The NTSB displays the 5-foot-long fuselage skin section taken from the Southwest Airlines accident aircraft on Tuesday. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty)

Boeing Co. said Tuesday that its engineering and safety experts were caught off guard by Friday’s rupture in the fuselage of a midair Southwest Airlines Co. jet, failing to anticipate the risks of such an incident “until much, much later” in the aircraft’s life.

In an attempt to explain what went wrong, including technical missteps by Boeing, a senior company engineer laid out some of the decisions and analyses by the aerospace giant that unwittingly set the stage for the five-foot tear in the aluminum skin of the 15-year-old Boeing 737 aircraft. The tear led to the rapid decompression of the passenger cabin while the plane was cruising at 36,000 feet, but no one was seriously injured. Get the full story »