Boeing whistleblowers testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday, alleging the aviation giant prioritized profits over safety and accusing it of discouraging employees from raising concerns about practices manufacturing of the company.
Sam Salehpour, a quality engineer at Boeing, said in a statement that Boeing’s focus on rapid production undermines its commitment to safety, saying executives are encouraged to overlook “significant defects” in Boeing’s planes. the company.
“Despite what Boeing officials say publicly, there is no safety culture at Boeing, and employees like me who speak out about defects in its production operations and lack of quality control are ignored, marginalized, threatened , sidelined and worse,” he told Boeing members. an investigative committee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Salehpour previously said he observed Boeing workers taking shortcuts when assembling its 787 Dreamliner. “Boeing took these shortcuts in its production processes, based on faulty engineering and an erroneous assessment of available data, which allowed the use of potentially defective parts and installations in 787 fleets,” he said during the hearing.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigate his allegations.
Salehpour also claimed that Boeing executives pressured him to stop expressing his concerns internally. “I was ignored, told not to create delays. I was told frankly to shut up,” he said Wednesday.
Salehpour said he was then reassigned to work on Boeing’s 777 program, where he claimed to have “literally seen people jumping on pieces of airplane to line them up.”
Another whistleblower, former Ed Pierson, engineer at Boeing, executive director of the Aviation Safety Foundation, also appeared at the Senate hearing. Pierson also expressed concerns that Boeing is ignoring safety issues.
“(T)he unsafe manufacturing conditions that led to the two 737 MAX disasters and the Alaska Airlines crash continue to exist, putting the public at risk,” Pierson said, referring to accidents involving aircraft Boeing in 2018 and 2019, as well as a January incident in which a the door stopper fell off an Alaska Airlines plane in mid-flight.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate subcommittee, and his top Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have requested documents from Boeing dating back six years. Blumenthal said at the start of the hearing that his panel planned to hold further hearings on the safety of Boeing’s planes and that he hoped Boeing CEO David Calhoun would appear for questioning.
Neither Calhoun nor any Boeing representatives attended Wednesday’s hearings. A Boeing spokesperson said the company was cooperating with lawmakers’ investigation and offered to provide documents and briefings.
Boeing denies Salehpour’s allegations and defends the safety of its planes, including the Dreamliner. Two Boeing technical officials said this week that years of design tests and aircraft inspections have found no signs of fatigue or cracking in the composite panels used in the 787.
“A 787 can operate safely for at least 30 years before requiring extensive airframe maintenance routines,” Boeing said in a statement. “Extensive and rigorous fuselage testing and extensive maintenance checks on nearly 700 aircraft in service to date have found no evidence of airframe fatigue.”
“Under the supervision of the FAA, we have thoroughly inspected and reworked aircraft and improved production quality to meet rigorous standards that are measured to hundredths of an inch,” the company added.
Boeing officials also rejected Salehpour’s claim that he saw factory workers jumping on fuselage sections of another of Boeing’s largest passenger planes, the 777, to bring them into line.
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Megan Cerullo
Grub5
