The FAA said it was investigating Boeing after some required inspections of the 787 Dreamliner were not carried out as planned. The Dreamliners are shown in production at Boeing’s manufacturing plant in North Charleston, South Carolina.
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The FAA said it was investigating Boeing after some required inspections of the 787 Dreamliner were not carried out as planned. The Dreamliners are shown in production at Boeing’s manufacturing plant in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images
The Federal Aviation Administration said it has opened an investigation into Boeing over inspections of the 787 Dreamliner that “may not be complete.”
The FAA said Monday that Boeing “voluntarily informed us in April” that the plane’s manufacturer may not have performed required inspections to confirm that there was adequate bonding and grounding to where the wings join the carbon fiber fuselage on some 787s.
In a statement to NPR, the FAA said it was also investigating “whether Boeing completed inspections and whether company employees may have falsified the aircraft’s records.” The agency also said Boeing was reinspecting “all 787 aircraft still in production and must also create a plan to care for the in-service fleet.”
The FAA previously announced it was stepping up oversight of Boeing and the 787 Dreamliner after discovering production defects in the wide-body plane in 2022.
Boeing told NPR that it “promptly informed the FAA and this was not an immediate flight safety issue.” Boeing provided an internal email April 29 to NPR written by Scott Stocker, who leads the 787 program. It was sent to Boeing employees in South Carolina, where the 787 is manufactured.
Stocker wrote that an employee “saw something in our factory that he thought was not done well, and spoke up about it.” The issue was raised with the management team who informed the FAA. “After receiving the report, we quickly looked into the matter and learned that several individuals had violated company policies by not performing a required test but recording the work as completed.”
Boeing says it is taking “prompt and serious corrective action with several teammates.”
In March, a former Boeing quality control manager who became a whistleblower about 787 Dreamliner safety problems was found dead in a vehicle after an apparently self-inflicted gunshot. John Barnett had testified in a deposition the day before regarding a series of problems he said he identified at the Boeing plant in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Boeing is facing new scrutiny for production and quality control lapses after a door jam caused a 737 Max 9 to blow up in flight in January. After this incident, the FAA blamed Boeing for “multiple instances” of quality control defects in the production of the 737 Max. Boeing is still reeling from the crashes of two 737 Max jets that killed a total of 346 people in 2018 and 2019. Faulty flight software was blamed for both crashes.
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