Given everything I've seen so far, I'd bet good money that what happened here was miscommunication between Spirit and Boeing. Spirit started out locking down th

Given everything I've seen so far, I'd bet good money that what happened here was miscommunication between Spirit and Boeing. Spirit started out locking down the plug, then Boeing asked them to just loosely attach it[1] so Boeing could yank the plug for interior/wiring/AC/paint, then someone at Boeing forgot about the "loosely". So now, they get in a hurry (maybe the AC/interior didn't need any access to work on, which makes sense for this MAX variant, it wouldn't need as many hatches to pull wire) and it went down the Renton line as if the plug was fully installed. It's enough to pass high blow inspection and other inspections, but then over time that "shipment config" attachment vibrated out, and pop goes the plug. Almost certainly systemic issue though, so that sucks. Sucks real bad. They need to get a Tiger Team or whatever together to look at everything with a shipment config, and make sure those "ship kits" don't leak into the real actual airplane configuration. This is . . ok, this is really manufacturing 101 stuff, but well, things happen. I'm in the industry, but haven't touched the MAX, so take this with a grain of salt. [1] Basically a "shipping" or train configuration