In February last year, a new Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 Max was on one of its first flights when an automatic stabilization system appeared to malfunction, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing shortly after takeoff.
Less than two months later, an Alaska Airlines 737 Max plane eight hours into the flight was briefly grounded while engineers fixed a problem with a fire detection system. And in November, an engine on a recently delivered United Airlines 737 Max failed at 37,000 feet.
Those incidents, which the airlines disclosed to the Federal Aviation Administration, were not widely reported. There was no indication that anyone was in danger and it was unclear who was ultimately responsible for these problems. But since Jan. 5, when a panel on a two-month-old Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 jet exploded in midair, incidents like these have taken on new resonance, raising further questions about the quality of the planes Boeing makes.
“There are a lot of areas where things don’t seem to come together right from the start,” said Joe Jacobsen, an engineer and aviation safety expert who spent more than a decade at Boeing and more than 25 years at the FAA
“The point is shortcuts are everywhere – we’re not doing the job right,” he added.
Such reports, and interviews with aviation safety experts and more than 22 current and former Boeing employees, paint a disturbing picture of a company long considered to be at the pinnacle of American engineering. They suggest Boeing is struggling to improve quality years after two Max 8 plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed nearly 350 people.
Some of the critical layers of layoffs that are supposed to ensure Boeing’s planes are safe appear to be overstretched, the people said. The experience level of Boeing’s workforce has fallen since the start of the pandemic. The inspection process meant to provide a vital check on the work done by its engineers has been weakened over the years. And some suppliers struggled to meet quality standards while producing parts at the rate Boeing wanted them.
Under pressure to show regulators, airlines and passengers that the company is taking its latest crisis seriously, Boeing announced sweeping leadership changes on Monday. The chief executive, Dave Calhoun, will leave at the end of the year, and Stan Deal, the head of the commercial jet division, which builds the 737 Max, has stepped down immediately. The company’s chairman, Larry Kellner, has resigned from that position and will not seek re-election to the board.
When he took the top job in January 2020, Mr. Calhoun said he was determined to improve the company’s safety culture. It added directors with engineering and safety expertise and created a safety committee on its board. Boeing said it had increased the number of quality inspectors for commercial airplanes by 20 percent from 2019 and that inspections per plane had also increased.
After the Max 8 crashes, Boeing and its regulators focused more on the cause of those accidents: faulty design and software. But some current and former employees say the build quality problems were also apparent to them at the time and should have been to executives and regulators.
After the Jan. 5 crash, a six-week FAA audit of Boeing’s 737 Max production found dozens of errors in Boeing’s quality control practices. The agency gave the company three months, or until about the end of May, to address quality control issues.
Federal officials traced the board explosion to Boeing’s factory in Renton, Washington, where the 737 Max is assembled. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the frame was removed but appeared to have been put back on without bolts securing it in place. This panel is known as a “door plug” and is used to fill the gap left by an unnecessary emergency exit.
Current and former Boeing employees said the incident reflected long-standing problems. Several said workers often faced intense pressure to meet production deadlines, sometimes leading to questionable practices they feared could compromise quality and safety.
Davin Fischer, a former engineer at Renton who also spoke to Seattle TV station KIRO 7, said he noticed a cultural shift that began around 2017, when the company introduced the Max.
“They were trying to get the plane going and then they just kept crunching and crunching and crunching to go faster, faster, faster,” he said.
The Max was introduced as a response to a new fuel-efficient plane from European manufacturer Airbus. Boeing has increased production from about 42 Max jets a month in early 2017 to about 52 next year. That rate collapsed to near zero soon after the second crash, in Ethiopia, when regulators around the world grounded the plane. Max flights resumed in late 2020 and the company began ramping up production again to avoid falling further behind Airbus.
Now, some Boeing executives are admitting they made mistakes.
“For years, we prioritized moving the plane through the factory over getting it right, and that has to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, told an investor conference last week.
Mr. Calhoun has also acknowledged that Boeing needs to improve, but defended the company’s approach to manufacturing. “Over the last several years, we’ve been very careful not to push the system too fast, and we’ve never hesitated to slow down, stop production or stop deliveries to take the time we need to get things right,” he said. he said in January.
Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respect the company and its employees and want Boeing to succeed.
A Washington State quality manager who left Boeing last year said workers assembling planes sometimes tried to install parts that hadn’t been recorded or inspected, an effort to save time by bypassing quality procedures meant to weed out defective or substandard parts.
In one instance, the employee said, a worker sent parts from a receiving area directly to the factory floor before a required inspection.
A worker currently at Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner factory in North Charleston, SC, described seeing several problems with the planes being assembled, including wires being routed incorrectly, increasing the risk of them rubbing against each other, resulting in damage.
Workers also sometimes went “inspector shopping” to find someone to approve the work, the worker said.
Some of the concerns echoed accusations of quality gaps from several whistleblowers at Boeing’s South Carolina plant who spoke to the Times in 2019.
Several current and former employees in South Carolina and Washington State said airplane engineers are sometimes allowed to sign their own work. Such “self-verification” removes a critical layer of quality control, they said.
Boeing said in a statement Wednesday that it had phased out self-inspections in South Carolina in 2021 and that the practice accounted for less than 10 percent of inspections elsewhere. The company inspects each plane before delivery to make sure wire harnesses are properly installed, the statement said, and does not allow inspector shopping.
Another factor at play in recent years has been that Boeing workers have less experience than before the pandemic.
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, air travel plummeted and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began cutting jobs and encouraged workers to buy out or take early retirement. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees across the company — including some with decades of experience.
At the end of 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in larger monthly pensions, which were linked to interest rates, according to the union that represents them, the Society of Professional Aerospace Engineers. More than 1,700 union members left the company that year, up from about 1,000 the year before. Departing members had been with the company for more than 23 years on average.
“We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise and we suggested some ways to deal with it, but the company blew us off,” said Ray Goforth, the union’s executive director, adding that he believed the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower paid architects engineers and technicians”.
Boeing now employs 171,000 people, including its commercial airplane, defense, service and other divisions. That number is up about 20 percent from the end of 2020. But many new workers are less experienced, current and former employees said.
A Boeing employee who ran quality checks in Washington State until last year said the company did not always provide new employees with adequate training, sometimes leaving them to learn critical skills from more experienced colleagues.
Boeing said that as of Jan. 5, workers requested more training and that it was working to meet those needs, including adding training at the plant this month.
District 751 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members has declined sharply in recent years. The percentage of its members with less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.
After the Jan. 5 incident, Boeing announced changes to improve quality, including adding inspections at its Renton plant and at the Wichita, Kan., plant owned by a supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the airframes of the planes. of planes Max.
Boeing recently said it would no longer accept Max bodies from Spirit that still needed substantial work. Previously it tolerated defects that could be fixed later to keep production on schedule.
Addressing its problems could take time for Boeing, aviation experts said, frustrating airlines that need new planes.
Some carriers recently said they were revising their expansion plans because they expected fewer planes from Boeing. Airlines may try to buy more from Airbus.
“They have to go slow to go fast,” Scott Kirby, chief executive of United Airlines, told investors this month, referring to Boeing. “I think they do that.”
