The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation into Boeing after a panel on one of the company’s planes exploded on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January, a person familiar with the matter said.
The airline said it was cooperating with the inquiry. “In an event like this, it is normal for the DOJ to conduct an investigation,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “We are fully cooperating and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.” Boeing had no comment.
On January 5, a panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet operated by Alaska Airlines exploded mid-air, exposing passengers to the air thousands of feet above the ground. No serious injuries resulted from that incident, but it could have been catastrophic if the panel had exploded minutes later, at a higher altitude.
The panel is known as a “door plug” and is used to cover a gap left by an unnecessary exit door. A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board suggested that the plane may have left the Boeing factory without the plug bolted on.
Criminal investigation is first reported of The Wall Street Journal.
The Justice Department previously said it was reviewing a 2021 settlement of federal criminal charges against the company, stemming from two fatal crashes aboard its 737 Max 8 planes. Under that agreement, Boeing committed to paying more than $2.5 billion, most of it in the form of compensation to its customers. The Justice Department has agreed to dismiss a charge accusing Boeing of defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration by withholding information related to its approval of the Max. It was not immediately clear whether the criminal investigation was related to the review of the 2021 settlement or a separate inquiry.
The agreement has been criticized for being too lenient on Boeing and for being reached without consulting the families of the 346 people who died in those crashes. The first occurred in Indonesia in late 2018. After the second in Ethiopia in early 2019, Max was banned from flying around the world for 20 months. The plane resumed service in late 2020 and has since been used on several million flights, mostly without incident — until the Alaska Airlines flight on January 5.
On Friday, Boeing informed a congressional panel that it was unable to find a potentially important record detailing its work on the panel that later exploded.
The company was asked to produce any documentation related to the removal and reinstallation of the panel. In a letter to Senator Maria Cantwell, who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Boeing said it conducted an extensive search but could not find a record of the information sought by the Senate panel and the safety board.
“We also shared with the NTSB what had been our working hypothesis: that the documents required by our processes were not created when the door plug was opened,” Boeing wrote. “If that hypothesis is correct, there is no documentation to be done.”
In the letter, Boeing also said it sent the NTSB all the names of the individuals in the 737 door team on March 4, two days after it was requested.
The door plug was opened in September at the Boeing factory in Renton, Wash., to repair damaged rivets in the plane’s fuselage, according to a document reviewed by The New York Times. Rivets are often used to join and secure parts in planes. The request to open the plug came from contractors working for Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier that makes the fuselage for the 737 Max in Wichita, Kan.
According to the document, on September 18, a Spirit AeroSystems mechanic was assigned to begin work to repair the rivets and open the door plug to perform the repair. The document shows that repairs were completed two days later and approval was given to close the door again.
The document contains no details about who was assigned to reinstall the door plug or whether it was inspected after it was replaced. It does not contain any other information about which Boeing employees were involved in removing and replacing the door plug.
The explosion on the Jan. 5 flight has sparked renewed scrutiny of Boeing’s practices, with lawmakers publicly criticizing the company. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the incident, but a preliminary report suggested that Boeing may have delivered the plane to Alaska without attaching the bolts needed to hold the door plug in place.
The FAA has since increased inspections at the factory where Boeing makes the Max and has limited how many planes the company can make each month. An FAA audit uncovered Boeing’s quality, and the agency gave the company several months to develop a plan to improve quality control.
Last month, an expert panel assembled by the FAA released a long-awaited report stemming from the Max crashes. It concluded that Boeing’s safety culture is still lacking, despite improvements in recent years.