(NewsNation) — The National Transportation Safety Board’s two-day investigative hearing into the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines midflight door plug blowout continues Wednesday on Capitol Hill with testimony from Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems leadership.
Wednesday’s hearing will include hours of testimony detailing the production of the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane as well as changes made after the Alaska Airlines incident.
NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said Tuesday that the safety culture within Boeing needs a lot of work, presenting thousands of newly released documents that shed light on what happened aboard the plane and details of working behind the scenes at Boeing.
“The safety culture needs a lot of work,” Homendy said. “It is not there from the evidence itself. It is there’s not a lot of trust. There’s a lot of distrust within the workforce and the management that has a role and then of course, FAA has an important role to ensure oversight.”
NTSB hearing: Day 1 recap
Boeing factory workers claim they were pressured to work too fast and asked to perform jobs they weren’t qualified for, including opening and closing the door plug that later blew off the Alaska Airlines jet.
During an interview with the NTSB as part of this investigation, a Boeing door installer said he was never told to take any shortcuts but everyone faced pressure to keep the assembly line moving.
“As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right? That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot,” the door installer said.
The panel that blew off the Boeing 737 Max in January was made and installed by a supplier, Spirit AeroSystems. It was removed at a Boeing factory so that workers could repair damaged rivets, but bolts that secure the panel to the plane’s fuselage weren’t replaced. It’s not clear who removed the panel.
Another interview transcript involves a pilot who flew that Alaska Airlines plane when the door plug blew off.
“It was just an explosive experience. Really, the only thing that was going through my mind was to get my oxygen mask on. That was it. After I did that, try and establish communications with (REDACTED) and get lower,” the pilot said.
The workers’ accounts were among more than 3,000 pages of documents released by the NTSB as it began a two-day hearing into the Jan. 5 accident, which left a gaping hole in the plane and created decompression so violent that it blew open the cockpit door and tore off the co-pilot’s headset.
“It was chaos,” the Alaska Airlines co-pilot told investigators.
The firs day of the investigative hearing brought exhaustive details about the manufacturing of planes as well as quality control and safety procedures.
Both Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems defended company procedures.
Alaska Airlines door plug blowout
The hearing comes after the NTSB displayed the actual door plug that blew off Flight 1282 at its lab.
So, what happened on Jan. 5?
The incident occurred minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, as the plane flew at 16,000 feet. Oxygen masks dropped during the rapid decompression and a few cellphones and other objects were swept through the hole in the plane. Passengers were terrified by the wind and roaring noise.
Despite a loss of pressure in the cabin, none of the 171 passengers or six crew members died, and the plane landed safely back in Portland. Only eight people on the aircraft reported minor injuries.
The door plug was found in a high school science teacher’s backyard in Cedar Hills, Oregon.
No one from the airline was called to testify this week before the NTSB. John Goglia, a former NTSB member, said that indicates the agency has determined “that Alaska has no dirty hands in this.”
The plane involved had been delivered to Alaska Airlines in late October and had made only about 150 flights. Shortly before the door panel blowout, the airline had stopped using the plane on flights to Hawaii after a warning light indicating a possible pressurization problem lit up on three different flights.
The accident led to several investigations of Boeing, most of which are still underway.
Boeing woes
Boeing has faced much scrutiny following the door plug incident, and the company has promised to improve its safety culture, including increasing inspections and improving employee training.
Tension remains high between the NTSB and Boeing. Two months after the accident, Homendy and Boeing got into a public argument over whether the company was cooperating with investigators.
Also, effective this week, Boeing announced its new CEO Robert “Kelly” Ortberg will replace former CEO Dave Calhoun.
Earlier this year, Calhoun faced pushback from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, with some accusing him of putting profits over safety.
Ortberg will be the company’s third chief executive in four and a half years.
The FBI has told passengers on the Alaska Airlines flight that they might be victims of a crime. The Justice Department pushed Boeing to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit fraud after finding that it failed to live up to a previous settlement related to regulatory approval of the Max.
Boeing, which has yet to recover financially from two deadly crashes of Max jets in 2018 and 2019, has lost more than $25 billion since the start of 2019.
Boeing also reported a $1.4 billion loss in revenue during its second quarter this year, which is around 10 times the loss it reported the same time last year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.