Hearing seeks insight into blowout on a Boeing jet that pilots said threw the flight into 'chaos'

Boeing factory workers say they were pressured to work too fast and asked to perform jobs that they weren’t qualified for, including opening and closing the door plug that later blew off an Alaska Airlines jet.

Those accounts from inside the company were disclosed Tuesday, as federal investigators opened a two-day hearing into the blowout, which further tarnished Boeing’s safety reputation and left it facing new legal jeopardy.

A Boeing door installer said he was never told to take any shortcuts but everyone faced pressure to keep the assembly line moving.

“That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast,” he told investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board. The installer, along with other workers, was not named in probe documents.

The panel that blew off the Boeing 737 Max in January was made and installed by a supplier, Spirit AeroSystems. It was removed at a Boeing factory so that workers could repair damaged rivets, but bolts that help secure the door plug weren’t replaced. It’s not clear who removed the panel.

Another member of the Boeing door crew said workers got no special training for door plugs and should not have been asked to open or close the panels.

Boeing workers at the factory in Renton, Washington, have “been put in uncharted waters to do everybody’s dirty work because no one wants to touch it,” the second worker told investigators. He said Boeing's safety culture is “garbage. Nobody's accountable.”

The workers’ accounts were among more than 3,000 pages of documents released by the NTSB as it began a two-day hearing into the Jan. 5 accident, which left a gaping hole in the plane and created decompression so violent that it blew open the cockpit door and tore off the co-pilot’s headset.

“It was chaos,” the Alaska Airlines co-pilot told investigators.

The captain said it was so loud that he couldn’t communicate with flight attendants. On an intercom, he heard them talking about a hole in the plane. He decided to land the plane as quickly as possible.

The accident on flight 1282 occurred minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, as the plane flew at 16,000 feet (4,800 meters). Oxygen masks dropped during the rapid decompression, a few cell phones and other objects were swept through the hole in the plane, passengers were terrified by wind and roaring noise, but miraculously there were no major injuries.

“This was quite traumatic to the crew and passengers,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said as the hearing began. “We are so sorry for all that you experienced during this very traumatic event.”

The NTSB said in a preliminary report that four bolts that help secure the panel, which is call a door plug, were not replaced after a repair job in a Boeing factory, but the company has said the work was not documented. During the hearing, safety board members are expected to question Boeing officials about the lack of paperwork that might have explained how such a potentially tragic mistake occurred.

The safety board will not determine a probable cause after the hearing. That could take another year or longer. It is calling the unusually long hearing a “fact-finding” step.

Boeing and Spirit executives said turnover since the coronavirus pandemic has left the companies with less-experienced workforces.

Elizabeth Lund, who has served as Boeing’s senior vice president of quality — a new position — since February, said before the pandemic most new hires at Boeing factories had aerospace experience, often in the military. Now, she said, "considerably more of our employees did not have that aerospace experience.”

Spirit Senior Vice President Terry George said that five years ago, 95% of the company's factory employees had worked with sheet metal, but now it is 5%. They company has increased training for tasks such as drilling holes and installing fasteners in aircraft bodies, he said.

A representative of the machinists' union said Boeing cut back on inspections and training over the last several years. Lund said the company has significantly increased training since the Alaska Airlines blowout, and that the company is trying to improve quality as it focuses on “lean manufacturing.”

“Can I make one suggestion?” safety board member Todd Inman interjected.

“Sure, please,” Lund replied.

“Stop talking about leaner and quality and start talking about safer manufacturing,” Inman said.

Lund also said Boeing is working on ways to prevent door plugs from being closed if they are not firmly secured, but she could not say when that redesign might be completed.

Boeing production of Max jets dropped below 10 per month after the blowout and remains under 30 per month, Lund said. The Federal Aviation Administration has set a limit of 38 per month until it is satisfied that Boeing's manufacturing process is producing safe planes.

Later Tuesday, witnesses were expected to testify about the FAA’s oversight of Boeing. FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker has conceded that his agency's oversight of the company “was too hands-off — too focused on paperwork audits and not focused enough on inspections.” He has said that is changing.

The accident led to several investigations of Boeing, most of which are still underway.

The FBI has told passengers on the Alaska Airlines flight that they might be victims of a crime. The Justice Department pushed Boeing to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit fraud after finding that it failed to live up to a previous settlement related to regulatory approval of the Max.

Boeing, which has yet to recover financially from two deadly crashes of Max jets in 2018 and 2019, has lost more than $25 billion since the start of 2019. Later this week, the company will get its third chief executive in 4 1/2 years.

FILE - The door plug from the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282's Boeing 737-9 MAX airplane is shown at the National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, in Washington, July 30, 2024. On Tuesday, August 6, 2024, the National Transportation Safety Board opens a two-day hearing on the blowout of the door plug from the Alaska Airlines flight traveling 16,000 feet above Oregon. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

FILE - This photo released by the National Transportation Safety Board shows an opening in the fuselage where a door plug fell from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, on Jan. 7, 2024, in Portland, Ore. On Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024, the National Transportation Safety Board opens a two-day hearing on the blowout of a door plug from an Alaska Airlines flight traveling 16,000 feet above Oregon. (National Transportation Safety Board via AP, File)

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — One month after a judge declared Google's search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.

The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.

The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.

They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.

“It's worth saying the quiet part out loud,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement. “One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”

Google says the government's case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.

In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn said, “We are one big company among many others, competing millisecond by millisecond for every ad impression.”

Revenue has actually declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023, according to the company's annual reports.

The trial that began Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, over the alleged ad tech monopoly was initially going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.

The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.

The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine, which generates the majority of the company's $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets.

In that case, the judge has not yet imposed any remedies. The government hasn't offered its proposed sanctions, though there could be close scrutiny over whether Google should be allowed to continue to make exclusivity deals that ensure its search engine is consumers' default option.

Peter Cohan, a professor of management practice at Babson College, said the Virginia case could potentially be more harmful to Google because the obvious remedy would be requiring it to sell off parts of its ad tech business that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.

“Divestitures are definitely a possible remedy for this second case,” Cohan said “It could be potentially more significant than initially meets the eye.”

In the Virginia trial, the government's witnesses are expected to include executives from newspaper publishers including The New York Times Co. and Gannett, and online news sites that the government contends have faced particular harm from Google's practices.

“Google extracted extraordinary fees at the expense of the website publishers who make the open internet vibrant and valuable,” government lawyers wrote in court papers. “As publishers generate less money from selling their advertising inventory, publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether.”

Google disputes that it charges excessive fees compared to its competitors. The company also asserts the integration of its technology on the buy side, sell side and in the middle assures ads and web pages load quickly and enhance security. And it says customers have options to work with outside ad exchanges.

Google says the government's case is improperly focused on display ads and banner ads that load on web pages accessed through a desktop computer and fails to take into account consumers' migration to mobile apps and the boom in ads placed on social media sites over the last 15 years.

The government's case “focuses on a limited type of advertising viewed on a narrow subset of websites when user attention migrated elsewhere years ago,” Google's lawyers wrote in a pretrial filing. “The last year users spent more time accessing websites on the ‘open web,’ rather than on social media, videos, or apps, was 2012.”

The trial, which is expected to last several weeks, is taking place in a courthouse that rigidly adheres to traditional practices, including a resistance to technology in the courtroom. Cellphones are banned from the courthouse, to the chagrin of a tech press corps accustomed at the District of Columbia trial to tweeting out live updates as they happen.

Even the lawyers, and there are many on both sides, are limited in their technology. At a pretrial hearing Wednesday, Google's lawyers made a plea for more than the two computers each side is permitted to have in the courtroom during trial. Brinkema rejected it.

“This is an old-fashioned courtroom,” she said.

FILE - A sign at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. is shown on Oct. 8, 2010. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly

Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly