On January 5, the "door plug" was suddenly ripped out of a Boeing 737 MAX 9's fuselage mid-flight, forcing the Alaska Airlines-operated passenger jet to make an emergency landing.
While all passengers and crew made it back to the ground unscathed, regulators are still trying to make sense of what happened — and, crucially, who's to blame.
At first, court documents obtained by The Lever suggested that Boeing spinoff Spirit AeroSystems, the company Boeing subcontracted to manufacture the door plugs, was potentially at fault, given a track record of an "excessive amount of defects."
But now, according to an account by an anonymous whistleblower confirmed with another source by the Seattle Times, it sounds like it may have been Boeing's own lack of quality control that led to the door plug being mis-installed after being removed for repairs prior to the January 5 incident.
All told, it looks like yet another black eye for the aerospace giant, which had already been reeling from previous deadly crashes involving Boeing 737 MAX airplanes and a slate of other embarrassments.
The first whistleblower claimed to have access to the airplane maker's manufacturing records.
"The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing’s own records," the whistleblower wrote in a note on an aviation website. "It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business."
The whistleblower's allegations...
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