Necessary readjustment

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:… Boeing in the hot seat.

Last week, a Senate subcommittee heard testimony from airplane safety experts and whistleblowers who say Boeing puts profits over safety.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: In recent years, two 737 Max jets crashed after a flight system malfunctioned, and the planes nose-dived.

Boeing grounded its entire fleet, promising to change how it does things to prevent similar accidents in the future.

BROWN: Tuesday’s hearing wasn’t about those crashes. It was about incidents from this year, such as when a door plug blew off of a plane during an Alaska Airlines flight or when a wheel fell off another plane during takeoff.

REICHARD: Should you be worried about getting on your next flight? WORLD Radio’s Mary Muncy has the story.

MARY MUNCY: Sam Salehpour is a Boeing quality engineer on the 777 aircraft. He says Boeing redesigned the fuselage of the plane a few years before he joined the team in 2022, but they didn’t take into account how the rest of the parts would fit together.

SAM SALEHPOUR: I witnessed severe misalignment when the planes were assembled.

Salehpour told lawmakers that instead of stopping to redesign the parts, the manufacturers allegedly went outside of standard procedures to force the pieces into place.

SALEHPOUR: I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align. I call it the Tarzan effect.

When he tried passing his concerns up the corporate ladder, Salehpour claims he was discouraged from talking about it.

And Salehpour isn’t alone.

The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging Boeing retaliated against its engineers.

SALEHPOUR: The attitude at Boeing from the highest level is just to push the defective parts, regardless of what it is, unfortunately.

A panel of experts appointed by the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, found similar results. Last week the panel told a different Senate Committee that Boeing has been valuing production over safety.

When I asked Boeing about the hearings, they declined to comment and pointed me to information on the quality of their planes.

So how did a company known for the safety and quality of their aircraft end up under the microscope?

JOHN COX: I'm Captain John Cox, I'm the CEO of safety operating systems.

Cox testified before Congress in 2019, shortly after the 737 Max crashes. He says Boeing rushed the plane to market to keep up with its competitor, Airbus, a move it wouldn’t have made earlier in its history.

COX: The culture at Boeing shifted from the 80s and 90s, where it was build the best airplane possible… but when it came to the after the McDonnell Douglas merger, the focus became more on shareholder value.

Cox says Boeing’s 1997 merger with the McDonnell Douglas company led to funding cuts for research and certification on some planes. Boeing also started outsourcing a lot of its manufacturing.

In 2005, Boeing sold its Wichita manufacturing plant. The hub became Spirit Aerosystems. That’s the organization allegedly responsible for installing the door plug that blew off during the Alaska Airlines flight in January. That’s what an initial report from the National Transportation Safety Board said.

But Spirit Aerosystems communications director Joe Buccino told me the panel was removed and put back incorrectly at a different Boeing facility further down the supply chain.

JOE BUCCINO: We've had problems at Spirit. But we maintain a culture of quality management, a culture of safety. And for us, it's just it's always been about providing the best quality product for our customers.

Buccino says right now, Boeing is in talks with Spirit to potentially buy the company back. He says that could solve some issues related to the travel work program—where a plane is shipped around the country to have different pieces put on.

BUCCINO: That travel group work program does introduce risk, because you've got different crews, different companies working on the plane at different times, different spots. And so here, we would drive down that risk. So it allows one company greater control over the entire process.

For now, the FAA has increased its scrutiny and capped how many airplanes Boeing can produce in a month. Boeing says it’s taking the quality control concerns seriously.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board flying is still one of the safest modes of transportation. Despite recent incidents, the organization reports that accidents have dropped in the last 15 years. Here’s Cox again.

COX: The allegations of these airplanes are leaving in large number that are inherently unsafe to fly, the statistics just don't show that—history just doesn't show that.

Cox is more concerned about how slowing down Boeing’s assembly lines, coupled with other supply chain problems, could affect airlines trying to grow their fleets.

COX: That can clearly affect flights that were planned for, let's just say the holiday season of 2024. If they don't have the airframes, those flights won't happen.

Cox says that while Boeing may be having issues, industry statistics show that safety checks from the FAA and other government agencies are catching errors.

COX: Can we do better? Yes. Are we striving to do better? Absolutely, that never stops in aviation. But as far as the safety of the airplanes, I'm getting on an airplane on Thursday, and it could very well be a Boeing product—So and I do that without hesitation.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.