Workers at Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory flagged four damaged rivets around a door plug on the ill-fated 737 MAX jet no less than 50 times, The Wall Street Journal reports.
One internal message in Boeing’s Shipside Action Tracker (SAT) on Sept. 17, 2023, asked workers to escalate the repairs to “Tier 3,” indicating how critical the situation had become: “$$TIER-CHG: 2-3 $$.”
In the SAT logs, workers discussed wading through layers of paperwork and management to finally get the fix made on Sept. 20. In all, it took Boeing 18 days, 12 hours and nine minutes to fix the damaged rivets, as it struggled internally and wrangled with Spirit to replace the damaged rivets with sound ones.
Obviously, the fix was not made soundly.
The jet’s door plug blew off in mid flight at 16,000 feet shortly after takeoff on Jan. 5, 2024, sucking the cabin pressure…
