Originally Posted by
WHBM
And if none of this exists, can we even be certain that the door was removed and reinstalled at all ? Did the bolts get left off somewhere else ? Did Alaska work on it ? Did it come out from Spirit in Wichita like that ?
There are photos of the door with the bolts in place and the flags placed to indicate the rivets that needed to be reworked.
Unless you are being snarky - which I admit would also be justified. The lack of the bolts indicates the lack of a complete paper trail.
The starting point should be the workers who removed the defective rivets and put in the new ones. Those would be under Spirit's QA/QC system and should have some recollection about the door, though I expect they will say they don't recall, either because they are simply covering or the more reasonable cause - they do rivets all the time and this was not a particularly notable job. The outcome, months later was certainly notable, but a rivet is a rivet.
The riveters should have gone to their supervisor and said the door needed to be out of the way to do the rivet work, in which case the NTSB can follow the thread that direction. Or the riveters removed the bolts, intending to reinstall them and then that was delayed when the damaged seal was discovered and it snowballed from there.