WASHINGTON - Ms Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), on Jan 18 said that Boeing chief executive 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.

She made her remarks to reporters after she gave a briefing to House of Representatives lawmakers investigating the Jan 5 Alaska Airlines incident, when a midair cabin blowout took place on an eight-week-old jet.

“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”, she said.

Ms 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 she 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.”

On Jan 17, Ms Homendy revealed that the door plug on the Max 9 was produced by a Spirit facility in Malaysia.

The NTSB is looking at the door plug transfer from Malaysia to Wichita, Kansas, and then onto the fuselage, along with the shipment by rail to Boeing’s Renton, Washington, facility and the plane-maker’s “quality assurance” work, she said.

Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke said on Jan 19 that while the faulty door plug was made in Malaysia, it was approved by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

He said the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia has reached out to the FAA’s Asia-Pacific office in Singapore to offer assistance.

Initial inspections completed

The FAA said on Jan 17 that inspections of an initial group of 40 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets had been completed, a key hurdle to eventually ungrounding the model after the Jan 5 incident.

The FAA had previously said that 40 of 171 grounded planes needed to be re-inspected before the agency would review the results and determine if it is safe to allow the Max 9s to resume flying.

It said on Jan 17 that it would “thoroughly review the data” and was convening a corrective action review board before deciding if the planes could resume flights. It put no timetable on a decision.

Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, the two US carriers that use the aircraft and completed the inspections, have had to cancel thousands of flights in January.

On Jan 18, Alaska Airlines said it will extend the cancellation of its Max 9 flights through till Jan 21.

The incident has shaken confidence in Boeing’s planes nearly five years after a pair of crashes killed 346 people and sparked questions about the company’s production processes.

The heads of Boeing and supplier Spirit AeroSystems met with Spirit employees in Kansas on Jan 17, while regulators answered questions from US senators in a closed-door briefing in Washington.

Boeing shares have lost roughly 20 per cent of their value since the start of 2024.

The NTSB and FAA briefed senators on the Commerce Committee for more than an hour on the investigation into why the Max 9 cabin panel – a door plug for an unused emergency exit on those planes – blew out, leaving a gaping hole.

FAA administrator Mike Whitaker said on Jan 12 that Boeing had experienced production problems for years and his agency planned an audit of the company’s production starting with the Max 9.

“This has been going on for a while, and whatever’s happening isn’t fixing the problem,” Mr Whitaker told Reuters.

Senate Commerce Committee chairwoman Maria Cantwell said she plans to hold a hearing on the issue and wants to make sure the FAA is ensuring strong oversight of Boeing.

She had pressed the FAA to conduct an audit of Boeing safety issues.

Senator Ted Cruz, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, said: “This investigation needs to find out where the mistake was, what caused this accident, and critically what needs to be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” REUTERS