It is said that the US will open a criminal investigation into Boeing
The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into Boeing after a panel on one of the company’s planes exploded on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, a person familiar with the matter said.
The airline says it is cooperating with the investigation. “When an event like this occurs, it is normal for the DOJ to conduct an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.” Boeing had no comment.
On January 5, a panel on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet blew out in midair, exposing passengers to the outside air thousands of feet above the ground. There were no serious injuries from that incident, but it could have been catastrophic if the panel had blown out minutes later, at a higher altitude.
The panel is known as a “door plug” and is used to cover an opening left by an unnecessary exit door. A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board suggested the plane may have left Boeing’s factory without its plug bolted on.
The investigation was first reported from The Wall Street Journal.
The Justice Department previously said it is reviewing a 2021 settlement of a federal criminal complaint against the company, which stemmed from two fatal crashes aboard the 737 Max 8 aircraft. Under that agreement, Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion, most of it in compensation to its customers. The Justice Department agreed to drop charges accusing Boeing of defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration by withholding information relevant to the approval of the Max.
The deal was criticized for being too lenient on Boeing and for being made without consultation with the families of the 346 people who died in those crashes. The first took place in Indonesia at the end of 2018. After the second in Ethiopia at the beginning of 2019, the Max was not allowed to fly worldwide for twenty months. The aircraft resumed service in late 2020 and has since been used on several million flights, mostly without incident – until the Alaska Airlines flight on January 5.
On Friday, Boeing told a congressional panel that it had failed to find a potentially important document detailing its work on a panel that later blew up.
The company was asked to provide all documentation regarding the removal and reinstallation of the panel. In a letter to Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Boeing said it conducted an extensive search but could find no record of the information the panel and safety board were looking for.
“We also shared with the NTSB what became our working hypothesis: that the documents necessary for our processes were not created when the door was opened,” the letter said. “If that hypothesis is correct, there would be no more documentation to produce.”
The January episode again sparked harsh criticism of Boeing’s practices, with lawmakers publicly criticizing the company. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the incident, but suggested in a preliminary report that Boeing may have delivered the plane to Alaska without installing the bolts needed to hold the door plug in place.
The FAA has since increased inspections at the plant where Boeing makes the Max and capped the number of planes the company can make each month. An FAA audit found quality defects at Boeing, and the agency has given the company a few months to develop a plan to improve quality control.
Last month, a panel of experts assembled by the FAA released a long-awaited report following the Max crashes. It concluded that Boeing’s safety culture was still lacking, despite improvements in recent years.