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Former Boeing Quality Inspector Turns Whistleblower, Says Plane Parts Had Serious Defects (bbc.com) 131

Posted by EditorDavid from the plane-speaking dept.
Thursday the BBC reported: Plane bodies made by Boeing's largest supplier regularly left the factory with serious defects, according to a former quality inspector at the firm. Santiago Paredes who worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, told the BBC he often found up to 200 defects on parts being readied for shipping to Boeing. He was nicknamed "showstopper" for slowing down production when he tried to tackle his concerns, he claimed.

Spirit said it "strongly disagree[d]" with the allegations. "We are vigorously defending against his claims," said a spokesperson for Spirit, which remains Boeing's largest supplier.

Mr Paredes made the allegations against Spirit in an exclusive interview with the BBC and the American network CBS, in which he described what he said he experienced while working at the firm between 2010 and 2022... "I was finding a lot of missing fasteners, a lot of bent parts, sometimes even missing parts...." Mr Paredes told the BBC that some of the defects he identified while at Spirit were minor — but others were more serious. He also claimed he was put under pressure to be less rigorous...

He now maintains he would be reluctant to fly on a 737 Max, in case it still carried flaws that originated in the Wichita factory. "I'd never met a lot of people who were scared of flying until I worked at Spirit," he said. "And then, being at Spirit, I met a lot of people who were afraid of flying — because they saw how they were building the fuselages."
"If quality mattered, I would still be at Spirit," Paredes told CBS News, speaking publicly for the first time. CBS News spoke with several current and former Spirit AeroSystems employees and reviewed photos of dented fuselages, missing fasteners and even a wrench they say was left behind in a supposedly ready-to-deliver component. Paredes said Boeing knew for years Spirit was delivering defective fuselages.
It could be just a coincidence, but the same day, the Associated Press ran story with this headline.

"Boeing plane carrying 85 people catches fire and skids off the runway in Senegal, injuring 10." It was the third incident involving a Boeing airplane this week. Also on Thursday, 190 people were safely evacuated from a plane in Turkey after one of its tires burst during landing at a southern airport, Turkey's transportation ministry said.
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Former Boeing Quality Inspector Turns Whistleblower, Says Plane Parts Had Serious Defects More

Former Boeing Quality Inspector Turns Whistleblower, Says Plane Parts Had Serious Defects

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  • Want to die of a sudden tragedy? (Score:5, Funny)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @02:35AM (#64466335)
    Cause this is how you die of a sudden tragedy. One wonder how much "Sudden Tragedy" is charging Boeing these days.

  • Santiago Paredes dies in (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @02:50AM (#64466351)

    3...2...1...

  • how to avoid MAX (Score:5, Informative)

    by writeRight ( 1444379 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @03:34AM (#64466377)
    Whistleblower quoted, "reluctant to fly on a 737 Max". While he is not an aviation design expert, he can speak on quality control. I purposefully avoid the 737MAX because I think it needs a new FAA type certification and the required testing.due to Boeing jamming big fans where they didn't fit. I start my travel planning at matrix.itasoftware.com and filter out flights on the MAX. In the "Extension Code" box, put in: -aircraft T:7M8 T:7M9
  • deadman walking!

  • Money makes the monkey dance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @04:27AM (#64466407)

    Santiago Paredes who worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, told the BBC he often found up to 200 defects on parts being readied for shipping to Boeing. He was nicknamed "showstopper" for slowing down production when he tried to tackle his concerns, he claimed.

    This sums up in a sentence, why 'self regulation by industry' doesn't work int he absence of outside followup and penalties for slacking off. There's always some greedy asshole who thinks it's a good idea increase profits in the short term by wrecking a reputation for quality built up over multiple decades of hard engineering work. Handing out nicknames like 'showstopper' to QA inspectors doesn't just speak volumes about the rank stupidity of the management this that advocates such a policy. It also indicates that a number of regular Boeing workers signed up to this idea as well if they were spitting this pejorative nickname after Paredes and other QA inspectors whenever they walked by. I suppose there is truth to the old proverb: 'Money makes the monkey dance".

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I was QC at a mfg facility (not airplane related), this whistleblower story sounds a lot like mine. Some of our production lines had critical defects between 20-25%. Didn't seem to matter what I found, management wanted numbers not quality. If anything got out the door they'd blame QC for not finding it.

      • I was QC at a mfg facility (not airplane related), this whistleblower story sounds a lot like mine. Some of our production lines had critical defects between 20-25%. Didn't seem to matter what I found, management wanted numbers not quality. If anything got out the door they'd blame QC for not finding it.

        Was the product safety related?

        If it's blenders breaking down early, then the company hamstringing QA sucks, but it just means more returns/pissed off customers.

        If it's something like a car or plane where failures can mean serious injury or death, then fighting QA is a big problem.

        I'm not sure what the answer is, government inspectors everywhere? Make it illegal for managers to pressure safety QA? I feel like whatever you do once companies are under a real crunch they'll find ways to take shortcuts.

      • Waiting to fix a problem with QA is a huge mistake. Good production lines don't need QA because there's nothing to "catch" at the end - it's been caught and corrected along the way.

        Ironically, the managers who push for numbers over quality have it completely wrong - better quality will produce better numbers (because there is much less rework). These lessons are from the 1980s. It's a shame they have still not learned them.
        • You are mistaking QC for QA. QC is inspecting after the fact, QA is trying to engineer the process such that errors literally cant happen.
          • I don't want to get into an argument over semantics, and I am happy to concede there is some difference between QA / QC (although personally I have not much interest in debating those differences)... but what I was mostly referring to was in the article summary it appeared the focus was on identifying and removing defects, rather than creating processes and systems that would prevent the formation of defects in the first place.

            Whatever it's called, it's #3 on Deming's 14 points (#3: cease dependence on in
    • I worked on a project for the government once. I was a quality inspector. Every time I had an issue with an inspection, I stopped that product from being sent to the government and my boss's boss, he 100% supported that decision of mine. a couple of times he asked what the issue was that I had with the product, but that was rare and once he understood why I was doing it, he would stand behind my decision 100%. My boss, his direct report, never once questioned my decisions. He had hired me for a reason and h

  • Boeing's management... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @05:10AM (#64466431)
    ...have well & truly f**ked the company. Will they ever recover from this? Who'll go to jail? How can they restore public confidence & the confidence of the people who decide which aircraft to buy/lease?

    As usual, the c-suite will probably be OK & move on to other jobs, while the workers, who were forced into this situation, will have to suffer the consequences. Don't you just love capitalism & all its glorious idiosyncrasies, perverse incentives, & lack of culpability?

    • Re:Boeing's management... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @05:25AM (#64466441)

      Who'll go to jail?

      Nobody.

      If you want to put people in jail for stupidity and incompetence, you'll need to build a lot more jails.

      The decisions that killed people were the lack of redundant sensors on the 737MAX and skimping on pilot training, both of which were approved by the FAA.

      • Re: Boeing's management... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by madbrain ( 11432 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @05:31AM (#64466445) Homepage Journal

        Criminal negligence is a thing. That seems to apply in this case.

        • Criminal negligence is a thing. That seems to apply in this case.

          It was an open process, and lots of people were involved. Some of them expressed second thoughts, but the bottom line is that the FAA signed off on these decisions.

          Should someone go to jail? That's a matter of opinion.

          WILL someone go to jail? No.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jd ( 1658 )

            Yes, it was signed off on, but consider this - juries don't really care about facts nearly as much as they care about how they feel. A skillfully-played jury would convict no matter who signed off on it.

            Unless it was Elvis. Elvis signing off on it might work. Because juries love celebrities even more than they love feeling righteous.

            • A prosecution requires a prosecutor.

              The prosecutors work for the government.

              Government fingerprints are all over this fiasco.

              Nobody will be prosecuted. Nobody will go to jail.

            • Yes, it was signed off on, but consider this - juries don't really care about facts nearly as much as they care about how they feel. A skillfully-played jury would convict no matter who signed off on it.

              No. A jury will be largely instructed to do something within the bounds of the law. One of the issues of multiple sign-offs and a largely open process, including one that involves a government agency is that it is virtually impossible to lay single specific blame.

              The top cut costs which isn't illegal. The bottom got diverse sign-off which spreads the blame. When everyone deflects on everyone else then it's virtually impossible to convict.

        • Boeing says they can’t find any documentation for the failed door plug. Oh well guess there’s no one to blame.

          • Whoever was in charge of collecting that documentation would need to answer for that one. It's hardly just the door plug, though. There have been many issues, which we are learning about thanks to whistleblowers.

      • Who'll go to jail?

        Nobody.

        If you want to put people in jail for stupidity and incompetence, you'll need to build a lot more jails.

        The decisions that killed people were the lack of redundant sensors on the 737MAX and skimping on pilot training, both of which were approved by the FAA.

        Yeah, now say that to the victims' families. & the passengers & crew who nearly died, how about them? & this looks like a case of "the chickens coming home to roost" after decades of criminal neglect. It's probably only going to get worse.

        I predict your insensitive comments aren't likely to age well.

        • I predict your insensitive comments aren't likely to age well.

          If you want to be lied to, go somewhere else.

          Only facts are of value when you're determining culpability.

          • Nope. Courts of law attempt to establish "the truth" in order to make sentencing decisions. All kinds of things that you probably wouldn't call facts are taken into consideration.

            Those comments are pretty bad now & given a growing litany of criminal negligence, time will be a harsh judge.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by irchans ( 527097 )

        The decisions that killed people were the lack of redundant sensors on the 737MAX and skimping on pilot training, both of which were approved by the FAA.

        The two 737MAX flights were Lion Air Flight 610 from Tangerang, to Pangkal Pinang and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 from Ethiopia to Nairobi, Kenya. The Pilots were not well enough trained, but I'm not sure how much it was the fault of the FAA. 737MAX pilots in the USA had more training.

        On the other hand, "In 2016, FAA approved Boeing's request to remove references to a new Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) from the flight manual." The MCAS, poorly designed software, faulty sensors,

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The Pilots were not well enough trained,

          That's unfairly blaming the pilots. Boeing's selling point for the 737Max was it flies like the other 737 planes, no need for extra $$$$$ training See: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/0... [cnn.com]

          New evidence has surfaced that Boeing told its commercial airline customers that the 737 MAX was fundamentally similar to previous versions of the workhorse jet, despite the addition of a stability system investigators are scrutinizing in probes of the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes.

          The planes are so similar, the sales pitch went, that airlines could avoid extensive and costly training for pilots who flew earlier versions of the 737.

          So no surprise many airlines didn't pay for extra training for the pilots. After all if they needed to pay for extra training, they might have bought Airbus planes instead.

          The FAA uses inspectors at Boeing that are paid by Boeing. That should stop.

          There's no problem with that as long as the inspectors go to prison when they say stuff is OK that they shouldn't have said is OK. Once you start doing t

        • In the USA, we require that doctors and lawyer be managed by doctors and lawyers.

          Citation needed.

          My healthcare provider is Kaiser. Here's the bio of the CEO [kaiserpermanente.org]. Guess what? He's not a doctor.

        • The best CEO of Boeing was a lawyer while two of the worst - one responsible for the management getting an office far away from the production facilities, the other responsible for the 737 MAX shit show - were both engineers. So much for that.

      • both of which were approved by the FAA.

        That is a massive oversimplification and yaddy-yaddering away of a) what it means to have FAA approval, and b) the process of obtaining FAA approval. While I agree the odds of anyone going to jail are zero, the reality is FAA approval doesn't prevent that, especially when there's documented evidence of both the process being heavily reliant on self-certification (which it was) and also evidence that the process itself was also deeply flawed.

      • The decisions that killed people were the lack of redundant sensors on the 737MAX and skimping on pilot training, both of which were approved by the FAA.

        So what you are saying is that for true justice, people from Boeing and people from the FAA need to be in prison?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

      Don't you just love capitalism & all its glorious idiosyncrasies, perverse incentives, & lack of culpability?

      It's an interesting statement which you present no alternative option. When you look at all the options the general definition sounds reasonable but the the implementation by humans seems impossible. Your statement would apply to any form of government;

      Don't you just love socialism & all its glorious idiosyncrasies, perverse incentives, & lack of culpability?

      There are many systems that have socialist governments that pretend to excel over capitalism but when looked at closely they suffer sim

      • The most likely cause of today's housing crises in a variety of developed countries is literal rent-seeking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Canada is a social democracy, like the USA, not a socialist state. They do have a kind of universal healthcare system, like most other developed countries, which are also mostly social democracies to some degree, but Canada's healthcare system is fragmented & semi-privatised, & as a result, has morphed into a two-tier system where you need private health i

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

          You missed the economics 101 lesson.

          The only way rent-seeking would be driving up the housing market is if there were limited suppliers allowing them to manipulate the market. While this can be said about telecom, there are way too many players in the housing market. In most jurisdictions entry into the housing market is fairly simple. Claiming rent-seeking is the cause of the housing crisis is a basic misunderstanding about economics.

          You missed the point in Canada and it's healthcare system. The only reaso

          • You clearly don't understand that all models are wrong but some are useful (George Box). In this case, your use of the overly simplified supply-demand model collapses under the complexities of how housing & healthcare systems in the real world actually work.
    • I don't recall the proletariat faring all that well under communism. Surprisingly, the inner party members seemed well-fed.
      • Yeah, things only really seemed to improve for most people when countries adopted social democracy as their political policy-making guide. Of course, some countries, like Finland, Norway, Sweden, etc., have implemented it more thoroughly than others. How's social democracy going in the USA these days?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by flink ( 18449 )

        They did OK at first, before the Bolsheviks purged all the soviets that were the country's namesake in order to centralize control. The real lesson of the Russian revolution was to distrust vanguard revolutionaries. It doesn't always go south, but it does more often than not.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      At this point, they might pull a DeHavilland. That was a very good company, but they botched it on safety once too often and went under. The British continued to use modified Comets for transport and early warning until very recently, showing how good the design was, but inept handling of safety trumped quality inspiration.

      It would not surprise me if Boeing suffered the same fate. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but aircraft incidents are being increasingly monitored in the news and it's almost always

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      This is now a race between them stepping down and reforming the company (very long-term thing) and some additional large catastrophe happening (probably will not take that long as broken as Boeing manufacturing is now). Management doing things "cheaper than possible" is pretty much a death-sentence for an engineering outfit, regardless of size. Same process seems to be at work with Microsoft (several really bad cloud breaches recently) and Google (they deleted a large customer from their cloud a few days ba

  • Why not one more ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hebertrich ( 472331 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @05:56AM (#64466501)

    If i was Santiago Paredes , i'd be worried , already two whistleblowers suddenly died tragically ( aka murdered ) and he imho will be the third,
    It won't come as a surprise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      If they were murdered, that fact will come out at some point. (I say "if", but it is extremely suspicious.)

      And if that comes out, Boeing will cease to exist as a going concern.

  • Still the safest way to travel (Score:3)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @07:22AM (#64466593)

    Much as it seems likely that Boeing has been evil in its failure to maintain safety standards, and deserves some serious punishment for their behaviour, it's important to realise just how safe air travel is. One of the saddest codas to 9/11 is that 1500 extra people died in road accidents because of choosing to drive instead of fly.

    https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Agreed that, if you rank things, air travel is extremely safe.

      However, if you score not against the existing alternatives but the upper bounds of what is practical and feasible, I suspect the scores would look drastically different, with all forms of transport being crammed into one blip at the end of the curve of what we could (economically) achieve with the technology and resources available.

      That's the curve I think we should pay more attention to, and we should be revising the standards, be it for cars,

      • There would be no deaths on the roads if noone drove. That we do drive is a trade off that we choose to make.

        Yes, there could be greater safety on the roads, but there would be a cost. The question then becomes: 'who should pay?' In reality the driving public will baulk at substantial rises in costs, and the result would be a loss of 'profits'. Profits are necessary if private firms are going to risk their shareholders' money and invest to produce cars.

        And remember the depressing observation that safer cars

    • Much as it seems likely that Boeing has been evil in its failure to maintain safety standards, and deserves some serious punishment for their behaviour, it's important to realise just how safe air travel is.

      Which is EXACTLY why the punishment needs to be swift and SEVERE. Those mother fuckers gambled with the safety processes that we had built up over years. People are dying now and in the future because of these fucked up decisions that were permitted to be made.

      With random numbers: We went from a 1 in 100 million chance in getting killed to a 1 in 100 thousand chance of getting killed. Sure, a 1 in 100,000 chance means every time I gamble, I am likely to come out a winner, but the odds have changed by an ord

  • Not coincidence (Score:3)

    by ThumpBzztZoom ( 6976422 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @09:19AM (#64466779)

    It could be just a coincidence, but the same day, the Associated Press ran story with this headline.

    "Boeing plane carrying 85 people catches fire and skids off the runway in Senegal, injuring 10."

    No, it couldn't be coincidence, because that was a 737-300, the last of which was made in 1999, which is 6 years before Spirit Aerosytems was founded. It's a completely unrelated story, not a coincidence.

    And a blown tire on another plane is also completely unrelated to the story.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      I'm not entirely convinced. Boeing list three airframes, I think in the 90s or early 2000s, due to metallic particles clogging the hydraulics. It took three accidents before they admitted there was any problem at all.

      That tells me that there has been a denial culture in Boeing for a very long time, that they'd rather blame others first. It also tells me that quality has always been secondary to profits, a correct design would have cost more and that took priority over doing the job right.

      Burst tyres happen

  • Suicide by Boeing (Score:3)

    by kmahan ( 80459 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @10:17AM (#64466881)

    Declaring yourself a Boeing Whistleblower is the latest way of committing suicide.

  • Something tells me heâ(TM)s going to suffer a very unfortunate âoeaccidentâ soon.

  • what scares me... (Score:3)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Sunday May 12, 2024 @10:50AM (#64466917) Homepage Journal

    What scares me about all of this is that so far nobody has faced any real consequences except for the whistleblowers, and Boing doesn't seem to suffer all that much.

    Building airplanes is a near-monopoly market. It's also a market where few units are sold (compared with, say, smartphones or virtually any other consumer and most industrial goods). That means you can pull stunts like low priority on quality, because you can make the probability calculations and they can end up in your favor. If cutting costs on corner X has a 1 in 10,000 chance to go wrong, in smartphones that means there will be hundreds of failures and your chance of getting away with it without headlines or class-action lawsuits is pretty slim. But if you only ever sell a few hundred or so - even the highly successful 747 has like 1500 units sold in total - then you have a very good chance that the 1:10,000 failure doesn't happen. So a business decision to just take the risk can make sense.

    And if the industry and courts don't punish you, severely, the message is clear: It's ok to take these risky decisions.

    If we don't want planes falling out of the sky, then the people making those decisions need to go to jail, and pay enough fines to wipe out a couple years of work, bonuses and all.

    As someone who has worked with management on all levels, I'm convinced that wide-spread quality-is-a-low-priority attitudes like this don't happen without top management knowledge and at least tacit approval.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      What scares me about all of this is that so far nobody has faced any real consequences except for the whistleblowers, and Boing doesn't seem to suffer all that much.

      Building airplanes is a near-monopoly market. It's also a market where few units are sold (compared with, say, smartphones or virtually any other consumer and most industrial goods). That means you can pull stunts like low priority on quality, because you can make the probability calculations and they can end up in your favor. If cutting costs on corner X has a 1 in 10,000 chance to go wrong, in smartphones that means there will be hundreds of failures and your chance of getting away with it without headlines or class-action lawsuits is pretty slim. But if you only ever sell a few hundred or so - even the highly successful 747 has like 1500 units sold in total - then you have a very good chance that the 1:10,000 failure doesn't happen. So a business decision to just take the risk can make sense.

      And if the industry and courts don't punish you, severely, the message is clear: It's ok to take these risky decisions.

      If we don't want planes falling out of the sky, then the people making those decisions need to go to jail, and pay enough fines to wipe out a couple years of work, bonuses and all.

      As someone who has worked with management on all levels, I'm convinced that wide-spread quality-is-a-low-priority attitudes like this don't happen without top management knowledge and at least tacit approval.

      Thinking on the long term, Boeing has to get their shit together fast lest we start to see competition in the 150-200 seat narrowbody market from BRICs, COMAC in China already has a A320/B737 size aircraft in production (made mostly from western parts). Embraer has made grumblings about making a larger aircraft to the E-Jets, Russia was trying to export it's commercial jets (like China, using western components) prior to the sanctions but struggled because Airbus and Boeing could meet demand. Competition wo

    • What scares me about all of this is that so far nobody has faced any real consequences except for the whistleblowers, and Boing doesn't seem to suffer all that much.

      Congratulations! You found out what "too big to fail" means. We will be stuck with shitty aeroplanes until the USA itself falls. :(

  • My sincere condolences to this man's widow.

  • He is not going to last long.

  • Capitalism at its finest. Relentless pursuit of profit before anything else. Thank YOU USA, for this wonderful tool designed to create inequality. Let the poor sods die in troves, who cares? Rich people have their own planes, anyhow. it's time to nationalise key industries and execute anyone found to be corrupt. And no, this has got nothing to do with communism or the Soviet union

  • Is this story of poor quality true or is someone trying to shift the blame from Zeus to a lesser god?

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