“I wanted to personally thank and congratulate this teammate for doing the right thing,” Scott Stocker, who leads the 787 manufacturing program, said in an April 29 internal memo.
“It’s critical that each of us speak up when we see something that doesn’t seem right or needs attention,” Stocker said in his memo, obtained by Business Insider.
On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating whether Boeing employees falsified safety records for the 787. Boeing, the FAA said in its statement, voluntarily informed regulators of the error.
A Boeing spokesperson told BI’s Matthew Loh on Tuesday that they had informed the FAA and that the outage would not pose “an immediate flight safety concern for the in-service fleet.”
“We will use this moment to celebrate it and to remind ourselves of the type of behavior we will and will not accept as a team,” Stocker said of the employee who spotted the problem.
Stocker’s praise comes at a tense time for Boeing. The company is now under close scrutiny following repeated quality assurance failures in recent years.
In January, a door plug on a Boeing 737 Max 9 exploded in mid-flight, prompting the FAA to order the grounding of more than 170 of the planes.
“In the short term, yes, we are facing difficult times,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in a letter to his employees last month. “But safety and quality must and will come first.”
Two Boeing whistleblowers have also died suddenly in the past two months.
In March, former Boeing executive John Barnett died a few days after starting to give an official ceremony deposition against the company.
The Charleston County Coroner’s Office told BI in a statement that Barnett, 62, died of “what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” No further details were provided.
And last month, a former quality auditor for Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems died after a sudden illness.
The late Joshua Dean testified against Spirit in a shareholder lawsuit last year. Dean, 45, accused the company of poor quality control in the production of Boeing’s 737 Max.
Boeing representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside of normal business hours.
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