Chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Jennifer Homendy reported to the Senate Commerce Committee that her agency had not received documentation of the door plug removal nor a list of employees involved in the procedure. While Boeing contested the claim the employees involved – as well as other employees with experience removing and reinstalling door plugs, the company acknowledged that documentation of the procedure may not exist. Boeing later confirmed that it does not exist.
This is a major shop discipline failure. It flies in the face of Boeing’s own quality system. It will raise in the minds of regulators the question of whether this is happening elsewhere. It will, of course, be difficult to prove that it is not since it is what is known as a type II error. This is an error of omission, which is inherently difficult to detect. The normal solution is to provide training across every unit that could commit the error and then monitor the affected units for a length of time to ensure the training took effect. In the end, this will make Boeing better, but it takes time. In the meantime, Boeing may have to answer whether this is also happening in their subtiers and how do they know that. What is the takeaway? Production rates will slow, but the industry will begin regaining production skillsets lost over the past few years. It will be a long, slow climb.
