Boeing Whistleblower Testifies Before US Senate

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Facts

• Boeing whistleblower Sam Salehpour told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations on Wednesday that the company has produced defective airplanes, with gaps much wider than what its own standards allow.¹
• According to the quality engineer at Boeing, the planemaker has sped up the production of its 787 and 777 aircraft and ignored safety standards. On Monday, Boeing challenged these allegations.²
• Salehpour further claimed to be isolated and threatened for flagging safety concerns, adding that he is scared but at peace. Last month, another whistleblower, John Barnett, was found dead in an apparent suicide.³
• Meanwhile, the Senate Commerce Committee heard from an expert panel that found serious issues in Boeing's safety culture — including that personnel who raise concerns could be subject to retaliation.⁴
• NASA's Tracy Dillinger said that Boeing employee surveys show that 95% of the respondents had no idea who their safety chief officer was, with Javier de Luis of the Massachusetts Institution of Technology adding that the self-certification program may have gone too far.⁵
• These hearings come as several safety incidents with Boeing planes have been reported in recent months, most notably a midflight door-plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max aircraft in January.⁶

Sources: ¹CNN, ²FOX News, ³The Hill, ⁴Associated Press, ⁵Politico and ⁶Independent.

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 created a culture of intimidation. Numerous whistleblowers have spoken out against Boeing's reaction to safety hazard reports, but the company is clearly more concerned with a culture of silence than it is with 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 be appealing, the very 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 in recent incidents, these problems will be eventually sorted out with training, repetition, standardization, and documentation.

Predictions