Boeing to increase quality inspections of 737 Max production

Boeing says there will be more quality inspections for its 737 Max aircraft after a fuselage panel broke off an Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight.

The US plane maker said that an outside party would be brought in to assess its production practices.

It will also check the work of the firm that supplies and installs the parts involved in the accident.

Last week, US regulator extended the grounding of 737 Max's with similar fuselage panels.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also said it would conduct an audit of the plane's production line, adding it believed there were "significant problems" with the 737 Max 9 jet as well as "other manufacturing problems".

Announcing the latest measures, Boeing commercial airplanes president and CEO Stan Deal said the company was "not where we need to be".

Following the grounding of the planes, Mr Deal said Boeing had been working with the five airlines affected to "bolster quality assurance and controls" in 737 production.

The plane maker is also deploying a team to check the work of the company Spirit AeroSystems, which supplies and installs the parts that were involved in the incident.

"We are planning additional inspections throughout the build process at Boeing and at Spirit," Mr Deal said.

"These checks will provide one more layer of scrutiny on top of the thousands of inspections performed today across each 737 airplane."

Scrutiny of Boeing has been renewed after the blowout on the Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon to California, which forced an emergency landing but resulted in no serious injuries.

The US aerospace giant has been struggling to restore confidence after crashes in 2018 and 2019 involving a different plane in the 737 Max group killed 346 people.

Poor design of a piece of its flight control system was found to play a role in those crashes, and authorities grounded its popular 737 Max planes globally for more than 18 months. Lax oversight by the FAA was also faulted.