Aviation Daily March 6 (verbatim):
"The NTSB’s frustration over not having documentation related to work done on a door plug that later blew off an Alaska Airlines
Boeing 737-9 spotlights broader deficiencies within
Boeing’s quality assurance process.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, testifying before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation March 6, said the agency is missing key details related to the aircraft involved in the Jan. 5 accident, despite multiple requests to
Boeing.
“
Boeing has not provided us with the documents and information that we have requested numerous times over the past few months, specifically with respect to opening, closing, and removal of the door, and the team that does that work at the Renton facility,” she said.
Boeing took the rare step of commenting on a probe it is involved in, countering that it provided names of employees “early” in the probe, “including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information.” It followed up by saying it provided the NTSB with a full list of all employees who work on 737 doors—even ones that did not work on the Alaska aircraft’s plug door—following Homendy’s testimony.
But detailed documentation will not be headed to NTSB because
Boeing doesn’t have any. Sources with knowledge of the probe told Aviation Week that
Boeing has provided all the paperwork that exists related to the mid-September 2023 rivet re-work during the aircraft’s production that required opening the plug. The work’s non-routine nature meant it was not documented in detail.
Boeing declined to comment on the Alaska door plug work specifically. “If the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share,” the company said.
Part of Homendy’s testimony ran counter to
Boeing’s version of events. Investigators have been told
Boeing “can’t find” documents related to the door plug work, and names of employees that did the work “haven’t been provided,” she said.
She also said it is possible
Boeing does not have the documents. “We’ve asked for the records with respect to what occurred,” she said. “Either they exist, and we don’t have them, or they do not exist.”
Investigators determined bolts needed to secure the plug in place
were not installed when the accident flight, Alaska Flight 1282, departed. They apparently were not re-installed when the plug was removed as part of non-routine work on non-compliant fasteners done in
Boeing’s Renton, Washington, 737 production facility. Understanding who did the work and why bolts were apparently not re-installed, and how
Boeing’s follow-up inspections before the two-month-old airplane was delivered to Alaska in late October 2023, will be key to the NTSB’s probe.
NTSB investigators are interviewing
Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems workers as well as contractors that might have relevant information, Homendy added. The interviews began on March 3 and are set to continue for several more days. She did not say whether the interviews are the first ones NTSB has done with 737 factory workers, or whether names on the list
Boeing provided early on in the probe have been interviewed.
While
Boeing may be cooperating by providing the information it has, the absence of documentation on a process critical to an in-service occurrence points to broad gaps in the company’s quality oversight process. A recent
review by industry subject-matter experts found similar problems and issued more than 50 recommendations to address its findings.
The FAA has given
Boeing until late May to address the report and
an agency audit triggered by the Jan. 5 accident that also found substantial problems—including regulatory “non-compliance issues”—in the company’s production quality processes."