Boeing will be in the spotlight Wednesday during back-to-back hearings as Congress investigates allegations of major safety failures at the embattled aircraft manufacturer.
The first session will feature members of a panel of experts who identified serious deficiencies in Boeing’s safety culture.
The main event will be a second hearing with a Boeing engineer who claims parts of the skin on 787 Dreamliner jets are not properly secured and could eventually fall apart. The whistleblower’s lawyer says Boeing ignored the engineer’s concerns and prevented him from talking to experts about fixing the defects.
Whistleblower Sam Salehpour sent documents to the Federal Aviation Administration, which is investigating the quality and safety of Boeing’s production.
Salehpour is scheduled to testify before a Senate investigative subcommittee on Wednesday. Another Boeing whistleblower – Ed Pierson, former manager of the Boeing 737 program – and two other aviation engineering experts are also on the witness list.
The Democrat who chairs the panel and his senior Republican have asked Boeing for a trove of documents dating back six years.
Lawmakers are seeking any data on the production of Boeing 787 and 777 aircraft, including any safety issues or complaints from Boeing employees, contractors or airlines. Some questions seek information about Salehpour’s allegations about ill-fitting carbon composite panels on the Dreamliner.
A Boeing spokesman said the company is cooperating with lawmakers’ investigation and has offered to provide documents and briefings.
The company says claims about the 787’s structural integrity are false. Two Boeing engineering managers said this week that in both design tests and inspections of planes — some 12 years old — there have been no findings of fatigue or cracks in the composite panels. They suggested that the material, formed from carbon fibers and resin, is virtually impervious to fatigue, a constant concern with conventional aluminum hulls.
Boeing officials also rejected another of Salehpour’s claims: that he saw factory workers jumping on parts of the fuselage of 777s to align them.
Salehpour is the latest whistleblower to come forward with allegations about production problems at Boeing. The company has been in crisis mode since a door panel blew off a 737 Max plane during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. Investigators are focusing on four bolts that were removed during a repair at the Boeing factory and apparently not replaced.
The company is facing a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and separate investigations by the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.
CEO David Calhoun, who will step down at the end of this year, has often said Boeing is taking steps to improve production quality and safety culture. He called the blow to the Alaska plane a “turning point” from which a better Boeing will emerge.
There is a lot of skepticism about these kinds of comments.
“We need to look at what Boeing does, not just what it says it does,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which will hold the first of two hearings on Wednesday.
The FAA will likely take some hits as well. Duckworth said that until recently the agency “overlooked far too much of Boeing’s repeated bad behavior,” especially when it certified the 737 Max nearly a decade ago. In 2018 and 2019, two Max jets crashed, killing 346 people, after faulty activations of a flight control system that the FAA did not fully understand.
Leaders of the Senate investigative subcommittee have also requested FAA documents on Boeing’s oversight.
Wednesday’s subcommittee hearing follows that of the Senate Commerce Committee, which is expected to hear from members of an expert panel that investigated safety at Boeing. The group said that despite improvements made after the Max crashes, Boeing’s safety culture remains flawed and employees who raise concerns could be subject to pressure and retaliation.
One of the witnesses, MIT aviation lecturer Javier de Luis, lost his sister in the second Max crash.
