An employee works on the tail of a Boeing Co. Dreamliner 787 aircraft on the production line at the company's final assembly facility in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Travis Dove | Bloomberg | fake images
boeing defended quality and safety testing of its 787 Dreamliner and 777 planes on Monday, days after one of the company's engineers went public with accusations that the planemaker took “shortcuts” to speed up production of the planes.
The whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, said last week that Boeing's 787 assembly put excessive stress on the planes' joints that could reduce some of the planes' useful life. Boeing denied the allegations, calling them “inaccurate” and said it stood by the safety of the planes.
Salehpour is scheduled to appear alongside another whistleblower who worked at Boeing, a former aviation official and an independent safety expert, at a Senate hearing Wednesday on aircraft safety called “Examining Boeing's Broken Safety Culture.” Boeing: First-Hand Accounts.
Salehpour's claims come as Boeing faces intense scrutiny after a door plug on a 737 Max plane exploded in January. The narrow-body plane is Boeing's best-seller and the explosion at 16,000 feet put passengers within inches of tragedy. Since the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration has prevented Boeing from increasing production of that plane.
In a roughly two-hour presentation with reporters on Monday, two Boeing engineering managers detailed the company's stress and safety tests for the 787, which include testing the plane for 165,000 cycles, each intended to provide the equivalent of a flight, with different conditions. Additionally, the fuselage skin was struck by a 300-pound pendulum, engineers said.
Steve Chisholm, Boeing's chief mechanical and structural engineering engineer, said Boeing created damage to the fuselage panels in intense tests that were repeated more times than planes would experience in service, “and the damage did not increase.”
Salehpour's allegations relate to tiny gaps where pieces of the 787's carbon composite fuselage join together. He said Boeing used force to join the pieces together and did not properly measure the gaps. He and his attorneys sent a letter to the FAA in January detailing his allegations, and the agency is investigating.
The whistleblower said in a call with reporters last week that he “literally saw people jumping on the pieces” of the 777 “to line them up.” Later that day, Boeing said those claims are inaccurate and that it has “full confidence in the safety and durability of the 777 family.”
Boeing previously suspended deliveries of the 787 for nearly two years, until August 2022, due to incorrect spacing in some parts of the planes' fuselage.
“These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has undertaken to ensure the long-term quality and safety of the aircraft,” the planemaker said in a statement responding to the claims. “The issues raised have been the subject of a rigorous engineering review under the supervision of the FAA. This analysis has validated that these issues do not present any safety concerns and that the aircraft will maintain its useful life for several decades.”
Salehpour's lawyers also allege that Boeing retaliated against him after he raised concerns by excluding him from meetings and removing him from the 787 program and incorporating him into the company's 777 plan.
Last week, Boeing declined to comment on those specific allegations, citing the FAA's ongoing whistleblower investigation, but said, “Retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”
The company is scheduled to report its quarterly results on April 24, when it will face questions from investors about aircraft safety, production rates and FAA oversight.
