- Boeing is trying to peel back the curtain on its operations after a series of high-profile incidents.
- The company says it’s facing its safety challenges head-on and that its planes remain generally safe.
- Boeing is making changes to its training, production processes and safety management system.
RENTON, Wash. – Boeing is having a rough year.
The company, which has been under a microscope recently, is trying to peel back the curtain on its operations. In a tightly choreographed media open house that USA TODAY attended on Tuesday, Boeing said it’s facing its safety challenges head-on. Employees, from the C-suite to the production line, insist that the airframer is turning a corner – reaffirming that its planes remain generally safe and are only getting safer.
Since 2018, a series of high-profile incidents, including two deadly 737 Max crashes overseas, and an explosive decompression incident in January that left an Alaska Airlines 737 Max flying without a section of its fuselage, have raised significant questions about the safety culture at the company, which was once renowned for its engineering excellence.
Scrutiny and criticism of Boeing increased exponentially this year after the Alaska Airlines incident, which seemed to show that the company was not keeping promises it made to improve safety in the wake of the earlier crashes.
During this event:Boeing sanctioned over media briefing that ‘provided investigative information,’ NTSB says
Now Boeing faces heightened oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration and Congress, and possible criminal liability in an ongoing Department of Justice investigation tied to some of these serious safety incidents.
The DOJ has made no decision yet on whether to pursue a prosecution of Boeing.
“From where I sit, the issue must be a relentless focus on process and product quality, which work together in a virtuous cycle of improvement to yield employee, product, and end-user safety,” Robert W. Mann Jr., a former airline executive officer and current president of R. W. Mann and Co., an independent airline consultancy, told USA TODAY in an email. Mann said he does not have inside information about the changes Boeing is working on internally, but his comments referred to the company’s culture more generally.
Boeing insists it’s turning that corner. Here are some of the changes it said it’s making:
Enhancing training
According to Elizabeth Lund, Boeing’s senior vice president of quality, the company’s first step to fixing its safety culture is changing the way it conducts training.
Lund told the 50 or so international journalists who attended Tuesday’s briefing that a production slowdown following the 737 Max crashes, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in high turnover on the factory floors, leading to a glut of newly hired workers with less experience. To address the resulting change in the company’s demographics, Lund said, it’s reinforcing its peer mentoring program.
“We knew we brought in thousands of new employees,” she said, “We have really strengthened on-the-job training. That’s the really hands-on part … you go to the floor and you really learn how to do your job.”
Before on-the-job training, however, Boeing factory employees undergo a reinvigorated foundational training regime where they learn the basics of their factory tasks before moving to the production line. According to Lund, every employee who comes out of foundational training gets assigned a mentor with more experience on the factory floor.
Simplifying processes
Lund said that Boeing is also trying to streamline its production processes and instruction documents to make them easier for new hires to learn.
Lund explained that because of Boeing’s multigeneration fleet types, like the 737, the first version of which was produced in the 1960s, some documents and production standards are amalgamations of previous best practices. Now, the company is evaluating many of its existing workflows, starting with the most safety-critical aspects, to ensure that they are efficient and easier to replicate.
Eliminating defects
Another key part of Boeing’s safety updates is trying to identify and address defects as soon as possible in the production chain. Part of that work includes sending more Boeing inspectors to its own suppliers to ensure that parts, like the fuselage produced by Spirit AeroSystems that was implicated in the Alaska Airlines incident in January, are defect-free before they even reach Boeing property.
It also means being more prepared to stop the production line when a defect is identified if it’s not easily remedied.
“Get quality right, via quality control, quality assurance, root cause identification and resolution, and it resolves the rest of the present issues,” Mann said.
Boeing’s 737 fuselages go through a 10-day production workflow on the factory floor. They move ahead day by day from the moment they enter the factory to the day they’re ready to roll out to the paint shop.
During the tour, a Boeing employee pointed out that the day-five slot was empty on the production line. A few days earlier, employees had identified an issue with a fuselage that was being worked on. Under Boeing’s previous practices, the semi-built aircraft may have moved ahead and the defects would have been addressed literally down the line. But now Boeing is putting greater emphasis on keeping airplanes in place until they pass a quality inspection each day that aims to guarantee they won’t need major retroactive fixes.
“We have seen up to an 80% reduction in defects” since implementing these changes, Lund said.
Strengthening Boeing’s safety culture
Lund acknowledged that Boeing only began implementing an official safety management system in 2019. The FAA defines a safety management system as “the formal, top-down, organization-wide approach to managing safety risk and assuring the effectiveness of safety risk controls. It includes systematic procedures, practices, and policies for the management of safety risk,” and it’s a standard practice at many airlines and other companies in the aviation industry.
Boeing still has not fully rolled out its safety management system, but Lund said the company is committed to finalizing that work, echoing promises the airframer made in the wake of the 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019.
“How do we make sure we’re not doing anything that could cause an airplane safety issue later on? We’re documenting it, we’re reviewing it,” Lund said.
Boeing has also been in the spotlight for its handling of whistleblower complaints. Several current and former employees have come forward alleging safety lapses at the company, and saying they were retaliated against for reporting their concerns.
While testifying on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said he had not met with any of the whistleblowers directly.
Lund said that Boeing takes these complaints seriously. While she couldn’t say for sure how involved the whistleblowers were in working with Boeing to update its safety procedures, she said they were certainly invited to participate in company-wide meetings that focused on safety, including recent “safety stand-downs” that gave employees across the company an opportunity to address their concerns to management directly.
Family members of victims killed in the Boeing crashes asked a U.S. judge to name a corporate monitor to examine the company’s safety and corporate compliance procedures.
Is it working?
Of course, by inviting members of the media, Boeing was always planning to highlight its progress toward safety. The steps it’s taking are in line with what Mann, the industry consultant, would recommend.
“A focus on quality creates the improved output and financial results that go with reduced traveled work, product rework, and the associated wasted effort, cost, time, and lost productivity,” Mann said. Traveled work refers to fuselages with defects moving down the production line that then require fixes out of phase with the regular workflow.
The feedback of one of its employees on the tour underscored the fact that this time, Boeing may actually be succeeding in making changes.
David Prigg, one of the Boeing-appointed tour guides for the media group, has been with the company for 13 years and told a group of journalists that his father worked for Boeing as well. He said he’s been involved in mentoring new hires on the production line and has recently seen a subtle shift in the company’s culture.
Now, he said, factory employees, including his mentees, are more assertive about speaking up about safety concerns. They’re even more open to offering suggestions to help make their workflow more efficient.
“We’re very proud of what we do and we take (safety) seriously,” Prigg said.