The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday blamed the blowout of a door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight on Boeing, Spirit Aerosystems, and the Federal Aviation Administration.

In January 2024, a door plug blew out minutes into a flight from Portland, Oregon, at about 16,000 feet. 

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“The safety deficiencies that led to this accident should have been evident to Boeing and the FAA,” NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said at a hearing Tuesday.

“I have lots of questions about where the FAA was during all of this. The FAA is the absolute last barrier of defense when it comes to ensuring aviation safety,” she added.

The investigation into the incident over the past 17 months found the plane had left a Boeing factory without the four bolts needed to hold the door plug in place. Investigators said the door plug was gradually moving upward over the 154 previous flights before this incident, and the plug ultimately flew off.

Boeing factory workers told the NTSB they were pressured to work quickly and were asked to perform jobs they did not have qualifications for, including opening and closing the door plug on the plane involved. At the time when work was done on this particular plane, just one of the 24 people on the door team had ever removed one of these plugs before, and that one person was on vacation.

“That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast,” a Boeing door installer told investigators.

Homendy noted that Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, has made more safety improvements since assuming last summer, but more needs to be done.

When the door plug blew out, it created a roaring air vacuum that sucked objects, including phones and other personal belongings, out of the cabin and scattered them below along with debris from the fuselage. 

Seven passengers and one flight attendant sustained minor injuries. There were no deaths or serious injuries when the incident happened. Pilots landed the plane safely in Portland.

Homendy commended the flight crew and called their actions “heroic.”

“This crew shouldn’t have had to be heroes,” she said. “This accident should never have happened. An accident like this only happens when there are multiple system failures.”

BOEING UNDER SCRUTINY AGAIN FOLLOWING AIR INDIA CRASH

Boeing has been at the center of a number of controversies since two of Boeing’s bestselling 737 Max airplanes crashed in 2018 and 2019. The crashes, one in Indonesia and another in Ethiopia, killed 346 people combined. Max jets around the globe were grounded for 20 months following the crashes.

The company has faced intense government scrutiny since.