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The alphabet soup of U.S. government entities looking into Boeing just got a few more letters. Bloomberg reports that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has begun digging into statements made by the company about how it approaches safety in its manufacturing processes after a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines-operated 737 Max 9 in January. That agency joins the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).
A sampling of post-blowout Boeing safety statements, taken from the plane-maker’s dedicated page for updates on the matter:
- On January 6, the day after the incident, Boeing said in a statement that “safety is our top priority.”
- On January 15, the company said that it has “taken important steps in recent years to strengthen our Quality Management System’s (QMS) foundation and its layers of protection.”
- On January 15, the company also said, “we will cooperate fully and transparently with both as we work to restore trust with our regulator and our customers.”
- On January 23, the company said, “Boeing is an active participant in the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board investigation of Alaska Airlines flight 1282.”
Though the exact nature of the reported scrutiny is unclear — neither Boeing nor the SEC responded to a Bloomberg request for comment — regulators had already been calling the company out. In February, the FAA said that Boeing’s safety and quality safeguards were not as strong as it claimed. In March, the NTSB told members of the Senate to say that Boeing hadn’t been as forthcoming with documents and information as the regulator would have liked.
Boeing stock is flat in early Friday trading. It was flat Thursday after Bloomberg published its report. But it is down more than 30% for the year.