‘Cockroaches of the factory’: Workers paint a picture of chaos and dysfunction at Boeing

Washington (CNN) — Workers on the Boeing 737 Max that lost a door plug on a January flight told federal safety investigators that they felt pressure to do their jobs too fast to avoid mistakes, according to testimony released Tuesday at the start of a two-day investigative hearing.

The revelation came at the start of the hearing by the National Transportation Safety Board into the blowout, with investigators questioning Boeing personnel about safety issues at the planemaker and what that might mean for passengers on its ubiquitous planes.

Previously, the NTSB said the door plug ripped off in mid-flight because the plane left a Boeing factory without the four bolts needed to keep the door plug in place.

‘Cockroaches of the factory’

Many of those documents were transcripts of interviews conducted by NTSB investigators during the seven months since the accident. One of those interviewed, identified only as “Assembler Installer Doors B,” told the investigator that the workload at the Boeing factory was too great to avoid mistakes from being made.

“As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” said the unidentified Boeing worker. “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.”

One transcript showed that a Boeing employee, identified as a Door Master Lead, told investigators there planes required much of the work during the assembly process to be redone because of problems that are discovered, as happened with the door plug that was removed to fix some rivets. The worker said there was no special training to open, close, or remove a door plug versus a regular door.

That worker told the NTSB that his team was “put in uncharted waters to where… we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.”

“The planes come in jacked up every day. Every day,” the second worker added.

One FAA inspector at the Boeing factory told NTSB investigators that FAA inspectors have “heard of pressure, [but] haven’t been able to substantiate those claims.”

The fuselage of the plane was manufactured by Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, and it arrived at the Boeing factory with the four bolts in place, according to testimony at the hearing. But there were problems with the rivets by the door plug that needed to be repaired, so the door plug was removed so the work could be done. There were Spirit employees at the Boeing plant, but communication between the Boeing and Spirit workers on the floor of the Boeing factory wasn’t good, according to another interview transcript released Tuesday.

“Well, basically we’re the cockroaches of the factory,” one unidentified Spirit employee told NTSB investigators.

And a Boeing team captain at the 737 factory told investigators of problems of low employee morale and high turnover.

“We have a lot of turnover specifically because, you know, this can be a stressful job, you know,” the Boeing team captain is quoted as saying in one of the transcripts. “What the company wants and what we have the skills and capabilities to perform at the time sometimes that doesn’t coincide, and so some people get disgruntled; they feel like they’re being overworked; they feel like, you know, that we might be getting taken advantage of.”

‘Injuries we can’t see’

The January 5 Alaska Airlines flight had the door plug blow out of the side of a Boeing 737 Max as it approached 16,000 feet. The incident left a gaping hole in the side of the plane, sending oxygen masks falling from the ceiling, tearing off clothing and ripping phones out of passengers’ hands and hurling them into the darkness.

Fortunately, the crew was able to land the crippled jet without any serious physical injuries. There were seven passengers and one flight attendant treated for injuries upon landing. It was a combination of the skill of the flight crew and good luck that no one was killed.

But the trauma of being on the flight likely affected many of those aboard the plane, said Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the NTSB, in the opening comments of the hearing.

“Injuries we can’t see, which we often don’t talk about can have profound and lasting impacts on lives and livelihoods,” she said. She offered an apology on behalf of the agency to the people on the flight.

The accident did serious damage to the public’s confidence in plane manufacturer Boeing, prompting a series of federal investigations into its practices and the safety and quality of its aircraft.

Boeing executives in charge of quality control are facing the safety board for questions, including Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ senior vice president of quality Elizabeth Lund. Alongside Lund for half of Tuesday’s hearing is Doug Ackerman, vice president of supplier quality for Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

The rare, two-day-long investigative hearing is key to closing the case on the January 5 incident, which led to a 19-day-long grounding of 737 MAX 9s in the United States. The NTSB says it will “use the information gathered to complete the investigation, determine probable cause, and make recommendations to improve transportation safety.”

But Homendy was clearly frustrated and ready to push back on Boeing in early testimony, telling Lund that “this is not a PR campaign for Boeing.” She said the hearing is being held to find out what was done ahead of the accident, not the tougher training and quality improvements made since then.

“You can talk about where we are today, but this is an investigation on what happened on January 5th,” Homendy said.

A final report is still months away.

Missing bolts — and missing paperwork

The NTSB has already released preliminary findings from the incident, disclosing that the plane used on the flight left the Boeing factory in Renton, Washington, 10 weeks earlier and without the four bolts needed to hold the door plug in place.

Since that report, Boeing has said the reasons for that oversight came down to something as simple as a lack of paperwork.

When the fuselage of the plane arrived at the Boeing factory from supplier Spirit AeroSystems, the door plug was in place, as were the four bolts meant to hold it securely attached to the side of the jet. But there were problems with five rivets near where the door plug was installed, and Boeing workers removed the door plug in order to fix those rivets.

According to Boeing, the workers who fixed the rivets didn’t generate the paperwork indicating they had removed the door plug and the four bolts in order to do that work.

When a different group of employees put the plug back in place, Boeing says the employees didn’t think the plane would actually fly in that condition. Instead, they were just blocking the hole with the plug to protect the inside of the fuselage from weather as the plane moved outside to a different area of the factory compound. That group of employees often makes those kind of temporary fixes.

Those employees likely assumed paperwork existed showing that the plug and bolts had been removed, and that paperwork would prompt someone else along the line to install the bolts. But without the paperwork, no one on the assembly line knew that the door plug had ever been removed, or that its bolts were missing and needed to be replaced.

Boeing’s mounting problems

But the probe is only one of the problems Boeing faces because of the incident.

There could be criminal charges related to the failures that led to the incident, as the FBI has notified passengers and crew members that they might be considered crime victims.

Even before the flight, Boeing faced the possibility of criminal charges because of problems with the 737 Max that were kept hidden from the Federal Aviation Administration during the original certification process. Those problems led to a design flaw on the plane that is blamed for two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.

In January 2021, Boeing and the Justice Department agreed to a settlement that deferred criminal prosecution of Boeing for three years for its employees defrauding the FAA during the certification process. But that three-year probationary period had been due to end just days after the January 5 flight. Instead, the DOJ reopened the investigation following the Alaska Airlines incident, and last month Boeing agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and be put under the supervision of a court-appointed monitor.

The FAA has also increased scrutiny of Boeing’s manufacturing process and is limiting how many planes it can build, which has added to financial losses at the company that have now reached $33 billion since the second fatal crash in 2019.

Boeing’s sales have plunged 70% in the first six months of the this year. In June it sold just three passenger jets, and one of those was to Alaska Airlines to replace the plane used in the January 5 flight, which Boeing has repurchased from the airline.

CNN’s Owen Dahlkamp, Danya Gainor, Celina Tebor, Nicki Brown, Ramishah Maruf contributed to this report.

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