“We don’t send planes into the air that we don’t have 100 percent confidence in,” Dave Calhoun told reporters before a meeting with senators in Washington.
“I am here today in a spirit of transparency to, first of all, recognize the seriousness” of what happened, he continued, and also, “to share everything I can ” with parliamentarians and to “answer all their questions, because they have many”.
Modifications carried out on 171 of the 218 devices
On January 5, a cabin door of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 flying from Portland, Oregon to Ontario, California came loose in flight. Airlines have the possibility of blocking a door when the number of existing emergency exits is sufficient in relation to the number of seats on the aircraft.
This modification has been made on 171 of the 218 Boeing 737 MAX 9s delivered to date. The American Civil Aviation Regulatory Agency (FAA) has suspended aircraft configured in this way from flight until further notice.
It also recommended this week that operators of Boeing 737-900ERs, an older model, check the cap holder attachments present on 380 of the 539 units delivered. The regulator has opened an investigation into quality control within Boeing, which has reported in recent months several production problems in the 737 family, its flagship model: connections on the fuselage, problem on the rear watertight bulkhead, risk of “loose bolt” on rudder control system.
Other incidents reported
The group last week appointed an independent advisor, reporting to Dave Calhoun, to review its quality control process. And it is due to hold the first in a series of training days on Thursday at its Renton factory (Washington State, West), with workshops focused on quality for staff at its production sites.
Latest incident reported by the FAA: a tire on the front axle of a 757 from the American company Delta came loose on Saturday morning while it was preparing to take off from Atlanta (Georgia) to reach Bogota in Colombia.
A Boeing spokeswoman noted that the 757 has not been produced since 2004, and referred Delta for further details. Asked by AFP, the company did not react immediately. According to the site airfleets.net, the plane concerned has been in service for 32 years.