Boeing must draw up quality-control plan in 90 days, regulator says

US aviation regulators have given Boeing 90 days to develop a plan to fix “systemic quality-control issues”, adding to pressures to fix its operations after a door panel blew out of one of its planes in flight last month.

Mike Whitaker, administrator of the US Federal Aviation Administration, met Boeing chief executive David Calhoun and his senior safety team on Tuesday before making the demand.

“Boeing must commit to real and profound improvements,” Whitaker said. “We are going to hold them accountable every step of the way, with mutually understood milestones and expectations.”

The door panel incident has placed Boeing under new scrutiny for its safety culture and quality control. A Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft lost the panel — designed to plug an unused door opening — at an altitude of 16,000 feet after it had taken off from Portland, Oregon.

A preliminary investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the plane had left a Boeing factory last year lacking four bolts needed to secure the door panel in place.

The incident led to the temporary grounding of the Max 9, a larger plane in Boeing’s family of single-aisle jets. The FAA has blocked Boeing from increasing its production rate for the jets and launched an audit of the company’s manufacturing and quality processes.

The door panel incident came as Boeing was trying to convince investors that it had moved past two crashes of the 737 Max in 2018 and 2019, which were caused by a design flaw and together killed a total of 346 people. The planes were grounded worldwide for nearly two years, and the Arlington, Virginia-based manufacturer paid $2.5bn to defer criminal prosecution for misleading federal regulators.

An expert report that was commissioned after the crashes and issued on Monday critiqued Boeing, calling its safety processes “inadequate and confusing” and citing a “disconnect” between senior managers and rank-and-file workers.

The plan required by the FAA would incorporate the findings of both the expert panel and the agency’s own audit, scheduled to be completed next month, Whitaker said.

But the plan, to be delivered in 90 days, must include steps to “mature” the safety management system the company committed to five years ago, the FAA said. It also must merge that program with a quality management system that included Boeing’s suppliers to “ensure the same level of rigour and oversight is applied to” them as to Boeing itself.

Calhoun said that the FAA audit, the expert report criticising Boeing’s safety culture and a daylong production pause undertaken for safety training last month have given the company “a clear picture of what needs to be done”.

“Transparency prevailed in all of these discussions,” he said. “Our Boeing leadership team is totally committed to meeting this challenge.”