Summary
- Boeing and the NTSB are unable to determine who removed the door plug on 737 MAX 9 aircraft involved in the Alaska Airlines incident.
- The NTSB Chair calls out Boeing’s safety culture and expresses the need for improvement and trust within the workforce.
- Boeing has been banned from increasing production of the 737 MAX by the FAA.
In the latest development of the Alaska Airlines blowout incident in January this year, Boeing says that it cannot determine who removed the door plug on the 737 MAX 9 aircraft. This is the latest in a series of other such lapses found in the investigations so far in which records of the work done on the plane’s door plug were found missing.
Who removed the door plug?
After months of investigation into the Alaska Airlines midair blowout incident involving a Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Boeing are still unclear who removed the door plug from the plane.
As pointed out by Reuters, the NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy spoke with reporters recently about the improvement needed in Boeing’s safety culture. She said,
“The safety culture needs a lot of work (at Boeing). It is not there from the evidence itself, from what you see in the interviews. There’s not a lot of trust, there’s a lot of distrust within the workforce.”
Boeing has been banned from increasing production of the 737 MAX aircraft beyond a certain limit by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which, too, echoes the NTSB’s concern about the safety culture within the organization.
Boeing has said that there have been 52 cases of a door plug being removed from MAX planes since 2019. And now, it is taking steps to ensure that oversights in these cases do not occur again. Elizabeth Lund, Boeing’s senior vice president for quality, said that the plane maker now places a bright blue and yellow sign on the door plug when it arrives at the factory that says “Do not open.” Simple Flying has contacted Boeing for a comment and will update the article when we receive a response.
No record
Several loopholes have been unearthed in the investigations following the January incident that point to a lax safety culture at Boeing. In March, it was reported that the plane manufacturer could not locate records of work done on a door plug panel that blew out in the incident.
The door plug was missing four bolts, and Boeing said that the documents detailing its removal during production were never created, indicating that usual documentation protocols were not followed.
The NTSB said that it could not review the video footage of repair work to the aircraft door plug
as it was overwritten
. The absence of such crucial information has affected the investigation being done by authorities.
In hot water
Boeing’s reputation has taken a serious hit in the last couple of years, and things went further south after the January 2024 incident. Airlines operating the 737 MAX 9 planes had to temporarily ground their fleet, incurring financial losses, and the FAA also tightened its grip on the plane maker’s production capacity.
Photo: Thiago B Trevisan | Shutterstock
The company is also seeing a change in leadership, with Dave Calhoun announcing earlier this year that he would step down as CEO in 2024. Boeing recently selected Kelly Ortberg as its new president and CEO. He has over 35 years in the aviation industry and is expected to steer the company in the right direction.

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