US justice department investigates door blowout on Alaska Airlines flight

The US Department of Justice is investigating the mid-air door panel blowout that terrified passengers of an Alaska Airlines flight two months ago, FT reports.

The airline said that “In an event like this, it’s normal for the DOJ to be conducting an investigation. We are fully co-operating and do not believe we are a target of the investigation.”

Since January Boeing has been facing a civil investigation of the incident conducted by the US Federal Aviation Administration. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board found that four bolts meant to secure the door panel were missing.

A six-week audit by the FAA into Boeing and supplier Spirit AeroSystems’ production and quality control processes found “multiple instances where the companies allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements”.

Neither Boeing or the justice department immediately responded to a request for comment.

The aerospace manufacturer has been functioning under a justice department deferred prosecution agreement since 2021. Boeing admitted wrongdoing and agreed to pay $2.5bn to resolve a criminal charge of fraud, tied to deceiving regulators about a design flaw on the 737 Max. The flaw, which could force the nose of a plane downward based on erroneous sensor readings, caused two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a combined 346 people.

The three-year agreement between prosecutors and Boeing said that if the manufacturer continued to operate a compliance programme established in the wake of the crashes, the department would ask the court to dismiss the fraud charge.

The Alaska Airlines blowout happened two days before the three-year probationary period expired. Boeing said in a January Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the justice department “is currently considering whether we fulfilled our obligations under the DPA and whether to move to dismiss” the charge.

Boeing faced criticism from regulators this week after Jennifer Homendy, chair of the NTSB, testified to the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that Boeing had not turned over documentation as the board tried to investigate the door panel blowout.

Boeing admitted on Friday in a letter to Senator Maria Cantwell, the chair of the committee, that it did not have some of the documentation requested. The NTSB’s preliminary report said the door panel arrived damaged at Boeing’s factory, forcing workers to open it to make repairs. Aircraft manufacturing generally requires documentation of the work performed as a routine safety measure. But Boeing said it believes it had not been done in this case.

“Our team has shared multiple times with the NTSB that we have looked extensively and have not found any such documentation,” the letter said.

“We likewise have shared with the NTSB what became our working hypothesis: that the documents required by our processes were not created when the door plug was opened. If that hypothesis is correct, there would be no documentation to produce.”