The Justice Department launched a criminal investigation into Boeing after a panel on one of the company’s planes exploded on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, a person familiar with the matter said.
The airline said it was cooperating with the investigation. “In an event like this, it is normal for the Department of Justice to conduct an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are cooperating fully and do not believe we are the target of the investigation.” Boeing had no comment.
On January 5, a panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft operated by Alaska Airlines exploded in midair, exposing passengers to outside air thousands of feet above the ground. There were no serious injuries as a result of that incident, but it could have been catastrophic if the panel had exploded minutes later, at a higher altitude.
The panel is known as a “door stopper” and is used to cover a gap left by an unnecessary exit door. A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board suggested the plane may have left the Boeing factory without the plug screwed on.
The criminal investigation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The Justice Department previously said it was reviewing a 2021 settlement of a federal criminal charge against the company, which arose from two fatal crashes aboard its 737 Max 8 aircraft. Under that agreement, Boeing agreed to pay more than 2.5 billion dollars, most of it in the form of compensation to its clients. The Justice Department agreed to drop the charge accusing Boeing of defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration by withholding relevant information about the approval of the Max. It was not immediately clear whether the criminal investigation was related to the review of the 2021 agreement or a separate investigation.
The agreement was criticized for being too lenient on Boeing and for having been reached without consulting the families of the 346 people who died in those accidents. 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 on several million flights, mostly without incident, until the Alaska Airlines flight on January 5.
On Friday, Boeing informed a congressional panel that it had been unable to find a potentially important record detailing its work on the panel, which later disappeared.
The company had been asked to present all documentation it had related to the removal and reinstallation of the panel. In a letter to Senator Maria Cantwell, who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Boeing said it had conducted an extensive search but could not find a record of the information requested by the Senate panel and safety board.
“We have also shared with the NTSB what became our working hypothesis: that the documents required by our processes were not created when the door was opened,” Boeing’s letter reads. “If that hypothesis is correct, there would be no documentation to present.”
In the letter, Boeing also said it had sent the NTSB all the names of the people on the 737 door team on March 4, two days after it was requested.
The door plug was opened in September at Boeing’s factory in Renton, Washington, to repair damaged rivets in the plane’s fuselage, according to a document reviewed by The New York Times. Rivets are often used to join and secure parts on aircraft. The request to pull the plug came from contractors working for Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier that makes the 737 Max body in Wichita, Kansas.
According to the document, on September 18, a mechanic from Spirit AeroSystems was assigned to begin work on repairing the rivets and the door plug was being opened so repairs could be made. The document shows repairs were completed two days later and approval was given to close the door again.
The document did not contain details about who was assigned to reinstall the door stopper or whether it was inspected after it was replaced. It does not contain any other information about which Boeing employees were involved in removing and replacing the door plug.
The explosion on the Jan. 5 flight once again prompted harsh scrutiny of Boeing’s practices, with lawmakers publicly criticizing the company. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the incident, but suggested in a preliminary report that Boeing may have delivered the plane to Alaska without installing the bolts needed to hold the door plug in place.
The FAA has since increased inspections at the factory where Boeing makes the Max and limited the number of planes the company can make each month. An FAA audit found quality failures at Boeing, and the agency has given the company a few months to develop a plan to improve quality control.
Last month, a panel of experts assembled by the FAA released a long-awaited report on the Max crashes. It concluded that Boeing’s safety culture was still poor, despite improvements in recent years.
