The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday it has opened an investigation to determine whether Boeing failed to ensure its 737 Max 9 plane was safe and manufactured according to the agency's approved design.
The FAA said the investigation stemmed from the loss of a fuselage panel from a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines that left a hole in the side of the passenger cabin shortly after it took off Friday from Portland, Oregon. The aircraft returned to Portland for an emergency landing.
“This incident should never have happened and it cannot happen again,” the agency said.
In a Jan. 10 letter to Boeing, the FAA said it had been notified of additional problems with other Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft following the Portland incident. The letter does not detail what other issues were reported to the agency. Alaska and United Airlines, which operate most of the Max 9s in service in the United States, said Monday that they had discovered loose hardware on the panel during preliminary inspections of their planes.
The new investigation is the latest setback for Boeing, which is one of just two suppliers of large aircraft to most airlines. The company has struggled to regain public trust after two 737 Max 8 crashes, in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, killed a total of 346 people.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating why the 737 Max 9 panel, also known as a door plug, flew from the Boeing jet. The safety agency is trying to determine whether screws that would have prevented the panel from moving and opening were missing or incorrectly installed. The plug is placed where an emergency exit would be if the aircraft had the largest possible number of seats.
No one was seriously injured in the incident, but aviation experts said the consequences could have been much worse if the panel had exploded at a higher altitude. Passengers and flight attendants would have walked around the plane and may not have been able to return to their seats to put on oxygen masks and buckle up. The Alaska Airlines plane was at an altitude of about 16,000 feet and was still climbing when the panel tore off.
Before Thursday's announcement, the FAA had been working with Boeing to revise the company's instructions for inspecting 171 grounded 737 Max 9 planes. The announcement of the revision came after reports of loose screws at two airlines.
“Boeing’s manufacturing practices must meet the high safety standards they are legally required to maintain,” the FAA said in the statement announcing the investigation.
Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun on Tuesday promised transparency in the company's response to the incident. He also said the company had “admitted our mistake,” without explaining what he was referring to. Boeing declined to elaborate on the comment.
“We will cooperate fully and transparently with the FAA and NTSB in their investigations,” Boeing said in a statement.
United has 79 of the planes and Alaska has 65, but Alaska has had the larger share of cancellations due to the grounding, with the Max 9 making up 20 percent of its fleet.
Arjun Garg, a former general counsel and acting deputy administrator for the FAA, said that by notifying Boeing of its investigation, the agency set in motion a process that could lead to an enforcement action against the company. In other such cases, the FAA has imposed fines and entered into agreements requiring companies to make changes to correct problems identified by regulators.
“At the end of the day, the FAA is interested in keeping people safe, not collecting fines or anything like that,” said Garg, now a partner at the Washington law firm Hogan Lovells. “They just want to make the system safer.”
Mark Lindquist, an attorney who represented the families of victims involved in the Max 8 crashes, said the FAA was more proactive than in the past and quickly launched an investigation into the Boeing 737 Max 9. Mr. Lindquist said: The FAA would take a much broader look at the aircraft than the NTSB, which aims to determine the cause of accidents and make recommendations on how to prevent them.
“The tone of this announcement shows that the FAA believes there is a risk of loss of life and the seriousness of quality control problems at Boeing,” Mr. Lindquist said.
The FAA needs to act quickly because it can't afford for travelers to worry about the safety of Boeing planes, said Robert Mann, a former airline executive who now works as an airline industry consultant.
Mr. Mann said the FAA would likely take a hands-on approach to inspecting the 737 Max 9 planes, as it did with the Max 8. He pointed out that Steve Dickson, the agency's then-administrator and a former airline pilot, flew the Max 8 before the FAA allowed commercial flights on the jet in late 2020, after the jet had been grounded for nearly two years.
“This is an acknowledgment of a long-standing problem and a very public rebuke,” Mr. Mann said.
The FAA's investigation offers Boeing and the agency an opportunity to ensure they have determined whether problems with the 737 Max 9 planes are isolated or systematic, said Billy Nolen, the agency's former acting administrator. “They’ll know that when they pass some of those 171 planes,” he said.
Mr. Nolen said the FAA is responsible for ensuring that every component of an aircraft meets the agency's standards. The fact that airlines have found loose screws on other Max 9 jets is reason enough for the agency to launch an investigation.