According to a journalistic investigation, Boeing gives priority to the speed of quality in the manufacture of its aircraft – 21/04/2019

The New York Times published a feature article in which it accused the Boeing company of neglecting its production processes in its Charleston plant, inaugurated in 2009, which, according to the report, they compromise the safety of their planes.

"Over the past decade, its 787 Dreamliner model plant has been affected by poor quality production and inadequate supervision that has threatened to compromise its safety," the New York paper said.

The media claim to have examined hundreds of pages of internal mail, corporate documents and federal records, and interviewed dozens of current and former employees to reach this conclusion.

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They point out that there is a corporate culture at Boeing in which the speed of production is higher than its quality, and that the aircraft manufacturer has put pressure on its employees to work quickly while ignoring some of the concerns expressed.

The New York Times report arrives a little over a month after the accident of a Boeing 737 Max 8, whose circumstances similar to those of another disaster occurred a few months earlier in Indonesia had suspected a defective operating system, which eventually led to all the 737 Max aircraft, which caused a major crisis of the company.

In total, the article reveals that about a dozen complaints filed by Boeing employees with US regulatory agencies for safety issues describing issues such as manufacturing defects, debris aircraft or pressure received for not reporting violations of the regulations.

Others have denounced Boeing for, they say, having been the object of retaliation after reporting flaws in the manufacturing process. One of the examples detailed in the paper is that of Joseph Clayton, a technician at the North Charleston plant in Boeing, one of the two makers of the Dreamliner, who said he usually found trash too close to the wiring. badpit of the pilots.

"I told my wife that I had never intended to take the plane, it's just a security problem," she said at Clayton newspaper. Although the article emphasizes that Dreamliner It never crashed, workers sometimes made dangerous mistakes, as did other employees who asked to remain anonymous for fear of the consequences of their remarks.

"Defective parts were installed in the aircraft and metal chips and tools were left inside the aircraft, as usual, often near electrical systems , and flight tests were carried out on the engines and the tail, at the risk of failures. ", details the support.

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John Barnett, a former Boeing Quality Service employee, for whom he worked more than three decades until his retirement in 2017, said that he had repeatedly found accumulations of metal chips near the cables of the aircraft controls, which he asked were removed.

But Barnett's superiors transferred him to another area of ​​the production plant in response to his complaints. In addition, a spokeswoman for the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Lynn Lunsford, said his agency had inspected several planes in which this garbage would have been removed, but that they were still there, and pointed out This type of failure can lead to short circuits and subsequent fires.

"As a quality manager of Boeing, you are the last defense mechanism before a defect reaches air pbadengers," said Barnett in the New York Times. "And I did not even see a plane in Charleston to which I would give my signature confirming that he is safe and able to fly," he concluded.