Boeing put under Senate scrutiny during back-toback hearings on aircraft maker’s safety culture
United Airlines to defer some new planes due to U.S. safety review
An engineer at Boeing said Wednesday that the aircraft company, in rushing to produce as many planes as possible, is taking manufacturing shortcuts that could lead to jetliners breaking apart.
“They are putting out defective airplanes,” the engineer, Sam Salehpour, told members of a Senate subcommittee.
Salehpour was testifying about Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, hundreds of which are in use by airlines, mostly on international routes. He spoke while another Senate committee held a separate hearing on the safety culture at Boeing.
The dual hearings were a sign of the intense pressure on Boeing since a door-plug panel blew off a 737 Max jetliner during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. The company is under multiple investigations, and the FBI has told passengers from the flight that they might be victims of a crime. Regulators limited Boeing’s rate of aircraft production, and even minor incidents involving its planes attract news coverage.
Salehpour alleged that workers at a Boeing factory used excessive force to jam together sections of fuselage on the Dreamliner. The extra force could compromise the carbon-composite material used for the plane’s frame, he said.
The engineer said he studied Boeing’s own data and concluded “that the company is taking manufacturing shortcuts on the 787 program that could significantly reduce the airplane’s safety and the life cycle.”
Salehpour said that when
he raised concern about the matter, his boss asked whether he was “in or out” — part of the team, or not. “‘Are you going to just shut up?’ ... that’s how i interpreted it,” he said.
The hearing of the investigations subcommittee marked the first time Salehpour has described his concern about the 787 and another plane, the Boeing 777, in public. Senators said they were shocked and appalled by the information. Democrats and Republicans alike expressed their dismay with the iconic American aircraft manufacturer.
The company says claims about the Dreamliner’s structural integrity are false. Two Boeing engineering executives said this week that in both design testing and inspections of planes — some of them 12 years old — there were no findings of fatigue or cracking in the composite
panels. They suggested that the material, formed from carbon fibers and resin, is nearly impervious to fatigue, which is a constant worry with conventional aluminum fuselages.
The Boeing officials also dismissed another of Salehpour’s allegations: that he saw factory workers jumping on sections of fuselage on another one of Boeing’s largest passenger planes, the 777, to make them align.
Separately on Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee heard testimony from members of an expert panel that found serious flaws in Boeing’s safety culture.
One of the panel members, MIT aeronautics lecturer Javier de Luis, said employees hear Boeing leadership talk about safety, but workers feel pressure to push planes through the factory as fast as they can.
United Airlines Holdings Inc. has put off delivery of at least three Boeing Co. Max 9 aircraft due to limits placed on its operations while federal aviation regulators carry out a safety evaluation at the carrier.
The deferrals mark the second example of how United is being constrained by a Federal Aviation Administration review that began in late March following a series of headline-grabbing safety incidents. The mishaps included an aircraft running off a Houston runway and a wheel falling off another plane just after takeoff. Airline safety throughout the US has been under heightened scrutiny since a fuselage panel broke off an Alaska Airlines flight Jan. 5.
Bloomberg reported last month that regulators were weighing a clampdown on United’s ability to grow, including restricting new routes and barring it from flying paying customers on newly delivered aircraft.
United earlier this month had to delay two new routes set to start this summer because they — like the aircraft — could not be added during the FAA’S evaluation. The agency has previously confirmed its increased oversight would delay some activities at the carrier.