FAA has doubled its enforcement cases against Boeing since a door plug blew off a 737 Max

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FAA has doubled its enforcement cases against Boeing since a door plug blew off a 737 Max

2024-08-08 08:35 Last Updated At：08:40

A federal Aviation Administration official said Wednesday that the agency has 16 pending enforcement cases against Boeing, half of which have been opened since a door plug blew off a 737 Max in midflight.

The increase in cases was disclosed Wednesday during a National Transportation Safety Board hearing into the accident, which happened during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5.

Brian Knaup, who helps manage the FAA's oversight of Boeing, said one of the open cases involves the removal of parts that have already been installed on airplanes in production.

That is apparently what caused the mistake that led to the Alaska Airlines accident: Bolts that were removed to open the door plug for maintenance workers were not replaced when the panel was closed and the plane left a Boeing factory near Seattle.

Knaup's comment came near the end of a two-day hearing that included discussion of Boeing's poor tracking of parts-removal jobs. The company failed to document who opened the door plug, and the missing bolts were never found.

Another FAA official overseeing Boeing, Bryan Kilgroe, said he is kept awake at night wondering “especially considering all that has happened since Jan. 5, is why is it so difficult to sustain a corrective action for the long term?”

Boeing said it had no comment.

The safety board released released testimony by Boeing employees who said they were pressured to build planes too quickly and not raise safety concerns.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy cited two employees who worked on aircraft doors where the Alaska Airlines plane was assembled and claimed they were moved to other areas — “Boeing prison” and “a cage” — after the door-plug blowout.

“What sort of impression does that give your employees if you sideline them ...? It is retaliation," Homendy said. She said “sidelining” the two workers runs against Boeing’s policy, which is not to retaliate against workers for unintentional mistakes.

Homendy said the NTSB will survey workers at Boeing’s factory in Renton, Washington, where the Alaska Airlines plane was produced, about the company's safety culture.

Representatives from Boeing and key supplier Spirit AeroSystems described their “safety management systems,” which encourage employees to voluntarily report safety concerns without fear of punishment. Boeing officials touted their “Speak Up” program for reporting concerns about quality and safety.

However, the president of the machinists' union local said Boeing often ignores safety concerns raised by the union until he lodges a complaint with federal regulators.

“It really sounds great,” the official, Lloyd Catlin, said of Boeing's safety plan. "In action on the factory floor, it is not.”

The FAA has been roundly criticized for lax regulation of Boeing ever since two deadly Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people. Those charges gained new momentum after the Alaska Airlines accident.

The agency’s new chief, Mike Whitaker, told Congress in June that FAA oversight “was too hands-off” but is improving. Knaup, a California-based FAA manager, said inspections have increased since the blowout.

FAA safety inspectors “can talk to anyone that’s on the (Boeing factory) floor at any time when they are doing an audit, and we do that,” he told the NTSB.

Door plugs are installed on some 737s to seal a cutout left for an extra exit that was not required on the Alaska jet. The plug on the Alaska plane was opened at a Boeing factory to let workers fix damaged rivets, but bolts that help secure the panel were not replaced when the plug was closed.

The accident on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 occurred minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, on Jan. 5. The blowout left a hole in the plane, oxygen masks dropped and the cockpit door flew open. Miraculously there were no major injuries, and pilots were able to return to Portland and land the plane safely.

A Boeing official said Tuesday that the company is redesigning door plugs so they cannot be closed until they are properly secured. Elizabeth Lund, who was named Boeing’s senior vice president of quality shortly after the blowout, said the company hopes to complete the fix within about a year, and that 737s already in service will be retrofitted.

Israeli strike on hospital tent camp kills 4 and ignites a fire that burns dozens

2024-10-14 15:53 Last Updated At：16:00

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip early Monday killed at least four people and triggered a fire that swept through a tent camp for people displaced by the war, leaving more than two dozen with severe burns, according to Palestinian medics.

The Israeli military said it targeted militants hiding out among civilians, without providing evidence. In recent months it has repeatedly struck crowded shelters and tent camps, alleging that Hamas fighters were using them as staging grounds for attacks.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah was already struggling to treat a large number of wounded from an earlier strike on a school-turned-shelter that killed at least 20 people when the early morning airstrike hit and fire engulfed many of the tents.

Several secondary explosions could be heard after the initial strike, but it was not immediately clear if they were caused by weapons or fuel tanks.

Associated Press footage showed children among the wounded. A man sobbed as he carried a toddler with a bandaged head in his arms. Another small child with a bandaged leg was given a blood transfusion on the floor of the packed hospital.

Hospital records showed that four people were killed and 40 wounded. Twenty-five people were transferred to the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza after suffering severe burns, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Israel is still carrying out near-daily strikes across the Gaza Strip more than a year into the war, and has been waging a major ground assault in the north, where it says militants have regrouped.

The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, while Palestinian militants abducted around 250 hostages. Around 100 are still being held inside Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters but says women and children make up more than half the fatalities. Around 90% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war, often multiple times, and large areas of the coastal territory have been completely destroyed.

Israel has ordered the entire remaining population of the northern third of Gaza, estimated at around 400,000 people, to evacuate to the south and has not allowed any food to enter the north since the start of the month. Hundreds of thousands of people from the north heeded Israeli evacuation orders at the start of the war and have not been allowed to return.

That has raised fears among Palestinians that Israel intends to implement a plan devised by former generals in which it would order all civilians out of northern Gaza and label anyone remaining there a combatant — a surrender-or-starve strategy that rights groups say would violate international law. The plan has been presented to the Israeli government, but it's unclear whether it has been adopted.

With no end in sight to the war in Gaza, Israel is also waging an air and ground war in southern Lebanon against the Hezbollah militant group, an ally of Hamas that has been firing rockets into northern Israel for more than a year. Israel has also threatened to strike Iran in retaliation for a ballistic missile attack, raising the prospect of an all-out regionwide war.

A Hezbollah aerial attack on an army base in northern Israel killed four soldiers — all of them 19 years old — and severely wounded seven others Sunday, the military said, in the deadliest strike by the militant group since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago.

Hezbollah called the attack near Binyamina city retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defense systems during the assault by drones.

Israel’s national rescue service said the attack wounded 61. It’s rare for so many people to be wounded by drones or missiles, most of which are intercepted by Israel's multitiered air defenses or fall in open areas.

Magdy reported from Cairo.

Find more of AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.