Pressure on Boeing grows as Buttigieg says the company needs to cooperate with investigations

With Boeing facing multiple government investigations, the company needs to make “a serious transformation” around its safety and manufacturing quality, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Monday. The comments came one day after Buttigieg said the aircraft builder is under “enormous” scrutiny by his department since a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max jetliner in midlfight. Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation into the Jan. 5 blowout on an Alaska Airlines jet. That followed the company’s admission that it couldn’t find records that the NTSB sought for work done on the panel at a Boeing factory. The FAA, part of Buttigieg’s department, is also investigating Boeing. “Obviously we respect the independence of DOJ (the Department of Justice) and NTSB (the National Transportation Safety Board) doing their own work,” Buttigieg told reporters Monday, “but we are not neutral on the question of whether Boeing should fully cooperate with any entity — NTSB, us, or DOJ. They should, and we expect them to.” Buttigieg said Boeing must “go through a serious transformation here in terms of their responsiveness, their culture and their quality issues.” <br/>