WASHINGTON, D.C. — Boeing said on Tuesday it plans to make design changes to prevent a future midair cabin panel blowout like the one in an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 flight in January that spun the planemaker into its second major crisis in recent years.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Boeing said officials still have not determined who removed and reinstalled that plane’s door plug during production.
Investigators have said the door plug in the new Alaska MAX 9 was missing four key bolts.
Boeing, which has vowed to make key quality improvements, faced extensive questions about the production of the MAX 9 and lack of paperwork documenting the removal of the door plug.
NTSB Chairman Jennifer Homendy on Tuesday criticized the planemaker’s safety culture, asking why it had not made improvements earlier and said it must take steps to improve.
“The safety culture needs a lot of work,” Homendy said.
Elizabeth Lund, Boeing’s senior vice president for quality, said the planemaker is working on design changes that it hopes to implement within the year and then to retrofit across the fleet.
“They are working on some design changes that will allow the door plug to not be closed if there’s any issue until it’s firmly secured,” Lund said.
Lund said two Boeing employees who were likely involved in the opening of the door plug have been placed on paid administrative leave.
The board also released 3,800 pages of factual reports and interviews from the ongoing investigation.
Boeing has said no paperwork exists to document the removal of four key missing bolts. Lund said Boeing has now put a bright blue and yellow sign on the door plug when it arrives at the factory that says in big letters: “Do not open” and adds a redundancy “to ensure that the plug is not inadvertently opened.”
Doug Ackerman, vice president of supplier quality for Boeing, said Boeing has 1,200 active suppliers for its commercial airplanes and 200 supplier quality auditors.
Lund said on Tuesday Boeing is still building “in the 20s” for monthly MAX production — far fewer MAXs than the 38 per month it is allowed to produce. “We are working our way back up. But at one point I think we were as low as eight,” Lund told the NTSB.
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