The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday proposed fining Boeing $3.1 million for safety violations in the months leading up to the Alaska Airlines 737 MAX panel blowout on a Portland flight last year.

The regulator said it “identified hundreds of quality system violations” at the manufacturer’s Renton, Washington, factory and its supplier Spirit AeroSystems between September 2023 and February 2024.

That September, a fuselage made its way through Spirit’s Wichita, Kansas, factory, where workers construct the 737 MAX fuselages before shipping the structures to Boeing’s Renton plant for final assembly.

On Jan. 5, 2024, 171 passengers and six crew were onboard the plane built from that fuselage on a flight bound for Ontario, California. Six minutes after taking off from Portland In

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