The Mexican charter company whose 39-year-old plane crashed in Havana had been the subject of two serious complaints about its crews' performance over the last decade, according to authorities in Guyana and a retired pilot for Cuba's national airline.
Mexico's government said late Saturday that its National Civil Aviation Authority will carry out an operational audit of Damojh airlines to see if its "current operating conditions continue meeting regulations" and to help collect information for the investigation into Friday's crash in Cuba that left 110 dead.
Firefighters carry a body bag that contains human remains recovered at the site where a Boeing 737 plummeted into a yuca field with more than 100 passengers on board, in Havana, Cuba, Friday, May 18, 2018. The Cuban airliner crashed just after takeoff from Havana's international airport in Havana, Cuba. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)
The plane that crashed, a Boeing 737, was barred from Guyanese airspace last year after authorities discovered that its crew had been allowing dangerous overloading of luggage on flights to Cuba, Guyanese Civil Aviation Director Capt. Egbert Field told The Associated Press on Saturday.
The plane and crew were being rented from Mexico City-based Damojh by EasySky, a Honduras-based low-cost airline. Cuba's national carrier, Cubana de Aviacion, was also renting the plane and crew in a similar arrangement known as a "wet lease" before the aircraft veered on takeoff to the eastern Cuban city of Holguin and crashed into a field just after noon Friday, according to Mexican aviation authorities.
Rescue teams search through the wreckage site of a Boeing 737 that plummeted into a cassava field with more than 100 passengers on board, in Havana, Cuba, Friday, May 18, 2018. The Cuban airliner crashed just after takeoff from Havana's international airport in Havana, Cuba. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
A Damojh employee in Mexico City declined to comment, saying the company would be communicating only through written statements. Mexican authorities said Damojh had permits needed to lease its aircraft and had passed a November 2017 verification of its maintenance program. They announced a new audit late Saturday.
Cuban Transportation Minister Adel Yzquierdo Rodriguez told reporters Saturday afternoon that Cubana had been renting the plane for less than a month under an arrangement in which the Mexican company was entirely responsible for maintenance of the aircraft. Armando Daniel Lopez, president of Cuba's Institute of Civil Aviation, told the AP that Cuban authorities had not received any complaints about the plane in that month. He declined to comment further.
People look from far at the remains of a Boeing 737 that plummeted into a yuca field with more than 100 passengers on board, in Havana, Cuba, Friday, May 18, 2018. The Cuban airliner crashed just after takeoff from Havana's international airport. (AP Photo/Desmond Boylan)
Yzquierdo said it was routine for Cuba to rent planes under a variety of arrangements because of what he described as the country's inability to purchase its own aircraft due to the U.S. trade embargo on the island. Cuba has been able to buy planes produced in other countries, including France and Ukraine, but has pulled many from service due to maintenance problems and other issues.
"It's normal for us to rent planes," he said. "Why? Because it's convenient and because of the problem of the blockade that we have. Sometimes we can't buy the planes that we need, and we need to rent them."
The few surviving passengers of an airliner that crashed arrive at the Calixto Garcia General Hospital in Havana, Cuba, Friday, May 18, 2018. The 39-year-old airliner with 110 people aboard crashed and burned in a cassava field just after takeoff from the Havana airport, leaving three survivors in Cuba's worst aviation disaster in three decades, officials say. (Marcelino Vazquez Hernandez/ACN via AP)
He said that with Damojh, "the formula here is that they take care of the maintenance of the aircraft. That's their responsibility."
He said Cuba didn't have pilots certified to fly the Boeing, so it had hired the Mexican crew with the expectation that they were fully trained and certified by the proper authorities.
Yzquierdo also said the jet's "black box" voice recorder had been recovered and that Cuban officials had granted a U.S. request for investigators from Boeing to travel to the island.
Eyewitness and private salon owner Rocio Martinez said she heard a strange noise and looked up to see the plane with a turbine on fire.
"It had an engine on fire, in flames, it was falling toward the ground," Martinez said, adding that the plane veered into the field where it crashed, avoiding potential fatalities in a nearby residential area.
Field told AP that the Boeing 737 with tail number XA-UHZ had been flying four routes a week between Georgetown, Guyana, and Havana starting in October 2016. Cubans do not need visas to travel to Guyana, and the route was popular with Cubans working as "mules" to bring suitcases crammed with goods back home to the island, where virtually all consumer products are scarce and more expensive than in most other countries.
After Easy Sky canceled a series of flights in spring 2017, leaving hundreds of Cubans stranded at Guyana's main airport, authorities began inspecting the plane and discovered that crews were loading excessive amounts of baggage, leading to concerns the aircraft could be dangerously overburdened and unbalanced. In one instance, Guyanese authorities discovered suitcases stored in the plane's toilet.
"This is the same plane and tail number," Guyanese Infrastructure Minister David Patterson said. He and other Guyanese authorities said they did not immediately know if the crew suspended last May was the same one that died in Friday's crash. Damojh operates three Boeing 737s, two 737-300s and the 737-201 that crashed Friday, according to Mexican officials.
Ovidio Martinez Lopez, a pilot for Cubana for over 40 years until he retired six years ago, wrote in a post on Facebook that a plane rented from the Mexican company by Cubana briefly dropped off radar while over the city of Santa Clara in 2010 or 2011, triggering an immediate response by Cuban aviation security officials. As a result, Cuban officials suspended a captain and co-pilot for "serious technical knowledge issues," and Cuba's Aviation Security authority issued a formal recommendation that Cubana stop renting planes and crews from Damojh, Martinez wrote.
"They are many flight attendants and security personnel who refused to fly with this airline," Martinez wrote. "On this occasion, the recommendation was overlooked and they rented from them again."
Contacted by AP in Havana, Martinez confirmed his Facebook account but declined to comment further.
Mexican officials said the Boeing 737-201 was built in 1979.
Mexican aviation authorities said a team of experts would fly to Cuba on Saturday to take part in the investigation.
An engineer at Boeing said Wednesday that the aircraft company, in rushing to produce as many planes as possible, is taking manufacturing shortcuts that could lead to jetliners breaking apart.
“They are putting out defective airplanes,” the engineer, Sam Salehpour, told members of a Senate subcommittee.
Salehpour was testifying about Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, hundreds of which are in use by airlines, mostly on international routes. He spoke while another Senate committee held a separate hearing on the safety culture at Boeing.
The dual hearings were a sign of the intense pressure on Boeing since a door-plug panel blew off a 737 Max jetliner during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. The company is under multiple investigations, and the FBI has told passengers from the flight that they might be victims of a crime. Regulators limited Boeing's rate of aircraft production, and even minor incidents involving its planes attract news coverage.
Salehpour alleged that workers at a Boeing factory used excessive force to jam together sections of fuselage on the Dreamliner. The extra force could compromise the carbon-composite material used for the plane’s frame, he said.
The engineer said he studied Boeing's own data and concluded “that the company is taking manufacturing shortcuts on the 787 program that could significantly reduce the airplane’s safety and the life cycle.”
Salehpour said that when he raised concern about the matter, his boss asked whether he was “in or out” – part of the team, or not. “'Are you going to just shut up?' ... that’s how i interpreted it,” he said.
Boeing said retaliation is strictly prohibited. A spokesperson said the company encourages employees to speak up, and that since January it has seen more than a 500% increase in employee reports on a company portal.
The hearing of the investigations subcommittee marked the first time Salehpour has described his concern about the 787 and another plane, the Boeing 777, in public. Senators said they were shocked and appalled by the information. Democrats and Republicans alike expressed their dismay with the iconic American aircraft manufacturer.
The company says claims about the Dreamliner’s structural integrity are false. Two Boeing engineering executives said this week that in both design testing and inspections of planes — some of them 12 years old — there were no findings of fatigue or cracking in the composite panels. They suggested that the material, formed from carbon fibers and resin, is nearly impervious to fatigue, which is a constant worry with conventional aluminum fuselages.
The Boeing officials also dismissed another of Salehpour’s allegations: that he saw factory workers jumping on sections of fuselage on another one of Boeing’s largest passenger planes, the 777, to make them align.
Separately on Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee heard testimony from members of an expert panel that found serious flaws in Boeing’s safety culture.
One of the panel members, MIT aeronautics lecturer Javier de Luis, said employees hear Boeing leadership talk about safety, but workers feel pressure to push planes through the factory as fast as they can.
In talking to Boeing workers, de Luis said he heard “there was a very real fear of payback and retribution if you held your ground.”
The dual hearings added to criticism that has been heaped on Boeing since the door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max as it flew over Oregon. Major safety failures have pushed Boeing into a crisis that has already resulted in a management shakeup, including the CEO's decision to step down at the end of this year.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the public is looking to Washington to assure that boarding a plane is not getting more dangerous.
“Flying commercial remains the safest way to travel, but understandably, recent incidents have left the flying public worried. The perception is things are getting worse,” he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates airlines and aircraft manufacturers, was also heavily criticized during Wednesday's hearings.
The FAA was battered for the way it approved the 737 Max nearly a decade ago without fully understanding a key flight-control system. Two Max jets crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. Critics continue to accuse the agency of being too cozy with Boeing.
“The FAA needs to be a regulator. They need to do their job. That's the missing piece right now,” Joe Jacobsen, a former Boeing and FAA engineer, told the investigations subcommittee.
The FAA is now under a new administrator, Mike Whitaker, who has taken a tougher approach to Boeing. He limited Boeing's production of 737 Max jets and gave the company until May 28 to produce a detailed plan for how it will fix manufacturing problems and resolve safety concerns.
Boeing is facing separate investigations by the FAA, the Justice Department and the National Transportation Safety Board. The Justice Department could reopen a 2021 agreement in which Boeing avoided criminal prosecution on a charge of misleading regulators about the Max. In exchange, the company agreed to pay $2.5 billion — mostly to airline customers.
All the attention is taking a chunk from Boeing stock, which has tumbled in price by nearly one-third since the Alaska Airlines panel blowout. Shares of the Arlington, Virginia, company have lost 32% — more than $47 billion in market value.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the investigations subcommittee, and the panel's senior Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have asked Boeing and the FAA for troves of documents going back six years. Blumenthal said his subcommittee plans to hold more hearings on Boeing and hopes to hear from CEO David Calhoun.
In interviews and messages to employees, Calhoun has said many times that Boeing is taking steps to improve its manufacturing quality and safety culture. He called the Alaska Airlines accident a “watershed moment" from which a better Boeing will emerge.
There is plenty of skepticism about comments like that.
“We need to look at what Boeing does, not just what it says it’s doing,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.
Shawn Pruchnicki, Ph.D, a Professional Practice Assistant Professor for Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University testifies during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs - Subcommittee on Investigations hearing to examine Boeing's broken safety culture on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
Daryl Guberman interrupts a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs - Subcommittee on Investigations hearing to examine Boeing's broken safety culture to announce he has information about Boeing to share with the committee on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
Chris Moore, center, holds a photo of his daughter Danielle Moore, who died in the March 2019 crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs - Subcommittee on Investigations hearing to examine Boeing's broken safety culture on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
Boeing Quality Engineer Sam Salehpour meets with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., right, before the start of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs - Subcommittee on Investigations hearing to examine Boeing's broken safety culture on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
Boeing Quality Engineer Sam Salehpour wipes his eyes during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs - Subcommittee on Investigations hearing to examine Boeing's broken safety culture on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
From Left, Boeing Quality Engineer Sam Salehpour; Ed Pierson, Executive Director of The Foundation for Aviation Safety and a Former Boeing Engineer; Joe Jacobsen, Aerospace Engineer and Technical Advisor to the Foundation for Aviation Safety and a former FAA Engineer; and Shawn Pruchnicki, Ph.D, Professional Practice Assistant Professor for Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University are sworn in before they testify at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs - Subcommittee on Investigations hearing to examine Boeing's broken safety culture on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
FILE - Boeing employees walk the new Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner down towards the delivery ramp area at the company's facility after conducting its first test flight at Charleston International Airport, March 31, 2017, in North Charleston, S.C. Boeing will be in the spotlight during back-to-back hearings Wednesday, April 17, 2024, as Congress examines allegations of major safety failures at the embattled aircraft manufacturer. (AP Photo/Mic Smith, File)
FILE - An airplane flies over a sign on Boeing's 737 delivery center, Oct. 19, 2015, at Boeing Field in Seattle. Boeing will be in the spotlight during back-to-back hearings Wednesday, April 17, 2024, as Congress examines allegations of major safety failures at the embattled aircraft manufacturer. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)
