In October last year, Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun said the US plane maker was focusing on improving the quality of its aircraft. The company, he told analysts, had in recent years “added rigour” to its “quality processes”.
“We’ve worked hard to instil a culture of speaking up and transparently bringing forward any issue, no matter the size, so that we can get things right for a bright future. As a result, we’re finding items that we need to resolve,” he added.
Those comments will now haunt Calhoun as he confronts the latest blow to Boeing’s reputation: the likelihood that a manufacturing error or lack of quality control led to a dangerous blowout of a section of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines flight just over a week ago.
Calhoun, who has promised the company will be completely transparent in helping investigators, will know too well that his own credibility and that of his executive team are also on the line.
The US Federal Aviation Administration, which had grounded some of the planemaker’s 737 Max 9 aircraft pending inspection, has opened a formal probe into the incident. The regulator on Friday said it would reassess the current system where some aircraft inspections were delegated to Boeing employees, as well as conducting an audit of the Max 9 production line. Later, the FAA said that the 737 Max 9 would stay grounded until Boeing provided additional data.
“They may have changed the way they’re doing things, but it ain’t working,” said Captain Dennis Tajer, spokesperson for the pilots union for American Airlines. “It doesn’t matter what system you put in place. We’re measuring it on the outcome.”
When Calhoun took the helm in January 2020 after two crashes of the 737 Max 8 aircraft that killed 346 passengers, Boeing was still reeling from the greatest crisis in its history. The former GE executive had been a Boeing board member since 2009. He promised to rebuild trust with regulators, airlines and the flying public, and to bring in greater transparency. Boeing’s engineering and safety processes would be strengthened.
There has been progress. The company created a board-level aerospace safety committee and centralised its safety reporting functions.
Top engineers among business units who previously reported to executives leading those divisions began reporting to the company’s chief engineer, who reported directly to the chief executive. Boeing created a product and services safety group, also reporting to the chief engineer.
Last year Boeing appointed Howard McKenzie as chief engineer to succeed Greg Hyslop, who retired, taking the role of adviser to the chief executive.
In January 2021 it named Mike Delaney, a vice-president overseeing the digital transformation of Boeing’s production lines, to the newly created role of chief safety officer.
“Mike and his team are the only people in our company that can give the go-ahead to move aeroplanes back into the air,” Calhoun said at an employee meeting at its 737 factory in Renton, Washington, last Tuesday.
Yet production mis-steps have continued, and while not all manufacturing errors affect safety, they suggest a disconnect between top-level initiatives and the reality on the shop floor. Boeing discovered in April last year that Spirit AeroSystems, one of its biggest suppliers, had improperly installed two fittings on the vertical stabiliser on the 737, forcing the jet maker to delay deliveries. Four months later a new problem arose: incorrectly drilled holes in the rear pressure bulkhead of some fuselages.
The two cases last year and the Alaska incident all have Spirit in common — the Wichita, Kansas-based company builds the Max fuselages, including the door plug that fell off the plane.
But there haven been other manufacturing problems in recent years. Deliveries of the 787 Dreamliner were stopped for 20 months because of multiple glitches, including the installation of poorly fitted shims — thin pieces of material used to improve fit between joints in the fuselage — and aircraft that did not meet engineering specifications for skin flatness. The company has even struggled with its prestige project, the jet that carries the US president, Air Force One.
Boeing has made “improvements since the original Max problems in 2018”, said John Cox, a retired pilot and chief executive of consultancy Safety Operating Systems. “Have they made sufficient improvements? The Alaska incident would suggest not,” he added.
The blowout and subsequent discovery by Alaska and United Airlines of loose bolts on roughly 15 grounded Max 9 aircraft raise a number of questions about the assembly process at Boeing’s Renton facility, said Cox.
“Is it unclear, is it overly complex, is it done between two shifts where one thinks it’s been done by the other one? Or is the safety inspection not adequate to correct what has now been identified to be a recurring problem?”
David Soucie, a former safety inspector at the FAA, criticised Boeing for a design error, a more serious lapse. He noted that in a photo published in trade publication The Air Current, the door plug bolts were not secured with safety wire, which he said was necessary for any use where a loose bolt could lead to unsafe conditions. Safety wire threaded through a hole on the bolt counteracts the everyday vibrations that cause bolts to loosen.
Boeing has improved its safety protocols since the Max crashes, Soucie said. He noted that when he visited one of the factories in Washington in December 2019, assembly workers never rotated away from their stations. This gave workers a siloed view of the product, making it harder for them to identify mistakes made by others. Since then, Boeing has started using rotations.
The company has added an ombudsman for employees authorised to work on behalf of the FAA — a move required by a lawsuit settlement — and added real-time data and analytics software into its safety management system.
“Boeing has a very strong risk management programme now,” Soucie said. “It was fairly strong many years ago, and then it got weak, and now it’s getting strong again.”
Company insiders said the discovery last year of instances of the wrongly drilled holes and loose rudder bolts was evidence that the system was working. “The expectation is that you will find stuff and by finding stuff the system is working because you are working to address them,” said one.
Several industry experts said well-documented labour shortages in the aerospace industry may have contributed to the quality lapses. Boeing in particular, they said, suffered from a shortage of skilled workers stemming from the halt of Max production after the 2019 grounding, followed by the onset of Covid-19.
Robert Spingarn, an analyst at Melius Research, said that manufacturing errors had risen throughout the industry because Covid changed the composition of the workforce, with older workers departing through retirements or lay-offs.
“We have a much less experienced workforce at all these companies and throughout the supply chain, and that has been on the factory floor more than elsewhere,” he said.
Boeing laid off thousands of workers during Covid, including final assembly workers, said Scott Hamilton of aviation consultancy Leeham News. When the company was looking to rehire people, many failed to return, increasing the share of inexperienced workers.
“It takes a period of time for people to understand the learning curve to become efficient and proficient in building aeroplanes,” said Hamilton. “You can probably point to a lot of this quality control issue to the new hires and learning curves. Spirit had the same problems.”
Several long-term Boeing watchers believe the company is still suffering from the consequences of the much-criticised “Partnering for Success” initiative. Former chief executive Jim McNerney, who led the company from 2005 to 2015, launched it to squeeze costs out of suppliers.
Boeing pointed to recent moves to improve oversight and safety processes. It said it had grown its workforce since the pandemic, adding about 15,000 staff to reach 156,000 by the end of 2022, driven by significant hiring in engineering and manufacturing.
The Alaska incident has refocused attention on the FAA’s role in overseeing Boeing, which was scrutinised during the Max 8 crisis.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell sent a letter to the head of the FAA on Thursday saying “recent accidents and incidents — including the expelled door plug on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 — call into question Boeing’s quality control. In short, it appears that FAA’s oversight processes have not been effective in ensuring that Boeing produces aeroplanes that are in condition for safe operation.”
Some long-term Boeing watchers worry that the company’s engineering-driven culture has still not fully recovered from a merger completed in 1997 with aerospace company McDonnell Douglas and the relocation of the company’s headquarters four years later from Seattle to Chicago. For some, the move away from the company’s longtime home marked a shift in priorities from engineering to financial performance.
Before the merger, Boeing was “very much a product-focused company based in Seattle with a lot of control over everything they did”, said Nick Cunningham, analyst at Agency Partners in London. Boeing launched its first big share buyback in 1998. It bought back $41bn worth of shares between 2013 and 2019, including more than $9bn a year in 2017 and 2018, contributing to its high debt levels.
Yet others dismiss suggestions that Boeing’s culture is at fault. “Clearly something has gone wrong with this incident. I do not think the culture around individual people feeling responsible for what they are doing has changed,” said one former industry executive.
Given the long lead times in the aerospace industry, the results of real corporate change will take time to manifest themselves.
“You can only judge by results,” Cunningham said. “It takes a long time for things that go wrong to play out, and if you fix those things it takes a long time.”
Taking stock of Boeing’s past
Boeing has encountered engineering and manufacturing problems in recent years ranging from small production errors to the catastrophic crashes of the 737 Max 8. Some company observers say the root of its difficulties can be traced back three decades
1997
Boeing merges with McDonnell Douglas. Critics say McDonnell Douglas’s culture — focused on financial performance — came to dominate over the ensuing years at the expense of Boeing’s engineering–driven culture
2001
Boeing shifts its headquarters to Chicago from its longtime home in Seattle, site of its oldest commercial aircraft factories
2005
Boeing divests Spirit, shifting fixed costs of its manufacturing facilities and labour
Oct 2018
Lion Air flight JT610, operated on a Max 8, crashes off the coast of Indonesia
Mar 2019
Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, operated on a Max 8, crashes shortly after take-off. US regulators ground the Max three days later
Dec 2019
Chief executive Dennis Muilenburg is fired. Dave Calhoun, former GE executive and board member at Boeing since 2009, takes over the following month
2020
Boeing says it will cut 10 per cent of its workforce as Covid hits the US.
2021
Boeing pays $2.5bn to resolve criminal charges connected to the Max crashes
2022
Boeing announces another move of its headquarters, this time to Arlington, Virginia. The relocation places the company’s leadership close to government officials and lawmakers in the US capital. Arlington is also the home of the Pentagon, a leading customer
Jan 2024
A door plug blows out of Alaska Airlines 1282, a Max 9 aircraft. US Federal Aviation Authority orders audit of Max 9 production line. It will assess safety risks around delegation of inspections to Boeing employees. The FAA says the aircraft will stay grounded until Boeing provides further data
