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The Boeing saga has reached a new level of absurdity
CNN New York –
If you’re a PR person, I can’t think of a harder job right now than working at Boeing. It’s not just cleaning aisle six, it’s cleaning the entire store, the loading dock and the parking lot on a daily — if not hourly — basis.
And boy, did Boeing have to bring out a lot of mops on Thursday. But this time, maybe it wasn’t Boeing’s fault.
Let me explain.
Boeing held a news conference at a factory in Renton, Washington, on Tuesday to talk about quality improvements.
But Boeing surely knew it would be questioned about the door plug that blew up a 737 Max on an Alaska Airlines flight in January. So Elizabeth Lund, Boeing’s senior vice president of quality, didn’t bother beating around the bush.
Lund kicked off the briefing by sharing the reason the four bolts needed to hold the door plug in place were never installed before the plane rolled out of the factory in October: paperwork. The workers who needed to reinstall the bolts never had the work order telling them the work needed to be done, my colleagues Gregory Wallace and Chris Isidore reported.
“The fact that an employee could not fill out paperwork under these conditions and it could result in an accident was shocking to all of us,” Lund said.
The lack of paperwork was It’s not new information.. It was previously disclosed in testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee by none other than the head of the National Transportation Safety Board, the government agency leading the investigation. But strangely enough, Boeing sharing this information itself has gotten Boeing into trouble with the NTSB.
The agency reprimanded Boeing on Thursday, saying it had “blatantly violated” agency rules.
The violation, according to an NTSB statement, was sharing “investigative information” and providing “an analysis of previously disclosed factual information.”
This would basically be like your friend making a public announcement on Instagram that she’s pregnant, requesting that you post it on your story saying something like, “My best friend is going to be a mom!” And then your friend sends you an angry message demanding that you take it down because it’s private information and you’re not allowed to comment on it.
“As part of many NTSB investigations over the past few decades, few entities know the rules better than Boeing,” the NTSB said (yes, government agencies throw shade sometimes, too). But the NTSB is taking things even further, saying it will no longer share any information generated by the NTSB during its investigation and that it would refer Boeing’s conduct to the Department of Justice, meaning there could be a potential criminal investigation.
The NTSB declined to provide further comment to CNN.
Clean, clean everyone everywhere
When the NTSB statement was released, Boeing’s public relations team went back into crisis cleanup mode.
I admit it’s difficult to take anything they say at face value, and part of my job as a journalist is to be skeptical and question any claims PR professionals make. But I think there is an ounce (ok, maybe closer to a quarter of an ounce) of truth in Boeing’s response to the NTSB.
He said he held the briefing in an effort to “take responsibility” and be transparent, adding that he “shared context on the lessons we learned from the January 5 accident.”
“We deeply regret that some of our comments, intended to clarify our responsibility for the accident and explain the actions we are taking, went beyond the NTSB’s role as a source of investigative information,” Boeing said Thursday.
Without giving Boeing too much credit, at least some executives were trying to take a slice of the ownership. But apparently that’s a violation of the NTSB. At the same time, rules are rules, no matter how hypocritical they may be. Boeing probably should have treaded more carefully.
When CNN reached out to Boeing, a spokesperson responded: “We deferred to the NTSB for information on the investigation.”
The irony in all of this is that the NTSB’s reaction is distracting from the more glaring story here: how a simple thing like a lack of paperwork could have put a plane full of people at risk.