Heroic actions of the crew of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 made sure that everyone survived last year when a door cap panel stole the plane shortly after takeoff, leaving a gaping hole that sucked objects outside the cabin, the president of the National Transportation Safety Board said Jennifer Homendy on Tuesday.
But Mumendy said: “The crew should not have been to be heroes, because this accident should never have happened.” The Council noted that the towers Boeing The manufacture and monitoring of security, combined with ineffective inspections and audits of the Federal Aviation Administration, led to the terrifying dysfunction.
THE Ntsb The investigation in the last 17 months has revealed that four bolts guaranteeing what is known as the door cap panel has been removed and has never been replaced during a repair while the Boeing 737 Max 9 was assembled.
The eruption occurred a few minutes after the flight took off from Portland, Oregon, and created a roaring air vacuum. Seven passengers and a on -board agent suffered minor injuries, but none of the 177 on board was killed. The pilots won the plane safely at the airport.
Boeing and Spirit Aerosystems – The company that made and installed the door cap – redesigned them with another backup system to keep the panels in place even if the bolts are missing, but this improvement will probably not be certified by the FAA until 2026 earlier. The NTSB has urged businesses and the regulator to ensure that each 737 max is modernized with these new panels.
Boeing and the FAA have improved training and processes since the incident, according to the NTSB, but the managers of the board of directors declared that the company and the agency had to better identify the risks of manufacturing and resolve them to ensure that such defects no longer sneak.
Mumendy celebrated the new CEO of Boeing, Kelly Ortberg, for improving security since he resumed last summer, although she said that more should be done.
The NTSB has recommended that Boeing continues to improve its training and safety standards and ensure that everyone knows when actions should be documented. The members of the Board of Directors also underlined the need to ensure that everyone in the business includes their security plan as well as managers.
The Board of Directors also urged the FAA to intensify and ensure that its audits and inspections deal with key areas according to past problems and systemic problems. The agency was also encouraged on Tuesday to assess Boeing’s safety culture and reconsider its long -standing policy so as not to force children under 2 years of age to travel in their own seats with appropriate constraints.
Many NTTSB recommendations echo a report that the Inspector General of the Transport Department has published last year and that the FAA is already working on implementation.
The FAA declared in a press release that it “has fundamentally changed the way it has supervised Boeing since the Alaska Airlines door accident and we will continue this aggressive surveillance to ensure that Boeing corrects its systemic quality of production problems. We are actively monitoring Boeing’s performance and meeting every week with the company to review its progress and any challenge to which it is confronted with the implementation of changes. necessary. “
In a statement, Boeing said he would examine the NTSB report when he continues to improve.
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“At Boeing, we regret this accident and continue to work on strengthening security and quality in our operations,” said the company.
Oxygen masks have dropped and phones are stolen
The accident occurred when the plane stole 14,830 feet (4,520 meters). The oxygen masks dropped during rapid decompression and some mobile phones and other objects were swept in the hole in the plane while the passengers and the crew supported the wind and the roaring noise.
The first six minutes of the flight to Ontario International Airport in South California were routine. The plane was halfway through its cruise altitude and moving to more than 400 mph (640 km / h) when the passengers described a strong “boom” and a strong wind that he torn someone’s shirt.
“We knew something was wrong,” Kelly Bartlett told the Associated Press in the days that followed the flight. “We didn’t know what. We did not know how much we did not know if it meant that we were going to crush ourselves. “
The piece of fuselage of 2 feet per 4 feet (61 centimeter per 122 centimeter) covering an unused emergency output behind the left wing had exploded. Only seven seats on the flight were unoccupied, including the two seats closest to the opening.
The member of the NTSB, J. Todd Inman, said that the Alaska Airlines accident would have been worse if he had occurred above the ocean and far from the land, but that the carrier had already limited the plane used for flight 1282 to land flights due to an unresolved maintenance problem with a fuel pump. The airline has taken this stage, going beyond the FAA requirements, said Inman.
The missing bolts emphasize the manufacture of Boeing
The panel that exploded was removed in a Boeing factory so that workers can repair five damaged rivets, but the bolts that help secure the door cap has not been replaced. It is not clear that deleted the panel.
The NTSB said in a preliminary report that four bolts had not been replaced after the repair work but that the work was not documented.
The investigators determined that the door cap was gradually moved during the 154 flights before this incident before finally flying.
The workers of the Boeing factory told NTSB investigators that they felt forced to work too quickly and that they had been asked to perform jobs for which they were not qualified. None of the 24 people on the door team has never been trained to remove a door cap before working on the plane in question and only one of them had ever removed one before. This person was on vacation when it was done in this case.
No one from the door team worked when the cap was resettled.
Investigators said Boeing did not do enough to train more recent workers who had no manufacturing training. Many of those who were hired after the pandemic and after two accidents involving the 7,37 Max planes lacked this experience, and there were no clear standards for employment training.
NTSB staff also told the Board of Directors that Boeing had no solid security practices to make sure that the door cap had been correctly resettled, and the FAA inspection system did not do a good job to capture systemic failures in manufacturing. Boeing had to adopt a more rigorous set of security standards after a 2015 settlement, but the NTSB said that the plan was only in place for two years before the specific Alaska Airlines plane which had undergone the failure of the door cap was carried out and that it was still being developed.
The FAA regularly performs more than 50 audits per year on the manufacture of Boeing, but there are no clear standards for what these audits cover. The agency regularly rejected previous inspection records after five years and has not always based its inspection plan on these past results.
Problems with the Boeing 737 Max
The maximum version of Boeing’s plane 737 of Boeing has been the source of persistent problems for the company since two of the jets crashed, one in Indonesia in 2018 and another in Ethiopia in 2019, killing 346 people combined.
Investigators determined that these accidents were caused by a system that was based on a sensor providing defective readings to push the nose down, leaving the pilots unable to regain control. After the second crash, the Max jets were anchored in the world until the company redrawn the system.
Last month, the Ministry of Justice concluded an agreement allowing Boeing to avoid criminal proceedings for having pretended to deceive American regulators about the maximum before the two plants.
The regulators of the Federal Aviation Administration have crowned the production of Boeing 737 to 38 jets per month while the investigators ensure that the company has strengthened its security practices, and the agency said that it did not intend to raise this ceiling “until we are convinced that the company can maintain security and quality while doing more planes.”
Boeing hired Ortberg last year and created a new position for a quality senior vice-president to help improve its manufacture.
The company was back in the news earlier this month, when a 787 piloted by Air India crashed shortly after takeoff and killed at least 270 people. The investigators did not determine what has caused this crash, but so far, they have not found any defects with the model, which has a solid security file.
The writer of the Associated Press, Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.