The support from Boeing was more haphazard. In the 1970s and 1980s, it had stationed people at maintenance hangars, too, so they could watch over what airlines were doing with their planes and offer advice, according to John Goglia, a mechanic at United and USAir for thirty years who was an NTSB board member from 1995 to 2004. More recently, he said, Boeing had relied on field service representatives covering multiple airlines, often stretched thin across thousands of miles. “It just faded away over time—there’s a Boeing rep around there someplace, but you have to call,” he said.
