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Daniel Laurence, aviation attorney on the Stritmatter 1282 lawsuit team, attended the August 6th and 7th NTSB hearings in Washington, DC. Here are his key takeaways from the proceedings.
Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board held a two-day, 20-hour long investigation hearing at its Washington, DC headquarters on the January 5, 2024, door plug blowout on Alaska Airlines as Flight 1282, a Boeing 737-MAX 9 that was a little over three months old.
This hearing went well beyond the normal aviation disaster investigation. Two major 737-MAX 8 disasters had already killed over three hundred people. Flight 1282’s terrifying mid-air decompression event on that could easily have killed almost 200 more. All were nearly new 737 MAX aircraft. The NTSB demanded answers to not to why the door plug blowout happened on that particular airplane, but more broadly, whether Boeing’s promises to rectify its safety culture for the better had come true. Apparently, they have mostly not.
The heat in the room was focused on Boeing, which is a “party” to the investigation, but was not allowed to ask questions. Chair Jennifer Homendy, the Board, its technical team, and representatives of the FAA, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the Airline Pilots Association, and the Association of Flight Attendants brought down on the witnesses from Boeing and to some extent, Boeing’s subcontracted fuselage maker, Spirit AeroSystems. Apparently, Boeing CEO David Calhoun was too busy not letting the C-Suite door hit him in the rear end as it slammed behind him to exercise his moral duty to attend. Alaska Airlines, though present as a party to the investigation, was not called as a witness, as the NTSB has apparently decided to ignore the lingering questions about why the airline allowed the plane to fly at all when it had intended to investigate the pressure warnings on the very day the blowout happened. The airline asked some questions of Boeing, but also suspiciously declined numerous opportunities to do so. Boeing has paid Alaska Airlines $160 million dollars after all. But no dollars to the terrified passengers. Apparently, Boeing’s reprehensible position is “make me!” And so we are working to do just that.
From the get-go, the NTSB’s questions and those of the other parties were unrelenting. The first day, Boeing Commercial Airplanes senior vice president of Quality, Elizabeth Lund, was under nearly constant examination under oath from 9 am to 7 pm. She admitted that Spirit had delivered the fuselage to Boeing with the door plug installed and secured by the bolts needed to hold the door plug in. She maintained remarkable poise. But even Ms. Lund could not answer critical questions about why Boeing is missing critical records that would help identify critical witnesses.
This trillion-dollar corporation has engineered some of the most sophisticated civilian and military technology in the history of mankind. This corporation was allowed to defer federal criminal prosecution for lying to the FAA by promising to restore production safety. And yet, Boeing failed to conduct a mandatory quality inspection to ensure the bolts were present as the door plug was closed up, so the airplane could be rolled out of the factory to get out of the way of the planes stacking up behind it. Boeing now asks the NTSB, and by extension, all of us, to believe that Boeing cannot identify its workers who actually removed the door plug and who not only failed to generate – or perhaps disposed of – the paperwork required by Boeing’s own rules. Of course, that is harder given that Boeing erased security video as well as a critical factory “badge-in” factory floor attendance record for the period when the door plug was handled in Boeing’s Renton plant.
The questioning exposed Boeing’s happy talk for what it is. Boeing’s witnesses’ testimony consistently drifted into almost indecipherable management-speak in the service of Pollyanna messaging about Boeing’s purported ongoing course correction. Despite the 20-hour inquiry, Ms. Lund and her testifying quality managers could not explain away Boeing’s administrative quality failures with word salad sprinkled with acronym croutons. NTSB Chair Homendy called foul: She chided Boeing for trying to turn the investigative hearing into a “Boeing P.R. campaign,” rather than focusing on the facts and seriousness of the door plug blow-out and the manufacturing failures that caused it, and asked the two key questions that were asked repeatedly throughout both days of the hearing, but never answered: Why didn’t 108-year-old Boeing implement these measures well before these disasters; and even now, why has it taken so long?
Interrogators repeatedly questioned Boeing on why it would kill employee trust by punishing and scapegoating those who speak up. Questions and answers exposed the dysfunction and pressure on factory workers imposed by a chaotic build process. Machinist union representative Lloyd Catlin reminded Boeing that its management takes a top-down rather than bottom-up approach to imposing quality control measures. By Mr. Catlin’s account: Neither Boeing nor the FAA includes the machinists, who actually build the airplane, in creating realistic and effective production safety process. Management writes instructions that confuse workers by changing terms without defining them. Ironically, the remarkable chief example cited is the quality assurance policy itself, which uses weasel-words to conceal the erosion of quality control steps. After management imposed those instructions, it continues to not give machinists paid time to read them, much less understand them, as it once did; preferring to just keep them pushing aircraft out the door. Boeing has created a safety suggestion reporting system, but many Boeing workers and even supervisors do not know it exists. Furthermore, fear of reprisal discourages its use. Although the system claims to allow anonymous comments, the worker has to log in with a badge number or Boeing password to access the system.
All this is so despite the fact that Boeing has replaced 60 percent of its machinists in the last couple of years, suffering a huge loss of skilled and experienced line workers.
Boeing nevertheless continues to prioritize maximizing the number of aircraft delivered. Corporate executives continue to press the FAA for permission to let floor machinists sign off on the quality of their own work instead of double-checking work with quality inspectors so Boeing can push 737 MAXes into production as cheaply and quickly as it thinks it can get away with.
Boeing had a much-needed chance this week to convince the watching world that it knows what it did wrong, knows why, knows how to fix it and has in fact fixed it. Boeing failed badly in all respects. We can only hope those in charge will value our safety and the long-term value of the company to our local and national economy and security more than quarterly share price when measuring their own job status and compensation.