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SEATTLE (AP) — The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the Boeing jetliner explosion that left a gaping hole in an Alaska Airlines jet in January, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. .
Investigators have contacted some of the passengers and crew on the January 5 flight, including the pilot and flight attendants, the paper said, citing documents and people familiar with the matter.
A Boeing plane operated by Alaska Airlines suffered an explosion seven minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. Boeing has come under increased scrutiny since an incident in which a Max 9 jet was blown away by a panel blocking the space left for an additional emergency door. No one was seriously injured.
“It is normal for the Department of Justice to conduct an investigation in cases like this,” Alaska Airlines said in a prepared statement. “We are cooperating fully and do not believe we will be targeted in the investigation.”
Boeing declined to comment. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The paper said the investigation was in response to an earlier settlement in which Boeing resolved a federal investigation into the safety of its 737 Max planes following two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019. The report said it will be useful in the ministry’s investigation into the matter.
In 2021, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion, including $244 million in fines, to resolve investigations into crashes of planes operated by Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines. The company also accused two employees of misleading regulators about flaws in its flight control system.
Boeing acknowledged in a letter to Congress that it could not find any records of work done on the door panels of Alaska Airlines planes.
Ziad Ojakli, Boeing’s vice president and chief government lobbyist, said in a letter to Sen. Maria Cantwell on Friday that “we have conducted an extensive search and have found no such document.”
The company said records of panel removal and reinstallation on the 737 MAX’s final assembly line in Renton, Washington, were not created even though Boeing’s system required them. “A working hypothesis.”
The letter, first reported by the Seattle Times, follows Wednesday’s contentious Senate committee hearing between Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board over whether the company cooperated with the investigation. It belonged to
Safety Committee Chair Jennifer Homendy said Boeing repeatedly refused for two months to identify employees who work on door panels on Boeing 737 planes and documents related to repair work, including removing and reinstalling door panels. He testified that he had failed to submit the
“It’s unreasonable to not have it after two months,” Homendy said. At Boeing, “not having that information raises concerns about quality assurance, quality control, and safety management systems.”
Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, demanded a response from Boeing within 48 hours.
Shortly after the Senate hearing, Boeing announced that it would reveal to the NTSB the names of all employees who work on the 737 doors, some of which it had previously shared with investigators.
Boeing said in the letter that it had already made it clear to the safety board that the documents were missing. Until the hearing, “Boeing was not aware of any complaints or concerns regarding lack of cooperation.”
The NTSB said in a preliminary report last month that four bolts holding the door plug in place were missing after workers removed the panel last September to repair a nearby broken rivet. . Repairs to the rivets were performed by a contractor from Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, but the NTSB does not yet know who removed and replaced the door panels, Homendy said Wednesday.
The Federal Aviation Administration recently gave Boeing 90 days to state how it will respond to quality control issues raised by the agency and a panel of industry and government experts. The committee found problems with Boeing’s safety culture, despite improvements made after two Max 8 jetliners crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people.
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