Witnesses to brief federal safety commission on Boeing 737 Max plane explosion earlier this year

“The NTSB wants to fill in the gaps in what is known about this incident and give people the facts,” said John Goglia, a former NTSB member. The agency will seek to highlight Boeing’s failure to follow the procedure it told the Federal Aviation Administration it intended to use in such cases, he said.

The safety board will not establish probable cause after the hearing. That could take another year or more. It calls the unusually long hearing a fact-finding phase.

Scheduled witnesses include Elizabeth Lund, who has been senior vice president of quality at Boeing since February — a new position — and representatives from Spirit AeroSystems, which makes fuselages for the Max planes.

Spirit installed a door plug — a panel that fills the space created on some planes for an extra exit — on an Alaska Airlines flight, but the panel was removed and the screws removed at Boeing’s factory near Seattle to repair the rivets.

The NTSB hearing agenda includes testimony about manufacturing and inspections, opening and closing doors at the Boeing plant, safety systems at Boeing and Spirit, and FAA oversight of Boeing.

FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker acknowledged that his agency’s oversight of the company “was too inactive—too focused on paperwork audits and not enough on inspections.” That, he said, is changing.

The plane in question was delivered to Alaska Airlines in late October and has only flown about 150 times. The airline stopped using the plane on Hawaiian flights after a warning light came on on three different flights, indicating a possible pressurization problem.

Flight 1282 crashed minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, at an altitude of 16,000 feet (4,800 meters). Oxygen masks fell during a rapid decompression, several cell phones and other items were blown through a hole in the plane, passengers were terrified by wind and roaring noise, but miraculously no one was injured.

The pilots landed safely in Portland. The cork in the door was found in the yard of a science teacher at a high school in Cedar Hills, Oregon.

No one from the airline was called to testify before the NTSB this week. Goglia, the former safety board member, said that indicates the agency has determined “that Alaska doesn’t have dirty hands in this.”

But tensions between the NTSB and Boeing remain high. Two months after the accident, board chairwoman Jennifer Homendy and Boeing engaged in a public spat over whether the company cooperated with investigators.

The conflict had largely been defused, but in June a Boeing executive angered the board by discussing the investigation with reporters and — worse, in the agency’s view — suggesting the NTSB was interested in finding someone to blame for the incident.

NTSB officials see their role as identifying the causes of accidents to prevent similar ones in the future. They are not prosecutors, and they fear that witnesses will not come forward if they believe the NTSB is looking for perpetrators.

As a result, the NTSB issued a subpoena to Boeing representatives, depriving the company of its customary right to ask questions at the hearing.

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

The FBI told passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight they could be victims of a crime. The Justice Department pressed Boeing to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud after finding it had failed to honor an earlier settlement related to regulatory approval of the Max.

Boeing, which has yet to recover financially from two deadly Max plane crashes in 2018 and 2019, has lost more than $25 billion since the start of 2019. The company will get its third CEO in 4 1/2 years later.

Testimony given during NTSB hearings is not admissible in court, but lawyers suing Boeing over this and other accidents will be watching the case closely, knowing they could request witness testimony that covers the same issues.

“Our cases are already solid — the corks in the door shouldn’t have gone off in mid-flight,” said one of those lawyers, Mark Lindquist of Seattle. “But our cases get even stronger if the shooting was the result of habitually sloppy practices. Will juries find that to be negligence or worse?”