Boeing has not turned over documents, says US accident investigator

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Boeing has not met federal regulators’ request for a list of employees who worked on a door panel that blew out mid-flight, the US’s top accident investigator testified to Congress on Wednesday.

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, told members of the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation that investigators were seeking the names of 25 people who work on that part of the 737 Max. But Boeing had yet to provide the list, she said, two months after a dangerous incident on an Alaska Airlines flight.

“Boeing has not provided us with the documents and information . . . requested numerous times over the last two months,” she said.

“We have subpoena authority, and we are not afraid to use it,” she added later. “We hope it doesn’t come to that. But it does concern us we don’t have certain information.”

Boeing said it had “deep respect” for the NTSB and had worked “proactively and transparently” with the agency since the January incident.

“Early in the investigation, we provided the NTSB with names of Boeing employees, including door specialists, who we believed would have relevant information,” the company said. “We have now provided the full list of individuals on the 737 door team, in response to a recent request.”

A person familiar with the matter said the NTSB had requested the 25 names over the weekend, and Boeing had provided the list on Wednesday, after Homendy’s testimony.

A preliminary report from the NTSB last month found the door that blew out at 16,000 feet on an Alaska Airlines flight lacked four bolts meant to secure it in place. The fuselage containing the door panel arrived damaged at Boeing’s factory in Renton, Washington, from its supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, forcing workers to open the door plug to make repairs. The bolts were not put back in place.

Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun acknowledged in January that the company had made a mistake. At a meeting for employees five days after the incident, he said Boeing was working with the NTSB to establish the cause of the incident and pledged “100 per cent and complete transparency every step of the way”.

Senator Maria Cantwell said in her opening remarks that the NTSB’s report “implies that Boeing facilities may have significant deficiencies in record keeping”, and the continued hunt for documentation related to the door panel repairs “raises questions” about “whether the documents even exist”.

Boeing said that “with respect to documentation, if the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share”.

Though the door panel incident caused no injuries among the flight’s 177 passengers and crew, it reignited scrutiny of Boeing’s safety practices, which started after a design flaw on the 737 Max caused two crashes in 2018 and 2019, killing a combined 346 people.

An expert panel commissioned by Congress to examine Boeing’s safety culture released a report last month that called its safety processes “inadequate and confusing”. While the company has initiated safety programmes since the deadly crashes, the panellists interviewed many employees who knew little about the purpose or procedures of the aircraft maker’s efforts to improve its safety culture.