National Transportation Safety Board via AP
National Transportation Safety Board Investigator-in-Charge John Lovell examines the fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, January 7, 2024, in Portland, Oregon.
On Sunday night, Bob Sauer, a high school science teacher in the Portland, Oregon, area, took a flashlight into his backyard and spotted a 65-pound piece of white aerospace equipment. It was nestled at the foot of several trees, which softened its 16,000-foot fall out of the sky.
The specific piece of equipment, a door plug that broke off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft during Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from Portland on Friday night, in fact illustrates many of the broader trends in the airline industry today: the desire to cram more passengers into finite space, the standardization of production across outsourced subcontractors, and the lack of oversight from federal regulators into these increasingly dangerous schemes.
Many of these same problems led to Boeing’s infamous 737 MAX plane crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people. Those crashes involved a new semi-autopiloting software that malfunctioned, forcing the planes to nosedive against the pilot’s best attempts to correct course.
A faulty course change pretty well describes Boeing, which went through a restructuring during the 1990s from an “association of engineers” to a firm run by Wall Street shareholders. This catastrophic path has led to another systemic crisis for one of the world’s two major commercial aviation companies, underscoring the deterioration of Boeing’s product quality by financialization, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.
BEFORE 2006, THE FUSELAGES OF BOEING PLANES were not designed with door plugs, which appear nearly identical to exit doors from the outside except they’re nonfunctional. Door plugs also help manage cabin pressurization levels.
By the early 2000s, airlines were consolidating, and bolstered by this new market power, many wanted to pack more seats onto planes, to the detriment of the consumer experience. Ryanair, a discount flyer, was one of the main airlines pushing for more seats from Boeing.
But because Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations require a certain number of exit doors per passenger, more seats would also demand a reconfiguration of the plane to fit more exit doors. “There are a lot of different ways to configure an aircraft to pack in air travelers like cattle, but it changed the calculus for manufacturers to meet standards,” said Bill McGee, an airline industry expert at the American Economic Liberties Project.
As McGee explains, it’s not that these orders posed so much a technical or engineering challenge to Boeing, which still had many of the best aerospace engineers. It was, however, a business predicament for the new management that took over after Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997.
Along with using more subcontractors for production, Boeing was in the process of standardizing all facets of its production across its supply chain to cut costs. This was a priority of the finance veterans now at the top of Boeing’s organizational chart. The company’s decision to leave Seattle, where production is located, and move its corporate headquarters to Chicago symbolized this transition away from engineering and toward becoming a shareholder-driven firm that issued extravagant dividend payouts.
Boeing didn’t want to tailor different plane designs with a wider array of seating specifications for separate airlines, even though they had done so before. It’s far more cost-effective to mass-produce one standard fuselage to fit all airline orders.
Court documents indicate that employees at Spirit AeroSystems, Boeing’s main supplier for door plugs, warned the company about safety issues but were instructed to falsify documents instead.
The solution Boeing came up with was to introduce cutouts in all its planes for the 737-900ER planes, the generation that came before the current 737 series. Door plugs could easily fill those cutouts, or be swapped out with exit doors for airlines that wanted to seat more passengers. That way, Boeing’s jets could meet FAA regulations, while avoiding specialized manufacturing.
This new design modification seemed innocuous at the time, and by all accounts passed federal inspections without an issue. Later, the 737 MAX 9 planes with cutouts for door plugs were also certified, and delivered to airlines within the past several months.
The need for the door plug introduced another line of supply for a new piece of equipment, which Boeing subcontracted out to suppliers. A separate company had to manufacture and install the door plug, depending on the airline’s desired seating configuration. When those aerospace suppliers began cutting corners on safety standards, it exposed another risk.
That seems likely to be one potential cause of the recent accident on Alaska Airlines. In a recent lawsuit reported by The Lever, court documents indicate that employees at Spirit AeroSystems, Boeing’s main supplier for door plugs, warned the company about safety issues but were instructed to falsify documents instead.
According to the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary findings, four bolts meant to attach the Alaska Airlines door plugs to the fuselage of the plane were missing, and inspectors are working to determine if they were ever installed. “We don’t know if they were there or if, again, they came out during the violent explosive decompression event,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at a Monday news conference.
Spirit AeroSystems was once a division of Boeing based in Wichita, Kansas, but the company spun it off in 2005.
In a statement, Spirit commented on the accident: “Spirit is a committed partner with Boeing on the 737 program, and we continue to work together with them on this matter. Spirit is following the protocols set by the regulatory authorities that guide communication in these types of circumstances.”
THERE HAD BEEN WARNING SIGNS ABOUT THE 737 MAX 9s before the recent accident. In December, Alaska Airlines had a series of issues where warning lights flashed indicating a loss of cabin pressure on the MAX 9 planes. It decided voluntarily not to fly the planes over water, so they could have a safe landing if anything went wrong.
There were no orders or known inspections from the FAA after these reports, and it’s unclear whether the depressurization issue that appeared to cause the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 incident was linked to the door plugs. The NTSB has said that there are redundancies in the system of warning lights, and planes have backup systems to account for a failure of pressurization.
Videos taken from inside the Flight 1282 aircraft mid-flight show a gaping, rectangular-shaped hole on the left side of the plane’s fuselage, as high-velocity winds ripped through the aircraft before it made an emergency landing at Portland International Airport.
No passengers were severely injured or killed in Friday’s accident, primarily because of the fortunate circumstance that no one was sitting in the window or middle seat next to the door plug that ripped off.
In response to questions from the Prospect, the FAA said: “The National Transportation Safety Board is in charge of the investigation about Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. It would be premature for the FAA to answer questions or provide information while the investigation is underway. The NTSB will provide any updates.”
On Monday, United Airlines found bolts loose on the door plugs on numerous of its own Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes. Alaska Airlines found the same issue. The 171 MAX 9 planes in operation have been grounded until further notice.
In a statement regarding the latest developments on the accident, Boeing said: “As operators conduct the required inspections, we are staying in close contact with them and will help address any and all findings. We are committed to ensuring every Boeing airplane meets design specifications and the highest safety and quality standards. We regret the impact this has had on our customers and their passengers.”
Just a week before the incident, the FAA asked airlines to inspect for loose bolts in a different part of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, in the rudder control system, after a maintenance check by an unnamed international airline revealed a bolt with no nut fastening it in place.
In previous decades, a popular slogan that company leaders frequently parroted was “If it ain’t Boeing, then I ain’t going.” These days, that could only be uttered with the deepest irony.
David Dayen contributed reporting.
