Boeing CEO Admits Mistakes in Senate Testimony

Facts

• Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dave Calhoun told the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations on Tuesday that the planemaker has a 'far from perfect' culture, but has taken action to improve 'transparency and accountability, while elevating employee engagement.'¹
• In addition, he apologized to families who lost their kin in two Boeing 737 Max fatal crashes years ago in Ethiopia and Indonesia and acknowledged the Alaska Airlines door plug incident in January was due to a manufacturing fault.²
• The hearing was the first time Calhoun faced lawmakers' questions under oath and put the spotlight on Boeing's safety concerns after the January mid-air blowout.³
• Previously, Boeing whistleblowers had told the Senate that the 737 Max, the 787 Dreamliner, and the 777 models had serious production problems, including claims that the company had lost track of defective parts.⁴
• These include Sam Mohawk, a quality insurance inspector for Boeing in Renton, Washington, who made more accusations just hours before Calhoun testified before the Senate.⁵
• Mohawk alleged that Boeing installed nonconforming parts in some planes after hiding them from the Federal Aviation Administration regulators, who had notified that an inspection would occur in its Renton plant.⁶

Sources: ¹CBS, ²New York Post, ³FOX News, ⁴BBC News, ⁵Daily Caller and ⁶CNN.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Democracy Journal. For years, there have been whistleblower leaks and government warnings about the safety of Boeing's planes — those concerns came to a head after a door plug blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight in January. Boeing's greed and fixation on profits led the company to cut corners on quality control and create a culture of intimidation. Numerous whistleblowers have spoken out against Boeing's reaction to safety hazard reports, but the company is more concerned with a culture of silence than safety.
• Narrative B, as provided by Wall Street Journal. While the 'profits-over-people claims' that media in the US has pushed to explain Boeing's safety problems may generate buzz, the idea that safety and shareholder returns are inversely related is entirely wrong. In fact, safety has enormously increased since the aviation industry was reorganized on competitive profit-and-loss lines in the 1970s. Boeing indeed has at least partial responsibility for recent incidents, and these problems will eventually be sorted out with training, repetition, standardization, and documentation.

Predictions