Boeing's problems were as bad as you thought [View all]
Boeing went under the magnifying glass at not one, but two Senate hearings on April 17 examining allegations of deep-seated safety issues plaguing the once-revered plane manufacturer. Witnesses, including two whistleblowers, painted a disturbing picture of a company that cut corners, ignored problems, and threatened employees who spoke up.
The hearings were convened just four months after a door plug blew out of a Boeing-made Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight in January, sparking further concerns about a precipitous downslide in Boeing’s reputation for safety and quality in recent years. The first April 17 hearing, held by the Senate Commerce Committee, questioned aviation experts who put together an FAA report published in February. It concluded that the company had not made enough strides in improving its safety culture since the deadly 2018 and 2019 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people.
“There exists a disconnect, for lack of a better word, between the words that are being said by Boeing management and what is being seen and experienced by employees across the company,” said witness Javier de Luis, an aerospace engineer and lecturer at MIT.
The FAA report conducted hundreds of interviews with Boeing employees across the country, and the authors found staff often didn’t know how to report concerns or who to report them to. “In one of the surveys that we saw, 95 percent of the people who responded to the survey did not know who the chief of safety was,” said Tracy Dillinger, manager for safety culture and human factors at NASA.
The second hearing put the spotlight on two whistleblowers — Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour and former Boeing engineer Ed Pierson — alongside aviation safety advocate and former FAA engineer Joe Jacobsen and Ohio State University aviation professor Shawn Pruchnicki. The whistleblowers slammed Boeing for allegedly knowing about defective parts and other serious assembly problems, and choosing to ignore or even conceal them. Such problems could slow down production and be expensive to fix — and internal and external critics say that Boeing’s priority was maximizing its profits.
https://www.vox.com/money/2024/4/17/24133324/boeing-senate-hearings-whistleblower-sam-salehpour-congress
Yeah, I thought so.
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