Motion of FAA Safety Oversight to an Independent Third Party, Revisited in a Comments on the Alaska Airlines COVID-19 Violation
Some oversight has been delegated to authorizedBoeing employees, despite concerns from safety advocates. Defenders of the practice say the FAA has limited resources and so it has to depend on the expertise of Boeing and other manufacturers for self-certification.
By the time the 737 Max was cleared to fly again in late 2020, the aviation industry was in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic with air travel reduced to a trickle.
Alaska and United airlines have canceled hundreds of flights a day as their fleets of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft remain grounded. Both airlines are waiting on the final approval of FAA guidelines so they can inspect the planes that are grounded.
“The public deserves a comprehensive evaluation of Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems to strengthen production quality and aviation safety,” Cantwell said in a statement.
The lawsuit doesn’t name the former Spirit employee, who is described as a 12-year veteran of the company, a “quality manager” who worked as an inspector and then led a team of inspectors. In that job, the suit says, he “oversaw various processes at the ‘end of the line,’ also known as the ‘rail pit,’ where Spirit finished working on products before shipping them to customers.”
Soucie cautioned, however, that following through on a shift to third-party oversight would be a heavy lift for the FAA and the aviation industry it regulates.
“They’re taking their time doing it because the impact of what they’re discussing doing here is huge,” Soucie said. “It’s enormous. Every manufacturer of aircraft in the US will be affected by it.
The FAA was asked to provide records from their oversight of Boeing, and the company that makes the door plug on the aircraft involved in the Alaska Airlines incident.
“This is a very smart move by the FAA” to consider moving safety oversight to an independent third party, he said in an interview with NPR. “The drive for profitability may just be overriding this ability to have an independent delegation within the organization.”
Soucie criticized the agency for not moving quickly enough to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8 after two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that left 346 people dead. The FAA Administrator seemed to be taking a more aggressive approach to this incident, when he was in office just a few months ago.
The plane could have gone off the ground and killed anybody if the door had exploded at 16,000 feet.
A recent lawsuit alleges ‘excessive’ defects at Boeing parts supplier: A response to a federal court filing filed by a former employee
A quality-control inspector working at a key supplier for Boeing’s 737 Max plane reported finding an “excessive amount of defects” at a plant in Kansas, according to documents filed in federal court last month.
The incident that took place last week is under investigation. National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said this week that while investigators know “what broke” on the plane over Oregon — a system of bolts failed to keep the door plug from being blown out of the plane’s side — they are still working to learn how and why that took place.
The lawsuit doesn’t specifically mention potential defects in manufacturing door plugs like the one that was blown out. When asked about the lawsuit’s allegations by NPR, a Spirit representative declined to comment.
“This included preparation for completed fuselages to be shipped to Boeing, and oversight for the ‘final shake,’ which is what Spirit called its final inspection before shipment,” the lawsuit states.
A former employee who was an internal quality auditor is quoted in the lawsuit as saying that “auditors frequently found screwdrivers in mechanics’ toolboxes that were not properly adjusted.” “This was potentially a serious problem, as a torque wrench that is out of calibration may not torque fasteners to the correct levels, resulting in over tightening or under-tightening that could threaten the structural integrity of the parts in question.”
According to the former employee, Spirit required auditors to seize wrongly calibrated tools — a move that he said angered managers and mechanics, including some who allegedly locked their toolboxes to block the audit.
Source: A recent lawsuit alleges ‘excessive’ defects at Boeing parts supplier
An NTSB Investigation into the Grounding of the Alaska Airlines Narrow-Body Max 9 Aircraft Using the Spirit Aerosystems System
When the aviation industry rebounded, airlines were forced to update their fleets and serve more customers, which resulted in pressure on Spirit to deliver plane parts to Boeing. At the end of the third quarter last year, Spirit reported a backlog of $42.2 billion, which it linked to work for Airbus and Boeing.
The headquarters of the company are in the state of Kansas, and it has 9,500 workers. Its global reach spans from Malaysia to France.
But Spirit AeroSystems has faced a string of challenges in recent years, and last November the company reported a net loss of $691.6 million in the first three quarters of 2023. It said it was $3.87 billion in debt.
The 20-month grounding of the popular plane rocked Spirit financially: As orders for the Boeing airliner dried up, production and deliveries halted, and Spirit laid off some 2,800 employees.
The Max is the fourth generation of Boeing’s 737, with its first commercial flight in 2017. The Max 9 has a longer body than the Max 8. Since first being produced in 1968, the narrow-body plane has been among the world’s bestselling aircraft.
NTSB head Homendy said on Monday that her agency asked Spirit AeroSystems to be a party to its investigation of the recent blowout on the Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9. The aircraft, with tail number N704AL, had been certified as airworthy and entered into service only months before Friday’s incident.
“A Spirit team is now supporting the NTSB’s investigation directly,” the company said in a message to NPR on Wednesday. We are always focused on the quality of the aircraft structures that leave our facilities.
A large chunk of the suit focuses on how executives allegedly handled a problem that made headlines last summer. That’s when it was found that there were holes in some of the737 Max planes, a critical piece of the cabin.
According to the lawsuit, in October 2022, Joshua Dean, a quality auditor at Spirit, had identified the bulkhead problem as a significant defect and then reported it to several departments.
“However,” the suit alleges, “Spirit concealed this issue from investors until it was revealed by independent reporting in August 2023, ten months after Spirit had identified it.”
That problem became public knowledge as Spirit was already dealing with another issue: Last April, Boeing revealed a defect in the way tail fin fittings were joined to the aft fuselage on some models of the 737 MAX, resulting in a production slowdown.
“Defendants concealed from investors that Spirit suffered from widespread and sustained quality failures,” the lawsuit alleges. “These failures included the presence of foreign object debris (‘FOD’) inSpirit products, missing fasteners, peeling paint, and poor skin quality.”
The lawsuit wants a jury trial for damages stemming from defendants’ wrongdoing, along with legal costs and expenses.