Boeing interview transcripts paint picture of chaos in 737 Max assembly

Newly released transcripts of interviews with Boeing employees describe a chaotic push to finish building the 737 Max that suffered a midair blowout in January, with pressure mounting on assembly workers last September as attempts to fix defective rivets dragged on.

On the same day that it began a two-day hearing into the January incident involving a door panel on an Alaska Airlines flight, the National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday released transcripts of interviews conducted in March and April with 16 workers at Boeing and a key contractor. All said they did not know specifically about the door panel that flew off in midflight, but the NTSB’s investigation has shed light on Boeing’s manufacturing problems at the time.

One Boeing manager interviewed in March by NTSB investigators described how senior managers got involved as the repair work lagged.

“I received a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails,” he said.

Eventually, according to the NTSB, a panel was removed for the rivet repair. But when the door panel was put back in place, four bolts were missing, allowing it to come free months later as the jet flew for Alaska Airlines.

The NTSB has not fully untangled key moments in the plane’s journey through the factory outside Seattle last September because the removal of the panel was not documented.

One investigator suggested in interviews with Boeing executives that growing pressure on workers might have contributed to the failure to track the work. Other documents released Tuesday show that Boeing had long struggled to keep tabs on removals and had reminded employees about the need to document them in July 2023, saying in red underlined type that removing or loosening parts had to be recorded.

Workers and executives described recurring problems with defective parts from suppliers, along with other production issues that slowed them down and resulted in work being done out of the normal order, causing pressure to mount.

“Somewhere, ‘22 or ‘23, we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear: forward doors, cargo doors, E/E bay doors,” one team leader told investigators. “The planes come in jacked up every day. Every day.”

The manager who was interviewed by the NTSB said he would like to see the manufacturing process emphasize caution over speed.

“I want to see everybody’s mentality is to slow down a little bit and get things done correctly instead of pushing and just need to be done,” the manager said. “And that needs to be changed from the executive levels, higher up levels.”

The documents released Tuesday, including interview transcripts, totaled more than 3,000 pages. Their release came as the NTSB held the first of two days of hearings this week to gather more information about an accident that has shaken the public’s confidence in commercial air travel and led to renewed scrutiny of the storied company’s operations.

Boeing leaders scheduled to appear at the hearings include Elizabeth Lund, the senior executive overseeing quality in the company’s commercial airplane division, and Terry George, a top executive with Spirit AeroSystems, the Boeing supplier responsible for manufacturing the fuselage involved in the accident.

Boeing is working on design changes to the 737 Max that will prevent a door plug from being closed if there are issues with it, Lund said during Tuesday’s hearing. The company, she said, hopes to implement the changes within a year and retrofit other planes with the updates. Executives told investigators in interviews that they had also made changes to the process for documenting when parts are removed.

However, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters Tuesday that documents and interviews with Boeing employees show that the company has known for years about problems in its manufacturing program, including defects in Spirit’s fuselages, which force workers to do work out of sequence. Yet it was only after the accident that the company began refusing to accept noncompliant fuselages. In June, Boeing announced that it had reached a deal to reacquire Spirit - Boeing sold it in 2005 in a larger cost-cutting move - as part of an effort to boost supplier quality.

“Why does it take a serious tragedy, which could have been so much more serious, for change to occur?” Homendy told reporters during a break in Tuesday’s hearing.

Homendy said investigators have not been able to interview the door-plug manager, who has been on medical leave. Other employees present during the final assembly process provided written statements, but investigators wondered about some of their accounts.

“I have some concerns because each of those written statements ends with the line, ‘I have no knowledge. I have no knowledge. I don’t know,’” Homendy said to reporters Tuesday. “It’s the same actual line. So I have some questions about that.”

Though no one was seriously injured, the fallout from the incident has been widespread, leading to multiple probes into a company that had promised a heightened focus on safety years ago, following two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

In a preliminary report released by the NTSB in February, investigators determined that four bolts designed to hold the panel in place were not reinstalled after the part was removed so fixes could be made to the plane’s fuselage. Investigators said they have been unable to locate the paperwork that shows who removed the bolts and why they weren’t reinstalled. Boeing officials have said no such paperwork exists.

The struggle to reconstruct the plane’s journey through the factory has also at times put federal investigators and Boeing at odds during the door-panel probe. At a March hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Homendy accused Boeing of withholding information critical to the agency’s investigation, including the names of individuals who may have worked on the door panel as the plane was being assembled at Boeing’s facility in Renton, Wash.

But on Tuesday, Homendy said Boeing has been responsive to requests for documentation.

The investigation has shed light on Boeing’s manufacturing problems at a time when it has sought to rebuild from the grounding of the 737 Max after the crashes and the coronavirus pandemic. Those broader assembly issues contributed to significant staff turnover, Boeing executives told the NTSB.

Lloyd Catlin, a representative from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers who spoke at Tuesday’s hearing, said that between January 2023 and May 2023, two-thirds of workers at the Renton factory had less than two years experience with Boeing.

Boeing said it is working to iron out remaining problems and rebuild confidence with the public and regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration. But the interviews with workers show that Boeing needs to do “a lot of work” to improve its safety culture, Homendy told reporters Tuesday.

“There is not a lot of trust,” she said. “There’s a lot of distrust within the workforce and the management. And then, of course, FAA has an important role to ensure oversight.”

The aftermath of the midair blowout has seen Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun’s decision to step down, as well as the departures of other senior leaders. Last week, the company named longtime aerospace executive Kelly Ortberg as its next chief executive. Ortberg, 64, will officially take over on Thursday.

The FAA also has come under scrutiny. Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Commerce Committee, sent a letter to FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker, noting that the agency had done nearly 300 audits of Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems in the two years prior but none resulted in enforcement actions. However, a special audit commissioned by the agency turned up myriad noncompliance issues at Boeing. The FAA’s oversight of Boeing will be examined on the second day of the NTSB hearing.

A final report on the blowout, including probable causes and recommendations, could take a year to 18 months to complete.

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Andrew Ba Tran contributed to this report.