(New York) Boeing wants to identify the flaw in its verification system which led to the incident that occurred Friday during an Alaska Airlines flight, and remedy it, the boss of the aircraft manufacturer promised on Wednesday.
“We want to know what went wrong in our battery of inspections,” Jim Calhoun said on CNBC, “what in the original work went wrong and allowed this failure.”
A door came loose from the cabin of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 on Friday during an Alaska Airlines flight that was to connect Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California.
Since then, the American Civil Aviation Regulatory Agency (FAA) has ordered 171 of the 218 MAX 9s in circulation to be kept on the ground while an inspection is carried out.
On Monday, the American company United Airlines, which owns the first fleet of this aircraft (79 planes), said it had discovered, during checks, “bolts that needed to be tightened”.
Locking certain doors is offered by Boeing to its customers on the MAX 9 when the number of existing emergency exits is already sufficient in relation to the number of seats in the aircraft.
It was one of those blocked doors that flew off on the Alaska Airlines flight.
Boeing’s second largest customer for the MAX 9 (65 aircraft), Alaska Airlines, for its part, reported on Monday “poorly secured equipment” after preliminary inspections.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is currently investigating and has not yet released any conclusions on the cause of the incident.
” It is serious. This is a security incident and no one is going to live with it,” Jim Calhoun said Wednesday, calling the failures in the production of the devices a “horrible failure.”
“We will scrutinize everything,” assured the general director of the aircraft manufacturer, “around the MAX, the Spirit factories (AeroSystems)”, Boeing’s largest subcontractor, “on our own sites, our inspection processes , and we will take steps to ensure that this never happens again. »
