An employee works on the tail of a Boeing Co. airplane. Dreamliner 787 on the production line at the company’s final assembly facility in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Travis Dove | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Boeing On Monday he defended quality and safety tests on the 787 Dreamliner and 777 jets, days after one of the company’s engineers published allegations that the plane maker took “shortcuts” to speed up production of the planes.
The whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, said last week that Boeing’s 787 assembly was putting too much stress on the planes’ joints that could shorten some of the planes’ lifespans. Boeing has denied the claims, calling them “inaccurate” and said it stands by the safety of the planes.
Salehpour is scheduled to appear with another whistleblower who worked at Boeing, a former Air Force official and an independent safety expert at a Senate hearing Wednesday on aircraft safety called “Examining Boeing’s Broken Safety Culture: Accounts from first hand”.
Salehpour’s claims come as Boeing is under intense scrutiny after a door stopper exited a 737 Max plane in January. The narrow-body airliner is Boeing’s best-seller, and the explosion at 16,000 feet left passengers inches away from tragedy. After the accident, the Federal Aviation Administration prevented Boeing from increasing production of this plane.
In a roughly two-hour briefing with reporters on Monday, two Boeing engineering directors outlined the company’s endurance and safety tests for the 787, which include testing the plane for 165,000 cycles, each intended to provide a flight equivalent, under different conditions . In addition, the fuselage skin was struck by a 300-pound pendulum, engineers said.
Steve Chisholm, chief engineer for mechanical and structural engineering at Boeing, said Boeing damaged the fuselage panels in intense tests that were repeated more times than the aircraft would test in service, “and the damage did not increase “.
Salehpour’s claims relate to tiny spaces where pieces of the 787’s composite carbon fuselage meet. He said Boeing used force to join the pieces together and didn’t measure the gaps properly. He and his lawyers sent a letter to the FAA in January detailing his allegations, and the agency is investigating.
The whistleblower said on a call with reporters last week that he “literally saw people jumping on the pieces” of the 777 “to get them to line up.” Boeing later that day said those claims were inaccurate and that it was “completely confident 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 clearances on 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 done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft,” the plane maker said in a statement in response to the allegations. “The issues raised have undergone a rigorous engineering review under the supervision of the FAA. This analysis confirmed that these issues do not present any safety concerns and the aircraft will maintain its service life for several decades.”
Salehpour’s lawyers also claim Boeing retaliated against him after he raised his concerns by excluding him from meetings and moving him off the 787 program and onto the company’s 777 design.
Boeing last week declined to comment on those specific allegations, citing the FAA’s ongoing complaint investigation, but said, “Retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”
The company is scheduled to report quarterly results on April 24, when it will face investor questions about aircraft safety, production rates and FAA oversight.