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There are devastating breakdown reports almost every day. Now the US aircraft manufacturer is taking countermeasures.
The US aircraft manufacturer Boeing cannot escape the negative headlines. Every week there are reports of lost wheels or doors, burning engines or technical problems that cause the plane to sink in the air, injuring passengers.
The New York Times has now published parts of the investigation report by the US aviation authority FAA. It gives Boeing a miserable report card.
Whistleblower dies due to violence
In addition, there is currently the death of a Boeing whistleblower due to violence. The 62-year-old engineer was found dead in his car in South Carolina. His body had wounds, according to initial media reports.
The man had spent a lifetime working for Boeing and was in South Carolina to testify in court against his former employer. The engineer had been publicly drawing attention to safety problems at Boeing since 2019.
The FAA report, for its part, supports statements made by the former Boeing engineer. According to the New York Times, the FAA inspected 89 Boeing production processes and products over a six-week period.
Conclusion: In 33 audits, Boeing did not meet legal safety and quality standards. Boeing’s main supplier Spirit Aero Systems, which, among other things, builds the fuselage of Boeing aircraft, did not meet the requirements in six out of 13 cases.
Soft soap for lubricating door bolts
Apparently there is a lack of documentation of production processes. Neither Boeing nor Spirit can provide documents about the blown-out side of an Alaska plane in January. In other cases, the FAA found that soft soap was used to lubricate door bolts.
Or hotel key cards were used to test whether doors were tight. It is becoming increasingly clear to experts that Boeing has lost control of its value chain.
The outsourcing of the construction of the fuselage parts is partly responsible for the debacle. In 2005, this part of the company, which had belonged to Boeing for 80 years, was spun off. It was sold to investors and listed on the stock exchange under the name Spirit Aerosystems.
It was believed that outsourcing would allow production to be cheaper. But this apparently came at the expense of quality and safety. Spirit has posted losses of $2.5 billion over the past four years.
Secession is reversed
19 years after the outsourcing, the strategic turnaround is now coming: A week ago, Boeing announced that it wanted to reintegrate Spirit again. Experts believe this is the only right step. Because the spin-off of this core business was a fundamentally wrong decision.
You can recognize it by the fact that 60 percent of Spirit production goes to Boeing. The European competitor Airbus does this completely differently: it produces the most important things on its own and thus has the value creation process under control.
But the re-integration of Spirit is not yet done. Boeing also needs more professionals with the necessary professional experience. But many of them were laid off during the pandemic. The company culture must also reward safety and quality again. Boeing now wants to achieve this with a new bonus system.