Boeing hearings

What we learned from a day of Boeing hearings

Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington pledged a bill responding to the latest Boeing safety mess by year’s end.

By ORIANA PAWLYK and JAMES BIKALES

Two Senate panels looking into safety lapses at Boeing revealed more shocking allegations Wednesday about problems at the planemaker and fresh questions about the Federal Aviation Administration’s capacity to oversee it.

But the dueling hearings produced no suggestions from lawmakers for quick solutions. The chair of the Senate committee that oversees aviation says she wants to act fast with a fresh bill — but doing anything quickly in a Congress mired in disagreement is a tall order.

One hearing included testimony from whistleblowers who said bosses at Boeing had threatened them for calling attention to shoddy safety practices, with one saying the company also sought to cover up information about the flaws.

Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour described a company culture of putting production over safety — which he said included practices such as trying to make parts fit together by jumping on them, which he called the “Tarzan effect.” But the part of his testimony that drew gasps from people in the room was his description of how he says his supervisors reacted to his attempts to report the problems.

“My boss said, ‘I would have killed someone who said what you said in a meeting,’” Salehpour told members of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

In a statement on Wednesday’s hearings, Boeing said retaliation is “strictly prohibited” and that though it has taken “important steps to foster a safety culture that empowers and encourages all employees to raise their voice,” the company knows it has “more work to do.”

The testimony was “more than troubling,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, adding that Congress has “got to get to the bottom of this.” But he and other lawmakers offered few specific ideas about what to do, after decades of Congress endorsing and expanding a regulatory approach in which the FAA delegates much of its certification oversight to companies like Boeing.

And lawmakers had only limited time to discuss the issue. The two hearings broke early to accommodate the Senate’s impeachment trial for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Here are key takeaways from the hearings:

A former Boeing employee suggested that the company sought to cover up vital information

Boeing has been tussling for weeks with the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency that is probing what went wrong during a January incident in which a door plug blew out midair on an Alaska Airlines flight. The NTSB has accused Boeing of stonewalling the release of information about who had worked on the plane’s faulty door plug. Boeing eventually said it had no such records of exactly who performed what work on the door plug.

But Ed Pierson, a former Boeing engineer who is now executive director of the Foundation for Aviation Safety, said Wednesday the records do exist — and that he had turned them over to the FBI. (The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into the Alaska Air incident.)

“I’m not gonna sugarcoat this — this is a criminal cover-up,” Pierson told the lawmakers.

The NTSB told POLITICO on Wednesday that it still “has not received any such documentation from Boeing or any other entity” on the door plug installation.

Boeing on Wednesday deferred comment back to the NTSB on the issue. The FBI declined to comment.

Also on Wednesday, the Seattle Times reported that the documents in question may have to do with an internal repair data system that tracks assembly work as the plane moves throughout the factory. The Times reported that system data, which Boeing mechanics logged, does exist, but still does not identify exactly who did the work on the door plug itself — which is the information the NTSB has sought.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told FlightGlobal on Wednesday that she also believes Pierson was discussing the system data. But after the hearing, Pierson told POLITICO he has more than just the tracking data documents.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the Homeland Security subcommittee that heard Pierson’s testimony, told POLITICO after the hearing that he would be demanding the documents from Boeing.

Another whistleblower alleged his supervisors threatened and intimidated him

Salehpour told senators he raised concerns for years about shoddy manufacturing practices on two of the company’s widebody aircraft — and faced retaliation and threats for doing so.

“I was ignored, I was told not to create delays, I was told, frankly, to shut up,” said Salehpour, who is still employed by the company.

Salehpour said the company’s culture of putting production over safety could compromise the airworthiness of the two of Boeing’s largest planes, the 787 and 777.

Boeing, which declined an invitation to testify at the hearing, has maintained that both aircraft are safe to fly and that the company prohibits retaliation.

In a statement, the FAA said voluntary reporting without fear of reprisal “is a critical component in aviation safety,” and that it thoroughly investigates “all reports.”

The witnesses faulted the priority that Boeing places on safety

The experts and whistleblowers who testified across both hearings painted a picture of a “safety culture” at Boeing so broken that the guardrails enacted around it can’t function properly.

Tracy Dillinger, manager for safety culture and human factors at NASA, told the Senate Commerce Committee that one of the foundational practices for an organization committed to safety is understanding who is ultimately responsible for it. But at Boeing, she said, employee surveys showed that 95 percent of those responding did not know who their chief safety officer was.

Dillinger mentioned protocols at NASA create a culture of “psychological safety” that could also be adopted at aerospace manufacturers when they see subpar or inefficient work.

The FAA’s attempts at policing Boeing have also been ineffective

January’s door-blowout on a Boeing 737 MAX was just the latest of a string of problems with Boeing planes, the witnesses noted, five years after two MAX crashes tied to faulty flight control software killed 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

“The FAA could have prevented an ever-increasing list of production quality defects,” Pierson said. “Instead, they’re surprised each time it occurs, showing how ineffective and reactive their oversight has become.”

The FAA on Wednesday said it will continue its “aggressive oversight of Boeing and ensure the company comprehensively addresses the findings” from its recent audit of the company, as well as an expert panel’s review into the delegation process.

“The company must commit to real and profound improvements and we will hold them accountable every step of the way,” the agency said.

But the expert witnesses contend there’s not much the government can do in the immediate term to pull regulatory functions away from Boeing and place them back with the FAA.

That delegation process allowing the company to self-certify aircraft with FAA oversight “is here with us forever because the FAA does not have the resources to be able to be the world’s experts on these technologies,” said Javier de Luis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department of aeronautics and astronautics, testifying before the Senate Commerce panel.

The FAA needs to step up its own safety management systems, he said. The agency is expected to finalize a final rule on that system — a process that will include feedback from manufacturers, operators and pilots, in June.

De Luis’ sister died during the 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia in 2019. (De Luis was among the experts who put together a report on changes needed in the FAA’s certification programs following that accident.) After that disaster, Congress passed a 2020 law intended to strengthen oversight of Boeing.

But Joe Jacobsen, who retired from the FAA in 2021, told senators that the message he heard at the agency after Congress passed that law was “we’re already doing all of this.”

“The attitude from day one was not good at the upper levels of the FAA,” Jacobsen testified.

Senators had few ideas for how to fix the problem

Johnson said Congress first needs to know a lot more about what went wrong, saying lawmakers need “to do the detailed work — we need more information, we need people coming forward on all sides.”

“There are some real problems at Boeing that have to be fixed. It’s got to include not only Boeing, it has to be how airlines maintain Boeing products, but it’s also got to look at the FAA,” he said.

Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) pledged to move a bill responding to Boeing’s problems and the FAA’s oversight by year’s end. But she offered few details about what exactly the bill might contain. In addition, the timeframe for getting any substantial legislation through both chambers during an election year is daunting.

A major aviation policy bill has been passed in the House and is awaiting floor action in the Senate, but Cantwell said she doesn’t want to delay that bill by reopening it to deal with issues raised by Boeing’s latest crisis.

Blumenthal vowed to press forward with more investigative hearings, including hauling FAA and Boeing representatives before his panel. Cantwell, too, said she wanted to hear from both in the near future.

“Boeing is in denial if it continues to say there’s no basis whatsoever, there’s no reason to change its practices,” Blumenthal told reporters. “Boeing has a lot to see if it looks in the mirror.”