsibility, working transparently and sharing “context on the lessons we have learned from the January 5 accident.”
A pre-Air Show briefing that drew fire
Lund kicked off the presentations on Tuesday morning by highlighting the enhancements Boeing has made to its quality and safety systems since the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout.
Before taking any questions, she opened by talking about the incident itself: the midair blowout of a door plug — a panel that seals a hole where some airlines put an extra emergency exit door.
It was already known this was due to a manufacturing failure on the Alaska jet when it was being assembled in Renton last September.
Lund added a new twist to the saga by saying that the mechanics who opened and then reclosed the door plug were not at fault.
As had been extensively reported, Lund reiterated that Boeing employees opened the door plug to allow access for mechanics working for supplier Spirit AeroSystems to drill out and replace some rivets that had been misinstalled at Spirit’s MAX fuselage plant in Wichita, Kan.
When the door plug was reclosed, four retaining bolts in each corner of the door were not installed.
Without those bolts, the door plug slowly worked its way upward over a period of about three months until it slipped out of the guide track holding it and blew out violently soon after takeoff from Portland on Jan. 5, leaving a gaping hole in the passenger cabin.
Lund provided the new detail that the door plug was closed by a Boeing “move crew” that prepares a jet to roll out of the factory. That crew’s job is to “button the airplane up for the weather.”
“They close the doors,” Lund said. “They ensure that any open holes on the airplane are covered so that it’s in good condition to go out in the weather.
“We know the move crew closed the plug,” she said.
“They did not reinstall the retaining pins,” Lund said. “That is not their job. Their job is to just close it, and they count on existing paperwork.
“We believe that plug was opened without the correct paperwork,” Lund said, and the fact that one or more employees “could not fill out one piece of paperwork in this condition that could result in an accident was shocking to all of us.
“We know the plug was opened, and the paperwork is not there,” she said.
Boeing has told the NTSB it cannot identify the individuals who failed to properly perform the work.
When journalists asked how this could be, Lund replied that Boeing is focused on ensuring something similar cannot recur and will “leave the who to the NTSB investigation.”
But that phrasing, suggesting it’s up to the NTSB to find out who did the faulty work, prompted a further objection from the safety agency as misrepresenting its mission.
“Boeing portrayed the NTSB investigation as a search to locate the individual responsible for the door plug work,” the agency stated. “The NTSB is instead focused on the probable cause of the accident, not placing blame on any individual or assessing liability.”
The NTSB relies on individuals’ willingness to come forward to explain what happened. If the agency is seen as seeking to pin blame, those individuals may be unwilling to cooperate with an investigation.
The NTSB said that when it learned of the briefing, it asked Boeing for details and was provided a transcript.
“The transcript revealed that Boeing provided nonpublic investigative information to the news media that the NTSB had not verified or authorized for release.”
Boeing on Thursday acknowledged Lund’s remarks were a mistake.
“We deeply regret that some of our comments, intended to make clear our responsibility in the accident and explain the actions we are taking, overstepped the NTSB’s role as the source of investigative information,” Boeing’s Kowal stated. “We apologize to the NTSB and stand ready to answer any questions as the agency continues its investigation.”
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