Boeing wants to identify and fix the error in its verification system that led to Friday's incident during an Alaska Airlines flight, the plane maker's boss promised on Wednesday.
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“We want to know what went wrong in our inspections,” David Calhoun said on CNBC, “what was flawed in the original work that caused this error.”
A door came off the cabin of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 on Friday during an Alaska Airlines flight connecting Portland, Oregon, with Ontario, California.
Since then, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered 171 of the 218 MAX 9s in circulation to remain grounded during an inspection.
On Monday, the American airline United Airlines, which owns the first fleet of this aircraft (79 aircraft), said that during inspections it had discovered “screws that needed to be tightened”.
Boeing suggests that its customers on the MAX 9 lock certain doors if the number of emergency exits is already sufficient in relation to the number of seats in the aircraft.
It was one of those jammed doors that blew off on the Alaska Airlines flight.
For its part, Boeing's second largest MAX 9 customer (65 aircraft), Alaska Airlines, reported “poorly secured equipment” on Monday after preliminary inspections.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is currently investigating and has not yet released any conclusions about the cause of the incident.
“It's serious. “This is a security incident and no one is going to live with it,” Jim Calhoun said Wednesday, calling the failures in the production of the devices a “terrible failure.”
“We will examine everything,” assured the general director of the aircraft manufacturer, “around the factories of MAX, the Spirit (AeroSystems), Boeing's largest subcontractor, “at our own sites, our inspection processes, and we will take measures to “To ensure that something like this never happens again.”