Last January, a door plug broke off on an Alaska Airlines plane (Reuters)
Boeing said on Friday that it believes that the documents required to explain why a key part was removed during the manufacture of the 737 MAX 9 plane do not exist at all, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The plane encountered an emergency during its flight last January.
The National Transportation Safety Board said last month that the door plug that separated from the Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight on January 5 was missing four key screws.
“We searched extensively and did not find any such documents,” Boeing Executive Vice President Ziad Ocakli told Senator Maria Cantwell in the letter.
On Wednesday, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, criticized what she described as Boeing's lack of cooperation and failure to disclose some documents, including documents related to opening and closing the door plug, in addition to the names of 25 people working in the manufacture of this part of the plane (the door plug). Boeing facility in Renton, Washington.
“It is ridiculous that we are not getting what we asked for two months later,” she said at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing.
Following the accident - which did not cause any injuries - the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Max 9 planes for several weeks last January, preventing Boeing from increasing the rate of Max production and ordering it to develop a comprehensive plan to address “systemic quality control problems” within 90 years. One day.
Yesterday, a Boeing 777 passenger plane was forced to make an emergency landing shortly after taking off from a San Francisco airport on a trip to Japan, after one of its tires fell in the airport parking lot.
A video clip posted on the Internet showed the tire falling from the United Airlines plane seconds after it took off from San Francisco International Airport.
The "Cron 4" website reported that the tire fell in a parking lot used by airport employees and caused damage to several cars, according to airport officials, before the plane was diverted to Los Angeles International Airport, where it landed.
Previous accidents
2024
January 13: The Japanese company All Nippon Airlines said that a domestic flight turned back to the departure airport after a crack was discovered in the cockpit window of the Boeing 737-800 while it was in the air.
On January 5, Alaska Airlines grounded all of its Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft, hours after a rear part of the plane exploded, separating the emergency door plug of one of the planes and forcing it to make an emergency landing.
The flight, which was carrying 171 passengers and 6 crew members, returned safely to Portland, Oregon, USA, without any injuries.
2023
Last December, Boeing instructed all its customers to inspect its 737 MAX planes for a possible loose screw.
The story began after periodic maintenance conducted by an international airline, which discovered a missing nut in the screw that connected the rudder control system during flight.
2019
In March 2019, aviation authorities and sector companies in most parts of the world announced that Boeing 737 MAX aircraft were required to remain on the ground after two crashes of that type, and the ban continued until the end of 2021.
On March 10, 2019, the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max plane crashed minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, with 149 passengers on board, all of whom died.
2018
In October 2018, a Lion Air plane of the same type crashed into the sea near Indonesia, carrying approximately 190 people, none of whom survived, according to local authorities.
Investigators said at the time that the Lion Air pilots appeared to be struggling with an automatic system designed to prevent the plane from stalling, a new feature for the Boeing 737 MAX model.
The results of the investigation indicated that the anti-stall system led to the nose of the plane lowering, despite the efforts of the pilots to correct this.
Source: Al Jazeera + agencies