Boeing & Aerospace

Boeing whistleblowers describe ‘criminal cover-

up,’ safety risks to Senate
April 17, 2024 at 12:23 pm | Updated April 17, 2024 at 5:13 pm

 1 of 3 | Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour, left,

meets with Sen. Richard Blumenthal,... (Kevin Wolf / The
Associated Press) More 

By Dominic Gates
Seattle Times aerospace reporter

This year’s nonstop public flaying of

Boeing continued in two separate U.S.
Senate hearings Wednesday as
Congress responded to public alarm
over the jet-maker’s broken safety
culture.

In sworn testimony before a Homeland

Security and Governmental Affairs
 subcommittee, Boeing engineer Sam
Salehpour reiterated his accusation
that Boeing has hidden safety risks on
the 787 Dreamliner and the 777
widebody jets, rejecting the account
Boeing offered Monday in an effort to
reassure the public.

He provided a trove of Boeing

documents to the subcommittee.
These included his own internal
technical presentations, data and
emails detailing for managers how the gaps at major joins of the 787 fuselage
sections exceeded specification.

“Boeing hid problems, pushing pieces together with excessive force to make it
appear that the gaps don’t exist,” Salehpour testified. “They are putting out
defective airplanes.”

He also provided presentations by other engineers on the difficulties

mechanics encountered assembling the 777 fuselages because parts didn’t
align.

“Boeing manufacturing used unmeasured and unlimited amount of force to

correct the misalignment,” Salehpour said. “I literally saw people jumping on
the pieces of the airplane to get them to align.”

During the same hearing, former Boeing manager Ed Pierson accused the
company of a “criminal cover-up” in the government’s investigation of the
fuselage panel blowout aboard a Boeing 737 MAX on Alaska Airlines Flight
1282 in January.

He oversaw the MAX assembly line in Renton until shortly before the first of
two deadly crashes and had complained to senior management then that the
pace of production was unsafe.

“The world is shocked to learn about Boeing’s current production quality

 issues,” said Pierson. “I’m not surprised because nothing changed after the
two crashes. There was no accountability.”

A bipartisan group of senators piled on criticism of Boeing during the hearing

before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which coincided with
a separate hearing on safety issues at Boeing before the Senate commerce
committee.

“Boeing is at a moment of reckoning. It’s a moment many years in the

making,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who chaired the
subcommittee hearing, calling the testimony “serious, even shocking.”

“There are mounting serious allegations that Boeing has a broken safety
culture and a set of practices that are unacceptable,” he said.

The ranking Republican member on the committee, Wisconsin Sen. Ron

Johnson, joined the chorus of Boeing criticism, even after noting that air
travel has the best safety record of any form of transportation.

“It’s what I keep telling myself when I go on an airplane. And even when I hop
on a 737 MAX,” Johnson said. “But I have to admit, this testimony is more
than troubling.”

Blumenthal said the committee will call further follow-up hearings and
wants testimony from both the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing,
including Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun.

And he said he wants the Department of Justice to reopen the deferred

prosecution agreement that in early 2021 settled its case against Boeing over
the two deadly 737 MAX crashes with a minimal fine and no criminal charges
against the company or top executives.

Blumenthal said the DOJ should consider the evidence his committee has
gathered and examine “whether conditions of that agreement have been
violated, whether criminal prosecution is appropriate.”

The Senate scrutiny reflected the collapse of public trust in Boeing and the
fierce backlash since the alarming Alaska in-flight incident.
 More on Alaska Airlines and the Boeing 737 MAX 9
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Dish soap to help build planes? Boeing signs off on supplier Spirit AeroSystem’s method
Boeing pays Alaska Airlines $160 million in compensation for blowout

After midair blowout, passengers want Boeing and Alaska Air to ‘notice’ them
Alaska Airlines blames Boeing for blowout, wants out of passenger lawsuit
More on the Boeing 737 MAX

In a statement responding to the allegations, Boeing insisted again

Wednesday it is “fully confident in the safety” of both the 787 and the 777.

Since the 787 entered service 13 years ago, it has safely transported more than
850 million passengers on more than 4.2 million flights, Boeing said. It
rejected Salehpour’s allegation that over years of flying the fuselage gaps
might cause premature damage to the airframe, known as “fatigue.”

“A 787 can safely operate for at least 30 years before needing expanded
airframe maintenance routines,” Boeing said. “Extensive and rigorous testing
of the fuselage and heavy maintenance checks of nearly 700 in-service
airplanes to date have found zero evidence of airframe fatigue.”

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, speaking Wednesday on CNBC after the
airline reported its first quarter earnings, backed Boeing’s assurances on the
787.

“There are thousands of these airplanes, they have been flying for decades
and millions of flight hours,” Kirby said. “I am totally confident the 787 is a
safe airplane.”

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this”

Boeing quality engineer and whistleblower Salehpour repeated his assertions
 last week that 787 Dreamliners are at risk of long-term structural failure due
to the gaps at the major fuselage joins.

Although his analysis is that there is a risk those joins might separate and the
plane could “fall apart” only after many years of service, Salehpour went
further Tuesday in an interview with ABC News and said Boeing should
ground the entire fleet of about 1,000 Dreamliners and halt production.

Boeing on Monday provided journalists detailed briefings and a tour of the

787 assembly facilities in North Charleston, S.C., in an effort to allay public
worries.

Salehpour rejected Boeing’s defense, saying management has concealed the

safety threat.

He repeated his allegation last week that a thorough inspection of 29 of the

787 airplanes “found gaps exceeding the specification that were not properly
addressed 98.7% of the time” and that drilling debris “ended up in the gaps
80% of the time.”

“I have analyzed Boeing’s own data to conclude that the company has taken
manufacturing shortcuts on the 787 program that may significantly reduce
the airplane safety,” Salehpour testified.

Boeing on Monday had specifically rebutted Salehpour’s first claim, saying

the sample size was 26 airplanes and that the data showed exactly the
opposite result: that nearly 99% of the gaps were “fully conforming” and less
than the required specification.

Steve Chisholm, chief engineer for Boeing mechanical and structural

engineering, denied the claim about debris in the gaps and added that tests
showed even if there was debris, it is “not detrimental.”

Salehpour said he took his concerns directly to the other engineering leader
who presented Boeing’s case on Monday in South Carolina: Lisa Fahl,
Boeing’s vice president of airplane programs engineering.

He said she promised to get back to him with data that would allay his fears,
 but never did so. “I have not seen any information whatsoever,” said
Salehpour.

Instead of providing answers, Salehpour said Boeing managers retaliated

against him.

“I was sidelined. I was told to shut up. I received physical threats,” he said.

He said the physical threat came when his boss on the 777 program told him
“I would have killed someone who said what you said in the meeting.”

Blumenthal even showed a photo of a bolt driven through the tire of

Salehpour’s car, though Salehpour acknowledged he has “no proof”
colleagues spiked the tire.

Pierson, the former Boeing manager, described a culture of ignoring safety

risks at Boeing and failed oversight by both the National Transportation
Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration that he said has led to
a litany of system failures aboard U.S. airline jets, though nothing yet with
catastrophic consequences.

Pierson first raised safety concerns about manufacturing of the 737 MAX
before the first deadly MAX crash in Indonesia in 2018.

And although the primary cause of both that crash and the one that followed
just over four months later in Ethiopia was an engineering design error in
critical flight control software, Pierson insists manufacturing errors
contributed to it and that the MAX is still unsafe.

At the hearing, Pierson criticized both the NTSB and the FAA of being “overly
dependent on Boeing” and lacking independence.

And he raised the stakes by accusing Boeing of criminally hiding evidence by

failing to produce documentation on the work to install the fuselage panel
that blew off the Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5.
 Alaska Airlines and Boeing face a potential class-action lawsuit brought by passengers aboard Alaska Flight 1282. In
a press conference announcing the amendments, passengers Suzannah Anderson and Garet Cunningham described
facing "the end" during the 25-minute flight. (Ramon Dompor / The Seattle Times)

Boeing has said there are no records that identify who removed and
incorrectly reinstalled that fuselage panel in September.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” Pierson said. “This is a criminal cover-up.
Records do in fact exist. I know this because I’ve personally passed them to
the FBI.”

Pierson is referring to the Shipside Action Tracker, or SAT, data, which is a

series of entries in an informal computer database at the MAX assembly plant
in Renton used to track problems during assembly and their resolution.

That documentation does exist and Boeing has provided it to the NTSB, the
safety agency charged with investigating the incident, NTSB chair Jennifer
Homendy confirmed Wednesday to aviation trade magazine Flight Global.

The SAT document shows it was Boeing mechanics who opened and then
incorrectly reinstalled the panel — a door plug used to fill a hole where some
 airlines choose to have an extra emergency door installed.

The Seattle Times obtained a copy of the page in the SAT record that contains
the entries for the days when the panel was removed and reinstalled and the
work item closed out.

However, the document does not identify the individuals who did the work.
The employees named in the record are “manufacturing representatives” in
the factory who simply log the entries to track the progression of the work.

Their role is as the liaison between the mechanics who do the work and the
managers who assign the work.

So the document Pierson has given the FBI doesn’t directly contradict
Boeing’s assertion that there is no documentation identifying who did the
work.

“I believe the whistleblower has the Shipside Tracker, which we already have,
[and] is not the documents we are looking for,” Homendy told Flight Global.
“We’re looking for other documents that don’t exist.”

In any case, it remains problematic and mystifying that Boeing cannot

identify those individuals from its team in Renton.

Pierson last year created an organization called the Foundation for Aviation
Safety that focuses on safety of the 737 MAX.

Joe Jacobsen, a retired FAA safety engineer and whistleblower, now a

consultant for the foundation, also testified Wednesday, ticking off a long list
of 737 MAX systems issues the FAA has identified as unsafe and requiring a
fix from Boeing.

He cited the engine anti-ice system, exhaust duct fasteners, compromised

sealant adhesion within the fuel tank, loose bolts in the rudder assembly,
stuck rudder pedals, and misinstalled electrical wire bundles in the wing.

Pierson’s foundation also compiled an exhaustive list of in-flight issues

reported by airlines on MAX jets in service.
 In his testimony Wednesday, Pierson drew attention in particular to more
than 1,200 instances of MAX system malfunctions on Alaska Airlines flights.

Last September, several independent safety experts asked by The Seattle

Times to examine about a dozen of what Pierson described as the most-
egregious of those incidents concluded all were routine maintenance issues
and not real safety risks.

Furthermore, Jason Lai, the Alaska Airlines managing director of

engineering, that month said Alaska had at that time zero reports of serious
incidents on the MAX.

Of course, that was before the door plug blew out on Flight 1282 in January.

Wednesday’s hearing continues the run of public relations shocks to Boeing,

fueled now by testimony from insiders.

At this point, Boeing’s three most important current jets — the 737, 777 and
787 — are under public attack, accused of being a safety risk. Those aircraft
are flying thousands of flights every day.

The resolution of the glaring disparity in the safety risk judgments between
Boeing and the whistleblowers may now rest — despite Pierson’s reservations
about the FAA’s independence — upon that safety regulator’s technical
assessment of Salehpour’s data and Boeing’s response.

It was an FAA threat in June 2020 to mandate action over the fuselage gaps
that forced Boeing to halt deliveries of the 787 for nearly two years, a step that
Boeing says cost it $6.3 billion.

And it was the FAA in August 2022 that judged Boeing had control of the
problem and it was safe to allow 787 deliveries to resume.

“We thoroughly investigate all reports,” the FAA said in a statement.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com; Dominic Gates is

a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.
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