Boeing chief admits lapse in quality control after Alaska Airlines mid-air door blowout

The head of beleaguered plane maker Boeing has said “a quality escape” occurred in safety checks which led to a mid-flight blowout when a door “plug” came off during a flight involving one of the jets made by the company.

Chief executive Dave Calhoun explained the “quality escape” to which he referred was “anything that could potentially contribute to an accident”, he told CNBC, in his first interview after the incident.

It saw a window and chunk of fuselage blow out of an Alaska Airlines plane on 5 January, shortly after it took off from an airport in Portland, Oregon, on route to an airport in California.

It has resulted in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounding all 171 Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes operated by US airlines.

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Answering questions on the further inspections being undertaken by airlines, Mr Calhoun said: “We’re going to want to know what broke down in our gauntlet of inspections, what broke down in the original work that allowed for that escape to happen.”

One of the world’s largest carriers, United Airlines, had identified problems with doors on its 737 MAX 9 aircraft, the same make of plane that experienced the blowout.

Both United and Alaska Airlines told the manufacturer the issue was “serious, serious”, Mr Calhoun said.

“It’s a safety incident. And nobody’s going to live with that, period,” he added.

When questioned on what happened to allow for such a lapse, Mr Calhoun said the airline, the FAA and US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg “have all had discussions about exactly that set of questions – the specific actions that we will have to take to make certain that it never happens again”.

None of the planes will fly in an “unsafe condition”, he said, “that I can promise”.

He said: “All of the work that we have to do in the background in the quality systems to ensure that in an ongoing basis that never happens again, that work is ahead of us but we are committed to doing it.”

But the issue can be isolated to a “discrete” set of aeroplanes, he added.