The Daily - Boeing’s Broken Dreams

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

This week, “The Daily” is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of 2019 and checking in on what has happened since they first appeared. Today, we return to our conversation with the whistle-blower John Barnett, known as Swampy, about what he said were systemic safety problems at Boeing. After two 737 Max jet crashes killed a total of 346 people and a federal investigation left the company in crisis, we ask: Is something deeper going wrong at the once-revered manufacturer? Guest: Natalie Kitroeff, a business reporter for The New York Times, spoke with John Barnett, a former quality manager at Boeing. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:Boeing successfully lobbied to reduce government oversight of airplane designs, allowing them to regulate faulty engineering internally.A congressional investigation last fall asked what Boeing knew before the two crashes.

Hey there, it's Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year, listening back, and then hearing what's happened in the time since. Today, the whistleblowers at Boeing. It's Friday, January 3rd. Boeing was the place. I mean, they were the place to work, you know. And oh my God, it was amazing when I put that Boeing shirt on.

My chest puffed out. You know, I'd walk into the store around here, and they're like, oh, you work for Boeing? That is awesome. And thank y'all so much, and you just mean so much to this area, you know. Wow. And it was just awesome. so much to this area, you know? Wow.

And it was just awesome. And it's just... We don't have that anymore here. Nobody does. I mean, everybody I talk to in Bowling, they're embarrassed to work there most of the time. It's just gone. Did you ever expect to feel the way that you feel about the company now?

Oh, absolutely not. Natalie, I still lose sleep every night. I just, I guess, I don't know. I got a conscience or something. I don't know. But I just, you know, I had to get it. I have to get it addressed. That's why I keep telling my story. Somebody's got to step in and get it addressed.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Indonesia's search and rescue agency says that a Lion Air passenger flight has crashed into the sea. An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 traveling from Addis Ababa to Nairobi has crashed with deaths reported. After the two crashes of Boeing's 737 MAX jets, regulators and lawmakers began asking questions about whether the race to get that jet built and the competitive pressure may have led Boeing to miss safety risks in the plane's design.

The FAA and Boeing say faulty sensors on new 737 MAX jets can cause the plane to go into a steep dive. In reporting that story, my colleague Natalie Kitchoff began to look into whether that pressure extends beyond the 737 MAX. It's Tuesday, April 23rd. Natalie, where does this story start? whether those pressures might have had an impact not just on the engineering decisions around the design of the aircraft at the highest levels,

but whether it also plays out on the factory floor and affects the people who are actually building Boeing planes. Basically, is there a larger cultural issue here? That's the question we were asking. Then we hear from attorneys who are representing multiple whistleblowers who work on the factory floor at Boeing. And it turns out that these whistleblowers have been trying to get attention to these issues, to their concerns, for a very long time. And any time you hear about there being several whistleblowers with the same concerns at a company like Boeing, you pay attention. Pay attention. So one of these whistleblowers was named John.

Hello? Hey, Swampy. Hey, how you doing, Natalie? Or Swampy. Swampy. He goes by Swampy. It's short for Swamp Dog. Yeah, one day I was at work just cutting up with some guys and one of them popped off. Well, hell, you're just

a damn double swamp dog from the swamps of Louisiana. And it just stuck. So I start talking to Swampy. Can I ask why you decided to become a whistleblower? Wow. So that's a lot.

A lot. And that leads me to many other whistleblowers. We're not talking about cars. You know, if your car breaks down, you can pull over to the side of the road. There is no pulling over. And ultimately...

And there's other things about the plane, the actual material that it's made of. My colleague and I talk to more than a dozen current and former employees, and we review hundreds of pages of internal emails, company documents, federal records. We speak with the FAA and with Boeing, and we begin to piece together an entirely new narrative about the way that

manufacturing is done at Boeing that we never expected to find. Ladies and gentlemen, your 787 Dreamliner. So it starts with the 787 Dreamliner, another of Boeing's crown jewels. This is the first commercial airplane to be made with 50% composite materials. It was unveiled in 2007, and it was Boeing's most important offering in a generation. And it looks cool. I remember reading about this plane. This had giant windows, the kind of unusually big nose. It was going to be the next big thing in airlines.

Oh, yeah. Oh, that was the news of the month, you know. New airplane, new technology, you know, state of the art. And for a while it was. That was our future. Absolutely. That's why it's a dreamliner, because it's our future, you know. And for a while it was. It was a big deal.

But pretty quickly, the 787 program begins to run into problems. So it is delaying this and Boeing saying, in fact, it's not going to know even for the next few weeks when it is going to reschedule. Well, now the company is dealing with two new 787 incidents in the past two days. Yet another delay for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner. The U.S. planemaker pushed back the schedule for the fourth time. To the point where Boeing begins to get a bit concerned about whether it's going to meet the deadlines that it's set for the program. Elsewhere, a confident Boeing is going to build a second plant to make its 787 Dreamliner. So Boeing decides it's going to open a brand new factory. And how big a deal is that for Boeing?

This is a huge deal for Boeing. Boeing has been making its commercial aircraft in two factories in Washington. This would be a foray into a new state, a new assembly line. You're talking a manufacturing hub that needs to be state of the art, that can manufacture one of the most advanced aircraft in the world. A major investment both in real estate and in jobs. And where do they end up building the facility? Do I even need to say it is a great day in South Carolina?

They picked Charleston, South Carolina. We are telling the entire world that we build things in South Carolina. We build cars, we build tires, and now we build dreams. Big Mac Daddy 787 dreams. The issue is that Boeing has promised to create 3,800 local jobs. But Charleston doesn't have the thriving aerospace workforce that you would see in Washington, where Boeing has nurtured generations of aircraft builders. And they bring people like Swampy, managers from the Washington area,

over to Charleston to get things started. I'm originally from Louisiana. I'm a Louisiana boy, so when they opened up the Boeing South Carolina plant, you know, I looked at it as a great opportunity not only to get close to my family, but to, you know, help build it from the ground up. So I want to be a part of that, you know? Was the culture of the factory in Charleston the same as the culture of the factory in Washington? Oh, absolutely not. It's like night and day. They hired a lot of people from the South Carolina state that really had no experience with building airplanes and building commercial airplanes and understanding what procedures were and the criticality of them. So, you know, that was a big change or a big difference I saw was they just didn't have the experience down here.

So they are furiously trying to train all of these new workers, but they're really far behind on the 787 program, years behind. but they're really far behind on the 787 program, years behind. Eventually, the plane comes out, but a couple years later, they run into a problem. The FAA suddenly announced they are grounding the Dreamliner. The FAA grounds the fleet after a problem with batteries overheating that could cause a fire. It's grounded until it can prove to the federal government that the airline has fixed the problem with the battery that continues to overheat.

They come up with a fix. But what I am learning from people like Swampy, from the more than a dozen current and former employees that we talked to, is that the batteries weren't the only problem. That there was pressure on the factory floor that was creating a litany of other issues. What was your title when you moved to Charleston? Quality manager. Multifamily quality manager.

So as a quality control manager, part of Swampy's job was to check the insides of planes to make sure that as workers are building the planes, nothing is left behind. No debris is left inside the aircraft. So I was called out to that airplane to look at an issue. And that's where we discovered all this debris, these three-inch long titanium slivers laying around. It's just debris everywhere. And while he's doing these inspections, he begins to notice that there are clusters of metal slivers that are hanging over the wires that control the plane.

The risk here is these metal slivers will migrate into a power panel, any kind of power, any kind of electronic equipment, and short it out and cause a fire. And if it's at 40,000 feet, that's a problem. Is this normal? No, no, absolutely not. This is a first. And so he brings the issue to his managers,

and he says, we need to clean this. I physically showed him the airplane. I took pictures, sent him pictures. And a peer of mine walked in on the conversation, you know, and he was telling my peer, you need to go inspect line 230. I said, that's what we just looked at. These are the pictures I sent you. I said, I won't sign off on it. I won't accept it. So he, I was removed from it. So you're saying you alerted your manager to the debris that you found on this plane. And in response, he took you off the plane and gave it to someone else to inspect. Yes, that's correct.

Did that ever get cleaned? It was delivered without being cleaned. And it's not just the metal slivers on these planes. Swampy and several other employees at Boeing have said that there is a ton of stuff that is being left inside of the aircrafts. Nuts, bolts, fasteners, rags, bubble wrap, trash, tools. And it's not just in the build process. They're finding this stuff on the flight line as the planes are being prepared for delivery. And when you say inside the plane, you mean inside the guts, the machinery of the plane, not the passenger parts of the plane. Right.

It's inside the bowels of the aircraft. So we heard the story of a representative for American Airlines who found a bolt, a stray bolt, inside of an engine. And this was on a plane that had already gone up for a test flight with Boeing pilots. We heard about a ladder inside of a tail of a plane that had also already gone up for a test flight. The workers pointed to these as examples of shoddy, sometimes sloppy workmanship. We heard, for example, of a technician who found chewing gum holding together the lining of a door. Just a cosmetic issue, but again, sloppiness. With some of the objects, though, there were safety risks, employees said. And I asked Swampy about all this.

Swampy, I think, you know, some people might hear a lot of the stuff that you saw and say, look, it sounds like a lot of that is sloppy, but maybe it doesn't affect safety. What would you say to that? I'd say probably about 60% of this stuff, I would agree. It's sloppy, but just shooting from the hip, I mean, 40% of this is critical stuff. I mean, look, you got metal shavings floating around, electronics equipment. If you've ever put your head against the window of an airplane, you know how much a plane vibrates while it's flying.

Imagine then a bolt or a ladder or these metal shavings vibrating near wiring or near critical parts of the plane. That bolt, had it migrated inside of the engine, it could have caused the engine to malfunction. So Swampy sees this pressure for speed resulting in all of this sloppiness. But he's even more troubled by something else he's seen as a reflection of this culture. So let me tell you this. Let me tell you kind of what's going on. We'll be right back.

So I was assigned to MRSA, quality manager of MRSA. Swampy, at a certain point, is in charge of the area of the factory that houses defective parts. And he says that hundreds of defective parts are going missing with no record of where they've gone. So basically they're just gone. And, you know, we tried to figure out who took them, where they went. We had no idea where they went. We just don't know. And he suspects and fears that they are ending up on airplanes.

I think it's highly likely they're on airplanes. Absolutely. Those fears are confirmed in a particularly troubling episode. So I was actually out of office that day, and I'd come in, I don't know, it was like the next day or the day after, and my team started telling me about it. One of my inspectors was telling me, you know, hey, this is what

happened, and there was three of us here, and we tried to tell him he couldn't do it. Where he hears from the inspectors who report to him that a manager has come into that area for defective parts, taken a defective, a dented

hydraulic tube out of that area, given it to another manager who installed it on an airplane. A dreamliner. A dreamliner. And like three of my inspectors jumped up and said, no, you cannot do that. That's a serious process violation.

And he basically told them the same thing. Don't worry about it, you know. Is the hydraulic tube, is it essential to the plane? Oh, yeah. Because, yeah, the hydraulics is what operates your flaps and your slats and, you know, anything that requires hydraulic movement, which is typically all your flight control systems. Yeah, that's where your hydraulic flumes go. flight control systems. Yeah, that's where your hydraulic flumes go. The reason that his inspectors know that this happened is that it looks as though someone has unsuccessfully tried to rub off the red paint that is on this part. There's red paint on the part

because it's defective. That is meant to signal, do not install this part on a plane. So someone went into that pile of red-painted, defective stuff, grabbed something out, tried to disguise it as non-defective, non-red, and had it installed in the plane. Boeing said that it investigated this issue and did not substantiate Swampy's claims. investigated this issue and did not substantiate Swampy's claims. But Swampy says it wasn't just anybody that did this. It was a senior manager. Someone above Swampy has done this.

And so he calls that person, he says, and he says, I said, hey, I'm hearing that you did this. Is it true? Did that happen? And he said, yep, I did. And don't you worry about it. I got it taken care of. That manager said it did and let it go.

We have it handled. And again, Swampy submitted a complaint about this issue to the FAA. The FAA investigated and found that defective parts had gone missing. So now you're getting into the culture at Charleston, right? And the culture here is push the planes out, don't worry, you know, just find a way. Get them out, get them out. Remember that in this factory,

there is a huge amount of pressure to produce these planes as fast as possible. And if you don't have the part that you need to finish the job, just one job on the airplane, that holds you back. That holds the whole production line back. And so if it's easier and faster to just go grab a defective part and put it on the plane, that might be what you do in that scenario. In fact, I had one senior manager one day tell me that, actually, there was a few of us standing around talking about inspection, and he said, you know, we don't need inspectors.

These planes are too smart to fall out of the sky. I was like, oh, my God, with that mentality running the show down here, that's scary. And Swampy, were managers rewarded for production? Yes. Actually, it's almost measured hourly at times. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of pressure to meet schedule. And folks are getting, managers are getting judged

by their superiors based on an hourly... The number of jobs they get sold, yes. Based on an hourly count of the work that they're doing, of the jobs that they complete and get approved by Quality and Spend. Exactly, exactly. And it's held against them if they create defects. So, you know, there's an incentive not to report your defect that you created because it's going to be held against you.

What does Boeing say about this idea that there is a conflict between the safety that they proclaim and the on-the-ground pressures that you're describing from employees to get these planes out the door? Boeing pushes back on the idea that there is a cultural problem. They reject that notion altogether. problem. They reject that notion altogether. In response to our reporting, Boeing insisted that safety is its number one priority and said, we prioritize safety and quality over speed, but all three can be accomplished while still producing one of the safest airplanes flying today. And to be clear, the 787 Dreamliner has never crashed. It has a pristine safety record, and there's no evidence that any of the problems that we document has led to major safety incidents. But since the crashes of those two 737 MAX jets, the question that is being raised by lawmakers, by regulators, and by employees within Boeing is whether those three factors, safety, quality, and speed, are always in balance. The competitive pressures that exist at the highest levels of this company are bearing down not just on the engineers as they design how this aircraft is going to work, but also on the factory floor, on the people who are responsible for assembling and manufacturing these aircraft.

assembling, and manufacturing these aircraft. Does the push to produce sometimes lead senior-level managers to overlook or ignore or sometimes dismiss the concerns raised by the people who are making these planes? I just think it's critically important that the activities going on within Boeing are made aware to the people whose lives could be affected. You know, I mean, manager at Boeing, you're the last line of defense before a defect makes it out to the flying public. So as a quality manager, being the last line of defense, that's a huge responsibility. You know, everything I put my name on, I'm certifying that it meets the requirements, the regulatory requirements, is a safe, airworthy condition. And I haven't seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I'd put my name on

that's saying it's safe and airworthy. Swampy is just one employee, but he retired a couple of years ago because of the pressure that he felt to not report violations. I think a lot of people listening to this may have flights booked on 787s, and I wonder what you would tell them. Well, I would say just, I mean, what could I say?

You know, I mean, just understand what you're getting into. I mean, understand that just because it's a brand-new airplane from Boeing don't mean that it was built right. Would you fly on a 787 Dreamliner out of Charleston? No, ma'am. You couldn't pay me. Swampy, thank you. You're welcome. We'll be right back. Following Natalie's investigation, the Times reported that the Department of Justice,

which was already looking into problems with Boeing's 737 MAX jet, had broadened its investigation to include the Dreamliner. As part of that investigation, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Boeing for documents related to production processes at the Dreamliner plant in North Charleston, where Swampy worked. The 737 MAX has remained grounded by federal regulators for nearly a year. As a result, in mid-December, Boeing said it would temporarily stop production of the jet. A few days later, Boeing fired its chief executive, Dennis Mullenberg.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you Monday.