Alaska pilot describes ‘chaos’ as Boeing officials quizzed on mid-flight blowout

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The mid-flight blowout of a panel from a Boeing 737 Max jet was so powerful that it blew open the plane’s cockpit door and tore off the co-pilot’s headset, and federal investigators began questioning officials from Boeing and its key supplier on Tuesday to understand how the accident occurred. “It was chaos,” the co-pilot of that Alaska Airlines flight on the 5 January said in documents released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Comments of the pilots, factory workers at Boeing and other people were released as the safety board held a rare investigative hearing into the blowout, an accident that further tarnished Boeing’s safety reputation and left it facing new legal jeopardy. The two-day hearing could provide new insight into the 5 January accident, which caused a loud boom and left a gaping hole in the side of the Alaska Airlines jet. The NTSB also released more than 3,000 pages of documents with details about the incident. The captain described “an explosive experience” and said he could not communicate with flight attendants, according to the documents. On the intercom, he heard flight attendants talking about a hole in the plane. He decided to land the plane as quickly as possible. The pilots landed safely back in Portland. The door plug was found in a high school science teacher’s backyard in Cedar Hills, Oregon. The accident on Alaska flight 1282 occurred minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, as the plane flew at 16,000ft (4,800m). Oxygen masks dropped during the rapid decompression, a few cell phones and other objects were swept through the hole in the plane, and passengers were terrified by wind and roaring noise, but miraculously there were no major injuries. “This was quite traumatic to the crew and passengers,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said as Tuesday’s hearing began, speaking to anyone who may have been on the flight or knew someone aboard. “We are so sorry for all that you experienced during this very traumatic event.” Homendy said seven passengers and one flight attendant suffered minor physical injuries. The NTSB has said in a preliminary report that four bolts that help secure the panel, which is call a door plug, were not replaced after a repair job in a Boeing factory, but the company has said the work was not documented. The safety board will not determine a probable cause after the hearing. That could take another year or longer. It is calling the unusually long hearing a fact-finding step. Among the first witnesses called Tuesday was Elizabeth Lund, who has served as Boeing’s senior vice-president of quality – a new position – since February. Witnesses for Spirit AeroSystems, which makes fuselages for Max jets and Boeing testified about safety systems and inspection processes. Lund said production of Max jets dropped below 10 per month after the Alaska Airlines blowout and has increased, but remains under 30 per month. Lund and others also discussed the impact of Covid on production and worker experience. Spirit senior vice-president Terry George said that just five years ago, 95% of its factory employees had worked with sheet metal, but now it is 5%, and they must get more training in drilling holes and installing fasteners in aircraft bodies. Before the pandemic, Lund added, most new hires at Boeing factories had aerospace experience, often in the military, but “coming out of Covid … we found that considerably more of our employees did not have that aerospace experience.” She said the company has improved training since the January accident. But others remained skeptical. “We have never been impressed with Boeing’s training at all,” International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers representative Lloyd Catlin said. “There has been changes, but I don’t know that it’s enough.” Lund also said Boeing is working on ways to prevent door plugs from being closed if they are not firmly secured, but she could not say when that redesign might be completed. The FAA administrator, Mike Whitaker, has conceded that his agency’s oversight of the company “was too hands-off – too focused on paperwork audits and not focused enough on inspections”. He has said that is changing. Tension remains high between the NTSB and Boeing. Two months after the accident, the board chair, Jennifer Homendy, and Boeing got into a public argument over whether the company was cooperating with investigators. That spat was largely smoothed over, but in June a Boeing executive angered the board by discussing the investigation with reporters and – even worse in the agency’s view – suggesting that the NTSB was interested in finding someone to blame for the blowout. NTSB officials see their role as identifying the cause of accidents to prevent similar ones in the future. They are not prosecutors, and they fear that witnesses will not come forward if they think NTSB is looking for culprits. So the NTSB issued a subpoena for Boeing representatives while stripping the company of its customary right to ask questions during the hearing. The accident led to several investigations of Boeing, most of which are still under way. Boeing, which has yet to recover financially from two deadly crashes of Max jets in 2018 and 2019, has lost more than $25bn since the start of 2019. Later this week, the company will get its third chief executive in four and a half years.