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The Boeing saga has reached a new level of absurdity
Handout/NTSB/Getty Images
In this National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) handout, a vent is seen in the fuselage of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, a Boeing 737-9 MAX, on January 7, 2024, in Portland, Oregon. A door-sized section near the rear of the Boeing 737-9 MAX airplane exploded 10 minutes after Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 took off from Portland, Oregon, on January 5 en route to Ontario, California.
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 in a lot of mops on Thursday. But this time, perhaps 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 began the briefing by sharing why the four screws needed to hold the door plug in place were never installed before the plane left the factory in October: paperwork. The workers who needed to reinstall the screws never had the work order stating the work needed to be done, my colleagues Gregory Wallace and Chris Isidore reported.
“The fact that an employee could not fill out a piece of paperwork under these conditions and it could result in an accident was shocking to all of us,” Lund said.
The lack of documentation was it is not new information. It was previously disclosed in testimony before the US Senate Commerce Committee by none other than the head of the National Transportation Safety Board, the government agency leading the investigation. But strangely, Boeing sharing this information itself got Boeing in trouble with the NTSB.
The agency reprimanded Boeing on Thursday, saying it had “flagrantly violated” agency rules.
The violation, according to an NTSB statement, consisted of 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 saying she’s pregnant, prompting you to post it on your story saying something like, “My best friend is going to be a mom!” And then the 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,” said the NTSB (yes, sometimes government agencies throw shade too). But the NTSB is taking the issue even further, saying it will no longer share any information generated by the NTSB during its investigation and that it would be referring Boeing’s conduct to the Department of Justice, meaning there could be a potential investigation criminal.
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.
The company said it held the briefing in an effort to “take responsibility” and be transparent, adding that it “shared context about 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 ownership. But apparently this is a violation of the NTSB. At the same time, rules are rules, no matter how hypocritical they may be. Boeing probably should have acted more carefully.
When CNN reached out to Boeing, a spokesperson responded: “We have referred the matter to the NTSB for information on the investigation.”
The irony in all of this is that the NTSB’s reaction distracts from the more glaring story here: how a simple thing like a lack of paperwork could have endangered a plane full of people.