The Justice Department has opened 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 such a case, it is natural for the Department of Justice to conduct 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 January 5, a panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines exploded in mid-air, exposing passengers to the outside air thousands of feet above the ground. There were no serious injuries resulting from this incident, but it could have been catastrophic if the painting had exploded minutes later at a higher altitude.
The panel is known as a “door plug” and is used to fill a gap left by an unnecessary exit door. A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board indicated that the plane may have left the Boeing factory without the plug being 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 stemming from two fatal crashes of its 737 Max 8 plane. Under that deal, Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion dollars, most of it in the form of compensation to its customers. The Justice Department has agreed to drop charges accusing Boeing of defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration by withholding information related to the approval of the Max. It was not immediately clear whether the criminal investigation was related to the review of the 2021 settlement or a separate investigation.
The deal was criticized for being too lenient on Boeing and for being 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 worldwide for 20 months. The plane resumed service in late 2020 and has since been used on several million flights, mostly without problems — until the Alaska Airlines flight on January 5.
On Friday, Boeing informed a congressional committee that it was unable to find a potentially important file detailing its work on the panel that later exploded.
The company was asked to provide any documentation it had regarding the removal and reinstallation of the panel. In a letter to Sen. Maria Cantwell, who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Boeing said it had conducted an extensive search but could find no record of the information sought by the Senate committee and the safety board.
“We have also shared with the NTSB what has become our working hypothesis: that the documents required by our procedures were not created when the door plug was opened,” Boeing’s letter states. “If this assumption is correct, there would be no documentation to produce.”
In the letter, Boeing also said it sent the NTSB all the names of the people in the 737 door group on March 4, two days after it was asked.
The door plug was opened in September at Boeing’s Renton, Wash., plant 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 fasten parts on airplanes. The request to open the plug came from contractors working for Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier that builds the fuselage for the 737 Max in Wichita, Kan.
According to the document, on Sept. 18, a Spirit AeroSystems engineer was assigned to begin work to repair the rivets, and the door stopper was being opened to make the repairs. The document shows that repairs were completed two days later and approval was given to close the door again.
The document did not detail who was tasked with reinstalling the door plug or whether it was inspected after it was replaced. It contains no other information about which Boeing employees were involved in removing and replacing the door plug.
The explosion on the Jan. 5 flight has once again drawn heavy scrutiny of Boeing’s practices, with lawmakers publicly criticizing the company. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the incident, but a preliminary report suggested Boeing may have delivered the plane to Alaska without installing the bolts necessary to hold the door plug in place.
The FAA has since increased inspections at the factory where Boeing builds the Max and has set limits on how many planes the company can build each month. An FAA audit found quality deficiencies at Boeing, and the agency gave 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 resulting from the Max crashes. He concluded that Boeing’s safety culture was still lacking, despite improvements in recent years.
