Boeing in trouble after fatal plane crashes, door released mid-flight, and whistleblower concerns.
Boeing, one of the biggest aerospace companies in the world, has faced increased scrutiny over the past six years due to a range of malfunctions that have affected their airplanes. On top of that, multiple employees of Boeing have recently come forward to expose the alleged neglect going on behind the scenes.
On Oct. 18, 2018, Lion Air flight 610 crashed off the coast of Indonesia, causing the death of all 189 passengers and personnel on board. The crash came just a few minutes after a pilot asked to return to the airport, a total of 12 minutes after departure. Investigation following the crash found that it was caused by a single sensor malfunctioning – the Angle of Attack (AoA) sensor which is normally used to keep the plane from stalling. When the AoA sensor triggers, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) brings the nose of the plane down. The MCAS can be overridden, but critically, the pilots were unaware of this – Boeing had opted to keep the feature secret in order to dodge the expensive costs of training their pilots on it. The AoA sensor repeatedly falsely triggered on Lion Air flight 610, causing the plane to nosedive into the Java Sea.
Less than six months later, on March 10th, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed just six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. The cause of the crash was found to be, again, a faulty AoA sensor that caused the plane to nosedive. Both Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 and Lion Air flight 610 were Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes.
Can a company that produces hundreds of planes a year just be expected to have a few faulty parts, or was this negligence? Evidence from a court trial following the second crash points toward the latter. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is a government agency that regulates most things aircraft-related in the U.S. including, importantly, flight inspections and standards for operation. In 2021, federal prosecutors accused Boeing of deceiving the FAA by concealing important flight software – the very same software that caused the 2018 and 2019 crashes. While Boeing originally plead not guilty, they then entered a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) in which they admitted to defrauding the FAA and paid fines to the families of the victims. However, many of the people affected were upset by the deal, saying fines were not an appropriate punishment for the manslaughter of over 300 people. Despite the outcries of the families of the victims, in 2023, district judge Reed O’Connor ruled that while their rights had been violated under the Crime Victim’s Rights Acts, there was no evidence to support that Boeing was still a threat to public safety and that he would not overturn the deferred prosecution agreement.
On Jan. 5, a Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane that departed from Portland International Airport lost an exit plug door while flying 16,000 feet above the ground. The following investigation found that all four pins that should have held the door in place were missing. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, but this mistake has big implications for Boeing due to some of the conditions it agreed to for the DPA. To comply, Boeing was ordered to make changes to its safety procedures, which should have kept mistakes like this from happening in the first place. Boeing is now being investigated by the FAA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Justice Department, which could find that Boeing violated its agreement.
However, the crashes in 2018 and 2019 are far from the beginning of Boeing’s deadly lack of quality. Former manager turned whistle-blower John Barnett first blew the whistle in 2017 after nearly a decade of safety concerns. Barnett reported to the FAA that substandard parts meant for the scrap bins often went missing, leading to the possibility of them being mistakenly installed. He even went as far to allege that faulty parts were installed deliberately. A review by the FAA found that over 50 of these parts were, indeed, missing. Barnett voiced other safety concerns too, including that he purportedly found that 25 percent of the oxygen masks used in case of cabin depressurization failed to deploy, and that he was removed from projects where he tried to document problems.
During Senate Committee hearings on April 17, whistleblower Sam Salehpour also testified that he was punished for attempting to raise his concerns on the safety of particular airplanes. One of these concerns was that employees were allegedly jumping on sections of the airplanes to align parts, and that the gap between pieces still ended up being significantly more than the 5/1000th of an inch Boeing standards allow. Boeing denied that employees were jumping on parts and that Boeing standards were extremely conservative, so no problems would arise even if they were not met exactly. Salehpour disagreed, and said “When operating at 35,000 feet, the size of a human hair can be a matter of life and death.”
As of April 19, the investigations by the FAA, NTSB, and Justice department are still ongoing. The lawsuit that Barnett filed against Boeing in 2021 is also still active, and is expected to go to trial in September. Tragically, Barnett died on March 9 from “apparently self-inflicted wounds,” though the investigation into his death is still under way. His family and lawyers intend on continuing his case.
The Axe 