New whistleblower alleges structural flaws on Boeing jets
A Boeing quality engineer went public Tuesday with damaging allegations that the jet-maker took manufacturing shortcuts to increase production rates that leave potentially serious structural flaws on its 787 and 777 widebody planes.
The Boeing engineer, Sam Salehpour, alleged that almost 1,000 787s and about 400 777s currently flying are at risk of premature fatigue damage and structural failure.
On Jan. 19, lawyers for Salehpour wrote a letter detailing his allegations to Mike Whitaker, head of the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency said Tuesday it is investigating the claims.
“We thoroughly investigate all safety reports,” said FAA spokesperson Ian Gregor.
Salehpour will speak next week at a Senate hearing convened by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., “to examine Boeing’s broken safety culture, focusing on firsthand accounts.”
Boeing said it is in discussions and will cooperate with Blumenthal’s committee and has “offered to provide documents, testimony, and technical briefsaid ings.”
Salehpour spoke in a virtual news conference with his lawyers Tuesday. His lawyers said documents will be presented at the Senate hearing to substantiate his allegations.
Boeing, facing rising public alarm about safety issues, responded with a detailed rebuttal to the 787 allegations.
“We are fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner,” Boeing said. “These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate.”
Boeing said testing and analysis, shared with the FAA, has shown that the issues raised by Salehpour “do not present any safety concerns and the aircraft will maintain its service life over several decades.”
As for allegations about the 777, Boeing said: “We are fully confident in the safety and durability of the 777 family. These claims are inaccurate.”
Salehpour came to the U.S. from Iran in 1973 to go to college and said he has worked as an aerospace engineer for 40 years. At Boeing, he has worked since 2007 as a contractor and as a direct employee.
“I love this country. … And I love my work at Boeing and the opportunities that I have been given,” he at the news conference. “I’m doing this not because I want Boeing to fail, but because I want it to succeed and prevent crashes from happening.”
The alleged flaws in the 787 Dreamliners relate to the tiny gaps that are at the joins of the fuselage sections and Boeing initially found in 2020. The discovery led Boeing to largely halt deliveries for almost two years at a projected cost of $6.3 billion as it worked to correct the flaws.
In August 2022, the FAA approved the fix that Boeing had developed and allowed 787 deliveries to resume. The safety agency’s approval came after a deep investigation of Boeing’s manufacturing process.
“We didn’t approve the return to deliveries until we were convinced that Boeing’s corrective actions were effective,” the FAA’s Gregor said.
Furthermore, ever since deliveries resumed, the
FAA has been inspecting every 787 before issuing an Airworthiness Certificate, which allows the plane to be delivered to an airline.
Boeing said “we slowed production and stopped delivering 787s for nearly two years to take our time to get things right and ensure each met our exacting engineering specifications.”
Yet Salehpour said Tuesday the solution that Boeing developed hid rather than fixed the problem.
He said that early in the 787 program, from 2012 on, engineers allowed the fuselage sections to be pushed together during final assembly with excessive force before measuring for gaps, so as “to make it appear like the gaps didn’t exist.”
Even after the 2020 delivery stoppage this continued, he claims, based on his work on the program in 2021.
“I repeatedly produced reports for my supervisors and management based on Boeing’s own data demonstrating that the gaps in the 787 were not being properly measured,” Salehpour said.
As a result, he said, the small filler pieces of material used to fill gaps were in many cases not inserted.
As the carbon composite fuselage skin, metal fasteners and joint fittings expand and contract with temperature changes during a flight, such unfilled gaps would theoretically allow the joined sections to move slightly relative to one another.
Over time, this can cause excessive wear and cause premature failure of the structure, Salehpour said. “It can cause a catastrophic failure.”