The Department of Labor and Industries has fined four Boeing suppliers for safety violations related to a fatal accident last year. The largest fine, $11,000, was levied against Jamco America.
The state Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) has fined four Boeing suppliers for safety violations related to a fatal accident at the Everett jet assembly plant last year.
The largest fine, $11,000, was levied against Jamco America.
Jamco and Vartan Aviation, the companies directly involved in the deadly incident, were each cited for serious safety violations.
Jamco, a subsidiary of a Japanese company, supplies Boeing with aircraft interiors. Vartan is a German interiors-assembly firm.
Because of safety shortcomings revealed in follow-up inspections, L&I also cited and fined two other aircraft seat suppliers, Zodiac Seats and B/E Aerospace.
Ken Otto, a technician for Jamco, died in December more than three weeks after an air-bag inflater inside a passenger seat belt discharged during installation and hit Otto violently in the face.
A second worker, a Vartan technician who was not named, was injured in the incident, taken to a hospital and later released.
Jamco was cited because it “did not develop an energy control procedure to protect employees servicing equipment from potentially hazardous energy.”
Vartan was cited for not “informing the mechanic to not expose himself to the potential hazardous pneumatic energy that could be released from servicing an aircraft seat airbag system being serviced by another company’s employee.”
L&I inspections of safety procedures in Everett later found that both B/E Aerospace and Zodiac also “did not develop an energy control program to protect employees servicing equipment from potentially hazardous energy.”
Air bags, a safety device common in cars, are installed on relatively few airliner seats.
They are typically found in the lap belts of business-class seats that don’t have a seat directly in front but are angled to face an aisle, or in seats that face a bulkhead wall or some other hard surface.
If a plane crashes, sensors in the air bag cause it to deploy upward and away from the lap belt, filling the space in front of the passenger to cushion the head and neck.
At the time of the accident, Boeing stressed that the injuries “were not related to air bag deployment, as would occur during passenger flight, but rather were related to the discharge of the inflater while the system was partially disassembled” during seat installation.
Jamco and Zodiac are instructed in the L&I citations to fix the shortcomings in their safety procedures within the next month.
Vartan and B/E Aerospace have already corrected their violations, according to the documents.
The fines for the other companies are: Zodiac $1,200; B/E Aerospace $700; and Vartan $200.
L&I spokesman Tim Church said the fines are set by law in a formula that takes into account factors including the size of each company, its safety history and the level of cooperation with the investigation.
“The law does not give us leeway to consider the death as part of the amount of the fine,” Church said.
Ken Otto’s younger brother Jerry said Friday that the family is pursuing its own possible legal action in the interests of Ken’s 16-year-old son.
A Boeing spokesman said the jetmaker had no comment on the citations. None of the four companies cited responded to requests for comment by press time.
Original article can be found here: http://www.seattletimes.com
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