Boeing 737 Max Groundings and Safety Concerns (2019)

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      Boeing Subject of Criminal Inquiry by DOJ

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      The investigation is tied to an incident on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Boeing also told a Senate panel that it cannot find a record of the work done on the Alaska plane.The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into Boeing after a panel on one of the company’s planes blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, a person familiar with the matter said.The airline said it was cooperating with the inquiry. “In an event like this, it’s normal for the D.O.J. to be conducting 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 Jan. 5, a panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet operated by Alaska Airlines blew out in midair, exposing passengers to the outside air thousands of feet above ground. There were no serious injuries resulting from that incident, but it could have been catastrophic had the panel blown out minutes later, at a higher altitude.The panel is known as a “door plug” and is used to cover a gap left by an unneeded exit door. A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board suggested that the plane may have left Boeing’s factory without the plug bolted down.The criminal investigation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.The Justice Department has previously said it was reviewing a 2021 settlement of a federal criminal charge against the company, which stemmed from two fatal crashes aboard its 737 Max 8 plane. Under that agreement, Boeing committed to paying more than $2.5 billion, most of it in the form of compensation to its customers. The Justice Department agreed to drop the charge accusing Boeing of defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration by withholding information relevant to its approval of the Max. It was not immediately clear if the criminal investigation was related to the review of the 2021 settlement or a separate inquiry.The deal was criticized for being too lenient on Boeing and for having been reached without consulting the families of the 346 people killed in those crashes. The first occurred in Indonesia in late 2018. After the second in Ethiopia in early 2019, the Max was banned from flying globally for 20 months. The plane resumed service in late 2020 and has since been used in several million flights, mostly without incident — until the Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Boeing Faces Justice Dept. Review Over Max 9 Incident

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      The department is looking into whether the blowout of a door panel in January violated a 2021 settlement after two fatal plane crashes.The Justice Department is reviewing whether an early January incident in which a part of a Boeing plane blew out in midflight violated a 2021 agreement to settle a criminal charge against the company, according to a person familiar with the review.Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion to settle the charge, which stemmed from two fatal crashes of its 737 Max 8 planes. The deal, reached in the final weeks of the Trump administration, was criticized at the time as being too lenient on the company.Under the terms, Boeing agreed to compensate the families of the crash victims as well as the airlines affected by the grounding of the planes. The Justice Department agreed to drop a criminal charge that was based on the actions of two employees who had withheld information from the F.A.A.Last month, a panel in the fuselage of a larger Max 9 blew out at an altitude of 16,000 feet shortly after takeoff from Portland, Ore., exposing passengers to deafening wind. There were no serious injuries, but the incident could have been catastrophic had it occurred minutes later, at a higher altitude. The panel is known as a “door plug,” which is used to cover a gap left by an unneeded exit door.The Justice Department review was reported earlier by Bloomberg.The episode in January reignited the intense scrutiny and criticism that Boeing faced after crashes in Indonesia in late 2018 and Ethiopia in early 2019 killed a combined 346 people. The Max 8 and Max 9 were banned from flying globally days after the second crash. Since the jetliners started flying again in late 2020, they have carried out several million flights worldwide.The weight of the crisis appeared to be lifting before the January incident. A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board suggested that the plane in that episode may have left Boeing’s factory without bolts needed to secure the panel. The Federal Aviation Administration immediately grounded nearly 200 Max 9 jets in the United States, pending inspections. Flights using the plane have since resumed.The F.A.A. also increased inspections of the Washington State factory where Boeing makes the Max. On Wednesday, the agency gave the company 90 days to put together a plan to improve quality control.“Boeing must commit to real and profound improvements,” the F.A.A.’s administrator, Mike Whitaker, said in a statement announcing the deadline. “Making foundational change will require a sustained effort from Boeing’s leadership, and we are going to hold them accountable every step of the way, with mutually understood milestones and expectations.”Earlier in the week, a group of F.A.A. experts released a long-awaited report stemming from the Max crashes, and it found that Boeing’s safety culture was still lacking, despite improvements in recent years. More

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      What Should Boeing Do to Fix its Longstanding Problems?

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      DealBook asked experts in company culture, aviation, and leadership for actions the manufacturer could take to restore public trust.As far as signs of trouble in a company go, a hole blowing through the wall of one of its airplanes at 16,000 feet is not subtle.So it was not a surprise that the Boeing chief executive, Dave Calhoun, spent most of the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday focused on safety. “We caused the problem, and we understand that,” he said of the Jan. 5 incident.Mr. Calhoun said the company had instituted additional quality controls and paused production for a day to focus on safety and quality. But Boeing’s issues span decades, and some aviation and management experts have long suggested they go deeper than processes, pointing instead to a shift in the company’s culture that put finances ahead of engineering. Fixing that may require more drastic measures.“What Calhoun and his team need to do requires both a leap of faith from the way they’ve been doing business and some kind of viable, credible courage,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School who focuses on crisis leadership.DealBook asked experts in company culture, aviation, and management for actions Boeing could take to try and fix its longstanding problems.Design a completely new plane. The 737 Max, the workhorse of the Boeing fleet, was introduced in 1968. “They’ve been putting in new components, but I think they need a whole new aircraft design based on all the lessons learned about aeronautics in the last 60 years,” said Bill George, the former chief executive of Medtronic and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School who has written two case studies on Boeing. “They may have to cut their dividend so the cash doesn’t go out the door and spend the money to design new aircraft,” said Mr. George, who added that Boeing should stop stock buybacks. Mr. Calhoun has said that Boeing would not deliver its next all-new aircraft until the mid-2030s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Boeing Suspends Financial Outlook as It Focuses on Safety

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      The manufacturer is under pressure to improve quality control after a panel blew off a 737 Max 9 plane during an Alaska Airlines flight this month.Boeing on Wednesday said that it would not provide a full-year financial forecast, the clearest indication yet that the company is trying to assure customers that it is prioritizing safety amid growing concerns about its popular 737 Max jets.Even as it announced its quarterly earnings, the company chose to focus instead on discussing quality control. Boeing is trying to stem the fallout from an incident less than four weeks ago in which a hole blew open on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 plane shortly after takeoff.“While we often use this time of year to share or update our financial and operational objectives, now is not the time for that,” Boeing’s chief executive, Dave Calhoun, wrote in a message to employees. “We will simply focus on every next airplane while doing everything possible to support our customers, follow the lead of our regulator and ensure the highest standard of safety and quality in all that we do.”With the Jan. 5 incident still under investigation by federal officials, Boeing executives had been grappling with how much to emphasize its efforts to improve safety while also reassuring shareholders about its financial performance. Quality concerns have taken on new urgency after news accounts, including a report in The New York Times, that Boeing workers opened and reinstalled the panel that blew off the plane, known as a door plug.The incident terrified passengers and forced the pilots to make an emergency landing in Portland, Ore. It renewed concerns among some aviation experts that Boeing has long focused too much on increasing profits and enriching shareholders through buybacks and dividends and not enough on engineering and safety. Experts raised similar concerns after two accidents on the 737 Max 8 killed nearly 350 people in 2018 and 2019.The effects of the incident on Boeing’s financial performance are not yet known: The results it announced on Wednesday were for the three months that ended Dec. 31.In its earnings release on Wednesday, the company said it was producing 737 Max jets at a rate of 38 per month at the end of the year. It had hoped to increase that rate to 42 per month this year.But the Federal Aviation Administration said last week that it was limiting Boeing’s ability to increase production of all 737 Max planes, including approving any additional assembly lines, until the company proved that it had resolved its quality control issues.The company said Wednesday that it lost $30 million in the fourth quarter, an improvement from a loss of $663 million in the same period a year earlier. Revenue rose to $22 billion, from about $20 billion a year earlier.The National Transportation Safety Board is expected in the coming days to release a preliminary report on the Alaska Airlines incident. More

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      Airlines Hoping for More Boeing Jets Could Be Waiting Awhile

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      The Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to limit Boeing’s production of 737 Max planes could hurt airlines that are struggling to buy enough new aircraft.Boeing hoped 2024 would be the year it would significantly increase production of its popular Max jets. But less than a month into the year, the company is struggling to reassure airline customers that it will still be able to deliver on its promises.That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it would limit the plane maker’s output until it was confident in Boeing’s quality control practices. On Jan. 5, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 body shortly after takeoff, terrifying passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight and forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport in Oregon. Almost immediately, the F.A.A. grounded some Max 9s.Since then, details have emerged about the jet’s production at Boeing’s facility in Renton, Wash., that have intensified scrutiny of the company’s quality control. Boeing workers opened and then reinstalled the panel about a month before the plane was delivered to Alaska Airlines.The directive is another setback for Boeing, which had been planning to increase production of its Max plane series to more than 500 this year, from about 400 last year. It also planned to add another assembly line at a factory in Everett, Wash., a major Boeing production hub north of Seattle.As part of the F.A.A.’s announcement on Wednesday, it also approved inspection and maintenance procedures for the Max 9. Airlines can return the jets to service once they have followed those instructions. United Airlines said on Thursday that it could resume flying some of those planes as soon as Friday.The move is another potential blow to airlines. Even though demand for flights came roaring back after pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions eased, the airlines have not been able to take full advantage of that demand. The companies have not been able to buy enough planes or hire enough pilots, flight attendants and other workers they need to operate flights. A surge in the cost of jet fuel after Russia invaded Ukraine also hurt profits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Boeing Reinstalled Panel That Later Blew Out of 737 Max Jet

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      Employees at its Washington State factory are said to have removed the door plug for further work before the plane was delivered to Alaska Airlines.Nearly three weeks after a hole blew open on a Boeing 737 Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight, terrifying passengers, new details about the jet’s production are intensifying scrutiny of Boeing’s quality-control practices.About a month before the Max 9 was delivered to Alaska Airlines in October, workers at Boeing’s factory in Renton, Wash., opened and later reinstalled the panel that would blow off the plane’s body, according to a person familiar with the matter.The employees opened the panel, known as a door plug, because work needed to be done to its rivets — which are often used to join and secure parts on planes — said the person, who asked for anonymity because the person isn’t authorized to speak publicly while the National Transportation Safety Board conducts an investigation.The request to open the plug came from employees of Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier that makes the body for the 737 Max in Wichita, Kan. After Boeing employees complied, Spirit employees who are based at Boeing’s Renton factory repaired the rivets. Boeing employees then reinstalled the door.An internal system that tracks maintenance work at the facility, which assembles 737s, shows the request for maintenance but does not contain information about whether the door plug was inspected after it was replaced, the person said.The details could begin to answer a crucial question about why the door plug detached from Flight 1282 at 16,000 feet, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport in Oregon minutes after taking off on Jan. 5. The door plug is placed where an emergency exit door would be if a jet had more seats. To stay in place, the plug relies primarily on a pair of bolts at the top and another pair at the bottom, as well as metal pins and pads on the sides.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Grounded Boeing Max 9 Jets Could Resume Flying Within Days

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      The F.A.A. approved inspection guidelines for the 737s, one of which lost a body panel in flight. Alaska Airlines planned to start using them again on Friday and United on Sunday.Federal regulators on Wednesday cleared the way for Boeing 737 Max 9 jets to fly again — but also said they would put new limits on production of the troubled planes.The Federal Aviation Administration grounded about 170 Max 9 planes on Jan. 6 after a body panel detached from an Alaska Airlines Max 9 minutes after the flight took off from Portland, Ore., leaving a gaping hole in the side of the jet.On Wednesday, the agency approved a set of inspection and maintenance procedures and said airlines could resume flying the jets once the checks were complete. The process includes requiring airlines to inspect certain bolts and fasteners and to re-torque fasteners on the panel, known as a door plug, which is placed where an emergency exit door would be if a jet had more seats.United Airlines said that it would begin inspecting its 79 Max 9 planes under the new guidelines and that it expected to start using them again on flights on Sunday. Alaska Airlines said on its website that it planned to put a “few planes” back into service on Friday, “with more planes added every day as inspections are completed and each aircraft is deemed airworthy.” The airline said it expected to complete inspections on all 65 of its Max 9 planes over the next week.In a statement on Wednesday, Mike Whitaker, the F.A.A. administrator, said the agency was convinced that, with the necessary checks, the planes were safe.“We grounded the Boeing 737-9 Max within hours of the incident over Portland and made clear this aircraft would not go back into service until it was safe,” he said.But while existing planes could begin flying in a matter of days, the F.A.A. made it clear that Boeing’s troubles were far from over. In its statement, the agency said it would not allow Boeing to expand production of any of the 737 Max planes — not just the Max 9 but also other versions of the plane.“Let me be clear: This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing,” Mr. Whitaker said in the statement. He said the agency would not approve production increases until it was “satisfied that the quality-control issues uncovered during this process are resolved.”The F.A.A. order is the latest in a series of problems for Boeing, and the 737 Max in particular. The line of fuel-efficient planes was meant to help the company regain ground it had lost to its European competitor, Airbus, and it quickly became the best-selling jet in Boeing’s history. But crashes of a different variant of the plane, the Max 8, in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people and led to the Max’s being grounded worldwide.The near disaster in January led to renewed scrutiny on quality control at Boeing and its contractors, including Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier that makes the body for the 737 Max in Wichita, Kan.The F.A.A. said on Wednesday that it would increase oversight of Boeing and begin an investigation into the company’s practices.“The quality-assurance issues we have seen are unacceptable,” Mr. Whitaker said. “That is why we will have more boots on the ground closely scrutinizing and monitoring production and manufacturing activities.”In a statement after the F.A.A. announcement on Wednesday, Boeing said it would “continue to cooperate fully and transparently” with the agency and follow its direction.“We will also work closely with our airline customers as they complete the required inspection procedures to safely return their 737-9 airplanes to service,” the company said.Sydney Ember More

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      Delta Air Lines Boeing 757 Lost Nose Wheel Before Takeoff, F.A.A. Says

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      The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the latest troubling event involving a Boeing aircraft.A Boeing 757 plane operated by Delta Air Lines lost a nose wheel as it prepared to take off from Atlanta’s main airport on Saturday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It was the latest troubling episode involving one of the manufacturer’s aircraft.Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was preparing to take off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for a trip to Bogotá, Colombia, at about 11:15 a.m. Saturday when a “nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill,” the agency said in a preliminary report.More than 170 passengers who were aboard had to deplane, but no one was hurt, the report said.A Delta spokesman said the passengers were put on a replacement flight.A Boeing spokesman declined to comment and directed questions to Delta.The F.A.A. said that it was continuing its investigation.It’s been a turbulent period for Boeing, which has been fraught in recent years with safety concerns after deadly catastrophes. The manufacturer faces renewed scrutiny after a door plug blew off a new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane at 16,000 feet on Jan. 5 just after it took off from the Portland International Airport in Oregon.No one was seriously injured then, but passengers were exposed to whipping winds on the plane’s harrowing return to Portland.The F.A.A. then ordered about 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes to be grounded in the United States until they could be inspected. The plane that lost a wheel in Atlanta on Saturday, a Boeing 757, is a different model. More