How safety lapses hit Boeing's reputation | FT Film

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As a reporter who writes about Boeing, I get asked all the time: so are the planes safe? And I'm like, yes, you're in far more danger when you drive to the airport.

But that doesn't mean the questions don't get asked.

The events that have occurred have truly been extraordinary.

People died because they took a very lax approach to safety.

346 lives lost, it should have never happened.

The FAA has limited them on production. And, still, we had the door plug blow out.

Their decision to plead guilty for defrauding the government could lead to all kinds of consequences.

The regulatory authorities, airlines, I don't think anybody trusts Boeing at this point.

Boeing is the archetypal national champion. It employs tens of thousands. And it is a real source of pride for the United States.

A gem, in terms of corporate America. It's a massive, massive name and just, in terms of aerospace specifically, a huge, huge player.

It's one of the world's two big manufacturers of commercial aircraft. It built the 747 plane, which helped to usher in the global jet age.

It's systemically important to US manufacturing and the US government. It's a really big exporter for the US. And it's also important for national security.

In the defence sector, it's one of three companies that can design and build combat aircraft or anything like that: F-15 fighter Jets, Apache attack helicopters, transports, missiles. They're one of the top defence primes.

So everyone needs Boeing to succeed. Everyone wants Boeing to succeed. But they are not succeeding.

Earlier this year, Boeing admitted guilt in a conspiracy to defraud the government.

The US prosecutors accused it, actually, of breaking a previous agreement following the crashes of 2018 and 2019.

They were supposed to clean up their act. That was part of the terms of their deal.

The company is also in a manufacturing crisis, an operational crisis.

They slowed down their factories. And because of that they have just burned cash. They get their money when they deliver planes.

This came about as a result of an incident in January where a door plug on an Alaska Airlines airline blew out at 16,000 feet.

It was an incredibly terrifying incident for the passengers on the plane. One little boy that was sitting nearby, his shirt was sucked off. So this is very serious.

If that had been at maximum altitude they might have lost the plane. They definitely would have lost some passengers.

After the door panel blew out in January there was immediate pressure on Boeing.

Not just from the regulatory agencies responsible for aviation, but Congress, too.

You have to remember this comes after several years of safety concerns and incidents, which all followed two fatal crashes back in 2018 and 2019.

Our breaking news, an Ethiopian Airlines flight has crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa.

157 dead, including eight Americans.

Ethiopia's transportation minister declaring the crash shows, quote, "A clear similarity" with the Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October.

In 2018 and 2019, there are two separate crashes involving Boeing jets that were obviously horrendous events. Almost 350 people died.

What those crashes did was lift the lid on the egregious failures of safety and quality in Boeing.

Two planes crashed. And it was because of an engineering design that changed how you fly the plane. And they didn't tell anyone.

It had pushed regulators not to include, or not to demand, extra training for pilots on this software system called MCAS.

Pilots should have been aware of how it worked differently, because what they had to do in response to the way the aircraft was being flown was something they didn't normally have to do.

Quickly, we learned, from the FAA and Boeing, after takeoff the trim can run nose down, aggressively. We thought, what's making that happen? Right after the crash, they come out and they tell us about this system called MCAS.

So, MCAS, which stands for Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, was a flight control software system that Boeing had installed on the 737 Max.

It was designed to stop the plane with these heavy engines from getting into an attitude and stalling. But engineers said, well, you've only wired it to one angle of attack indicator. If that indicator fails, then what's going to happen?

We're in the simulator today. And we're going to do our best to show what the Lion Air pilots went through. And this is before anybody ever heard of MCAS.

So right after takeoff, the airspeed is getting inputs that the aircraft is stalling. So they get an immediate stick shaker right at rotate.

That tells them that they are about to stall. Well, they're not about to stall. They recognise that. They're climbing out. They get the gear up, just like I would do in the airplane. They're recognising there's a problem, but they're getting confusing information.

But here's the catch. When they go to clean up the airplane, like we're trained to do, and they bring the flaps up, that lets the MCAS out of its cage. The MCAS kicks in and pushes the nose down with a power and speed that the pilots have never seen before.

They pull back on the airplane. So, now, the aircraft is in this zero G's, positive G's, this roller coaster ride. They interrupt the MCAS with the trim. And then the MCAS pushes the nose back down again. After five seconds, it'll run 10 seconds down. So they're in a lost situation. And within a handful of seconds, the airplane goes into the ocean.

The solution to the problems with the MCAS system is the pilot. But if the pilot doesn't know, like the pilots on Lion Air didn't know the system existed, they have no idea why it's getting all these uncommanded nose down, nose down, nose down. There was, I would say, deliberate concealment of this system, the MCAS system.

Following the crashes, the US Congress starts looking into Boeing and starts a series of probes. One of them is spearheaded by House representatives, including Peter DeFazio, that basically tries to understand what had caused these crashes to begin with.

What we discovered in the wake of those crashes and in the investigations is that Boeing was deliberately withholding details and information about how the system worked in order to minimise training costs.

They did not want to have pilot training on the airplane because the customer would say, well, now I've got to train pilots. I've got to take them off trips. I've got to get the simulator. It adds cost to something that Airbus is not proposing.

So we're going to say it's just an addition to the trim system. And nobody outside of Boeing will hear the words or the acronym, MCAS. No one will know about it. That was one of the first really big red flags we found.

Do you think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to not inform pilots of the existence of the MCAS system?

Congressman, a few things on that... and, agree, we made some we made some mistakes on MCAS.

A lot of the evidence of what happened came out in congressional hearings. More and more things kept coming up. And you realise that there was a huge problem.

There was a group of emails where you had two test pilots saying, look, the software is going crazy on this simulator. I've unwittingly told lies to the FAA about it. That was unthinkable.

They knew that this was deadly. And they let that airplane fly.

Mr. Forkner, so, basically, I lied to the regulators unknowingly. Gustavsson, it wasn't a lie. No one told us that was the case. Forkner, I'm levelling off at, like 4,000 feet, 230 knots. And the plane is trimming itself like crazy. I'm like, what? 346 people are dead because what these chief pilots described as egregious and crazy, that's their language. That's Boeing's internal language in this exchange.

Dennis Muilenburg, the then-chief executive of Boeing, his public appearances at some of these hearings didn't do the company any favours.

They fired the previous CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. They brought in David Calhoun. And within a handful of days, he says, we're doing the pilot training. And, frankly, I admit, I thought, all right, this is the road to recovery.

He was a better communicator than Dennis Muilenburg. I think the view at the time was that he would be able to steady the ship. He'd also set up that the company's chief engineer was reporting directly to the chief executive. So on the outside, it looked like Boeing was doing something to improve its safety.

They agreed to establish safety management systems and do a whole host of things, have a new committee, subcommittee, of the board, which would only do safety.

As far as the MCAS goes, the airplane has been redesigned. The software has been redesigned. The system is disconnected from the airplane through its own software logic.

And it also doesn't trigger repeatedly, which is what it was doing during the two Max crashes.

There was a period where it looked like it might be coming out of the darkest days of this crisis.

And then Covid hit.

Covid devastated the aviation industry.

Nobody could fly. Nobody could travel.

Airlines saw their revenues plummet. And if you don't know where your revenue is coming from you're definitely not buying a jet.

Suddenly, there was no need for new aircraft to be built. So that was a huge hit for the entire industry.

Boeing shed a lot of employees during that period, whether through encouraging people to take retirement, buyouts. A lot of people who had been there for a long time left. And they did not come back.

We also know that there's a massive issue in the supply chain.

Factories were closed for some time. You had shipments disrupted. And they had to fire a lot of people.

So even post-Covid, they've struggled to find the people they need as the markets recovered to actually do things properly, to keep up with demand.

Everybody's lost people. So everybody's trying to hire. Some of the smaller suppliers have got financial problems. And you're only as good as your worst supplier.

We are now five years on. But we're still having incidents. We're still discovering that the wrong holes are drilled on the fuselage, that bolts are rolling around in rudder systems. Maybe some of this is stuff that was inevitable to discover. It's not a sign that it wasn't trying to deal with the problems. It's, in fact, perhaps a sign that it is dealing with the problems.

I think there is an important difference between what happened this year, in 2024, and what happened with the Max crashes in 2018 and 2019. What happened with those aircraft and what led up to that was a design flaw. This year, the focus is on Boeing's manufacturing processes and those of its suppliers.

Unfortunately, all of the problems that had been baked into the production system at the workforce level, at the supplier level, at the cultural level, were still very much in place.

And it became really clear, finally, when the door plug blew out. I mean, the bolts are missing. The plug was held on by paint.

New details tonight about a midair scare last month. The NTSB says four bolts were missing from an exit door that blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight.

The NTSB now saying it has photographic evidence it was not properly bolted in place when that plane left the Boeing factory.

After the Alaska Airlines incident, other questions were raised about the company's factories.

As evidenced by the fact that part of the plane blew off, clearly, there are some problems.

The Senate panel revealed something called travelled work, whereby Boeing workers would allow an aircraft that they were building, or was being assembled, to travel through different production stops, even if certain things hadn't been completed.

A plane moves through the factory in stations. And it has certain work done on it at each station. And you want to do the work in sequence, one thing after another. But sometimes you can't do work where it's supposed to be done. And so, the plane moves down the line. And the work still hasn't been done.

So that meant that something that was supposed to happen three stations ago, you might have to take stuff off the plane to put those things in later. They're having problems with suppliers. OK, that sort of stuff.

The fuselages for the 737 Max are made in Wichita, Kansas, by Spirit AeroSystems. And then they are shipped by train to Washington State. And the final assembly of the plane is done. Well, they used to be shipped with defects.

The door plug blew out because of defective work by Spirit, which had to be fixed. And it had to be fixed way down the line. They had to take the plane apart. And then the Boeing people didn't put the plane back together properly.

When that fuselage was in Renton, Washington, in the factory, the door plug was opened so that workers could work on it. Then it was shut at some point. And the bolts were never put back.

What came out of the Alaska incident is just how the paperwork process isn't right. There should be paperwork for every important step that is taken, including putting bolts back on a door plug.

The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that there had been a lot of confusion because of protocol that had not been followed, forms that had not been filled out.

It sounds like a small thing. But it's actually really not, because the documentation is how you know that all the work that needs to be done has been done and that it's safe.

That basically tells you why they screwed up, why the bolts were not on the airplane, because that is the process that makes sure the bolts get reinstalled.

It's got nothing to do with the nuts and bolts involved. It's got everything to do with people showing up and the resources being provided, both in terms of time and people and whatever else, to get the job done safely.

In some ways, I think what's striking is that it's taken this long, and it took an incident like the Alaska Airlines, for the prosecutors to say, look, there's a problem here.

Coming out of the two Max crashes, there was this view that a lot of people had tried to speak up, raise red flags, but weren't either listened to or were told not to say anything.

You had whistle-blowers who weren't being listened to and, in fact, who were being bullied into keeping quiet.

My name is Ed Pierson And I started working at the 737 programme in about 2015. I was a senior manager in the production system support organisation. So our team supported the manufacturing employees as they built the planes. Certainly, going into 2017, it was very obvious that the company was having a lot of problems.

Then that led to a bunch of mandatory overtime. Employees were now working when they were tired and fatigued. And we started seeing a lot of defects. Our defect rate started climbing.

There were manufacturing defects and alarming rate. There were process breakdowns. There was chaos. Ed Pierson brought that up six years ago. And no one listened to him.

In 2019, I testified as a Boeing whistle-blower. I had previously warned the 737 general manager before the Max crash to shut down the factory. I also warned Boeing's general counsels, the CEO, and the board of directors before the second crash to shut it down. They ignored my warnings.

The concerns and the issues that we were bringing up, as we brought them up to management, there was this kind of sense of, hey, we got to get the job done. We've got to get these planes out the door as fast as possible. Our customers are expecting them. This very severe level of undue pressure.

Everywhere, there was countdown clocks. Launch the plane. Get the plane out the door. The pressure was just... it permeated all the way down to the people sweeping the floor.

Post the Alaska incident, more people did come out as whistle-blowers. And there was still a feeling amongst some Boeing workers that speed of production was being prioritised over safety practises.

Multiple whistle-blowers decided to come forward in public, which is not an easy thing to do.

Sam Mohawk is one of a dozen who have come to us in recent months. And his account of the retaliation against him is particularly chilling, the pressure that was exerted on him to stay silent. They have a programme called Speak Up. Well, he was told to shut up.

Boeing has said they've launched a campaign called Speak Up to try and allow employees to raise concerns.

But I think even after they started that whistle-blower programme, some whistle-blowers were complaining that they were being encouraged not to say anything or that they were being sidelined.

You said you'd listen to whistle-blower testimony. We've had multiple whistle-blowers come before this committee and allege that Boeing is cutting every possible corner on quality and safety, not just in the past, but now. That doesn't sound like attention to quality to me. And yet, you're getting paid $33mn a year.

Senator, I'm sticking this through. I'm proud of having taken the job. I'm proud of our...

Proud of this record?

...safety record. And I am very proud...

You're proud of the safety record?

...of our Boeing people.

You're proud of this safety record?

I am proud of every action we have taken.

After four years, it's very hard to say that Dave Calhoun has turned the company around. The company, several times, has had to stand in front of Congress and say, we pledge that we will improve safety measures. Well, you shouldn't have to do that twice or three times.

That is what Boeing is trying to address through changes in how it builds, in its Renton factory, trying to improve training, even sort of overhauling their instructions on how to make things so that they're simpler.

You can have the best safety protocol processes in place. But if there is this culture of not being allowed to speak up if you spot a mistake, I think that undermines these processes.

What you've basically got is, well, a culture that broke down and wasn't able to keep the lines of communication open between people at the top and people who design and manufacture jets. It's a recipe for trouble.

33,000 Boeing machinists walked off the job Friday after union members voted to reject a tentative deal with the aircraft manufacturer.

Workers have operated without a paycheck. Boeing reportedly losing more than $1bn each month this strike goes on.

To guarantee that things go well, and safety isn't an issue, and, of course, production rates can be met in a timely way, you want a workforce that is, well, content.

In terms of wages and benefits, look at the cost of living. Look at how much it costs to eat. Look how much it costs to buy a home, buy a car. How long can you go in today's economy without an increase?

Workers see this, a, as a big catch-up in terms of just actual pay and better benefits. And there is also a lot of resentment that has been built up over several decades.

The employees do not feel respected. They don't feel valued in what they provide. And, yet, it's critical to the safety and the quality of the product.

In general, you're a commodity. You're a number. And, hey, we'll just take you out of the starting line-up. And we'll plug in the backup. Away we go. And three days later, it's like, well, who was that guy?

The strikes went on for seven weeks, which is a very long time if you're not building planes and not getting any money coming in. Analysts have estimated that the strike was costing Boeing $50mn a day. The new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, has been quite open about the fact that Boeing needs a big reset.

As soon as Kelly Ortberg came in as CEO, the first thing he did was say, I'm moving to Seattle. I'm not really clear if and when Dave Calhoun went to Seattle. So the idea of moving there, even though the headquarters is still based in Washington, DC, shows the importance of, frankly, showing up, showing the flag, and making sure that management is intimately involved with the process of manufacturing jets.

They also announced a mammoth equity raise recently. They're raising just over $21bn, the largest ever equity fundraising in US history. It's given them some breathing space in order to now focus on turning the company around.

I think Boeing will recover. I think Boeing will recover. It has to. The world needs more than one aircraft manufacturer. The world needs a healthy Boeing. It needs a healthy competitor to Airbus.

They've already lost a great deal of market share to Airbus. But all the airlines still want there to be two plane-makers to buy from.

Boeing can turn things around. But it's got to be, how many quality airplanes can we get out the door, not how many airplanes we can get out the door.

The people we represent care about quality and safety. They always have. They always will. The men and women the IAM represent, they truly care about the products they build. But Boeing has to provide the resources to allow that to happen.

The workforce, the supplier network, customers, all of these have to be valued as, well, as partners.

It's pretty basic. It's treating people respectfully, not retaliating against people, encouraging people to speak up, those kinds of things.

They did not get into this position overnight. And they are not going to get out of it overnight.