Boeing opens factories to airline customers for additional inspections

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Boeing will allow airline customers of its 737 Max aircraft into its factories to review its procedures while also conducting additional quality inspections itself, as the US plane maker seeks to contain the fallout from a damaging fuselage breach on an Alaska Airlines plane 10 days ago.

The company will also bring in an external third party to review its quality management systems, as well as deploying a team to key supplier Spirit AeroSystems which made and installed the door plug that blew out on the Alaska aircraft in mid-air on a flight from Portland, Oregon.

The team will inspect Spirit’s installation of the door plugs and approve them before the completed fuselage sections are shipped to the plane maker’s factory at Renton in Washington. 

Boeing teams are also inspecting more than 50 other points in Spirit’s manufacturing processes, according to a memo sent to employees by Stan Deal, the head of the plane maker’s commercial aircraft business. 

Deal, a Boeing veteran who joined the company in 1986, has been head of its commercial aircraft business since October 2019. He took over as Boeing was dealing with the fallout from two deadly crashes of its Max 8 in 2018 and 2019. 

Although the model in focus this time is the Max 9, the longer version of the Max 8, the incident has once again raised questions over Boeing’s manufacturing processes and its quality control.

The US Federal Aviation Administration, which has grounded some of the plane maker’s 737 Max 9 aircraft pending inspection, has opened a formal probe into the incident. It said on Friday that it wanted to analyse data from inspections of an initial group of 40 of the roughly 170 grounded jets before it decided whether to lift the flying ban.

While Boeing had taken “important steps” in recent years to strengthen its quality management systems, the Alaska accident had made clear that “we are not where we need to be”, said Deal in the memo. 

“To that end we are taking immediate actions to bolster quality assurance and controls across our factories.”