WASHINGTON (Reuters) – National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy said on Thursday that Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun called after a cabin panel on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet blew out in midair, and told her “they want to rectify” errors made in the past.
Homendy made her remarks to reporters after she gave a briefing to House of Representative lawmakers investigating the Alaska Airlines incident this month.
“He (Calhoun) called me and said they’ve made errors in the past, and they want to rectify that,” she said. “Great, but my focus is less on the executive team and more on what happened here with this aircraft.”
Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, which makes and installs the door plug on the MAX 9, have so far been “very cooperative,” Homendy said.
Homendy said the NTSB will move next week onto destructive testing of the door plug, or testing to the exact point of failure. So far the investigation has not been able to establish whether the door plug was outfitted with the four bolts that prevent it from vertical movement, but Homendy said it is too early to say whether the root cause was missing or wrongly installed bolts.
“We’re also looking at the seal. We’re looking at, was there any sort of structural flexing of the aircraft?” she said. “It may not be bolts.”
(Reporting by Valerie Insinna, writing by David Ljunggren; Editing by Doina Chiacu and David Gregorio)
