It’s becoming a little bit clearer how Boeing’s 737 Max mess got to be as bad as it is.
A Wall Street Journal investigation uncovered that it took Boeing 18 days to fix the door plug that eventually gave out during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. The paper reports that 737 Max planes were usually able to get through the company’s Renton, Washington factory in a week or two; after the issue was resolved, the plane still continued to sit in the factory for another month before getting shipped off to Alaska Airlines.
Part of the issue was the difficulty of communicating the urgency of the needed fix with Spirit AeroSystems, the onetime fuselage division that Boeing spun out in 2005 and is now trying to reintegrate into itself.
“It’s a critical supply for us, critical,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun told CNBC last week. “It’s our fuselage. When you go out in the factory, the first thing you’re going to see is our fuselage. It’s a Boeing fuselage. Our job is to make sure mechanics and engineers freely travel between the shop floor and the design effort, and that they can help one another every step of the way. Vertical integration is the only way to accomplish that.”
A report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that four crucial bolts holding the door plug in place were missing. An initial investigation from the Federal Aviation Authority suggests that Boeing’s safety culture leaves a lot to be desired. The manufacturer told the Journal that it could not comment on an ongoing investigation. The Justice Department has opened an inquiry into what went wrong and informed passengers on the flight in question that they may have been victims of a crime.
Though the company had been trying to ramp up production while maintaining high safety standards as it sought to dig its way out from 737 Max 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019 that grounded the planes for 20 months, it has had to curtail its output amid all its recent scrutiny. Some airlines, like Southwest, have given up hope that they’ll be getting any of the jets this year that they’d been expecting to receive.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced last week that he would be retiring early this year, as did the chair of Boeing’s board of directors. The company’s stock is down more than 27% for the year, among the worst performances among S&P 500 firms.