Quality Concerns in Dreamliners That Boeing Sold to Air India Had Given a Manager Nightmares

This report first appeared on The American Prospect and was republished with permission. Read the original here. Sign up for the Prospect's newsletter here. For 15 years now, engineers and quality control specialists have implored regulators, journalists and airlines to take a closer look at the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing's first and only clean-sheet commercial airplane designed from scratch since the company's horrific 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. The smooth surface of the lightweight composite fibres used to construct the airframe can conceal deadly structural flaws, they warned. The non-union workforce that manufactures the jets in South Carolina is unqualified to stand up to 'good old boy' bosses constantly pressuring them to ignore obvious nonconformities, install malfunctioning parts and cut every corner imaginable to get planes out the door, they asserted. Unsavoury subcontractors have exploited Boeing's lax standards to litter the assembly line with fake parts, they demonstrated.But until today, the contrarians could always demand to know: if the Dreamliner is so unsafe, why hasn't it ever crashed?The late John Barnett, who died last March in an apparent suicide two days into a three-day deposition stemming from the insane practices he witnessed and tried vainly to stop as a quality manager at the Dreamliner's final assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina, had a ready answer for this question: Just wait a bit. Most planes aren't designed to dive nosefirst into the ground like the 737 Max. It generally takes, he'd say with audible sadness, ten or twelve years for assembly-line sloppiness to culminate in a plane crash. (Barnett personally drove everywhere in the orange truck in which he died.)More from Maureen TkacikIt's too early to know exactly what caused the bizarre crash of Air India 171 in Ahmedabad, a western India city of 5.6 million people, just seconds into what was supposed to be a 10-hour flight to London. The pilot reportedly cried 'engine failure' in a mayday call to air traffic controllers seconds before the crash into a guest house for doctors, and footage of the plane, which slowly sank with its nose upturned in takeoff position, suggests a sudden loss of power. The 787 Dreamliner has been plagued by engine problems partially caused by the abundance of so-called 'foreign object debris' Boeing assembly line workers chronically leave on aircraft components in their haste to move to the next task.So far, Boeing has only said they were 'working to gather more information' on the crash. Air India has confirmed that 241 of the 242 passengers aboard have died, with the lone survivor being treated in a nearby hospital.Barnett was demoted and ostracised after he attempted to force workers to disassemble and clean wire bundles and electrical boxes that had been littered with metal scraps of floorboard fasteners, scraps he knew could cause the electrical systems to short-circuit. Another former quality manager I know was fired after refusing to sign off on improperly-tied wire bundles littered with foreign object debris that had already begun to fray. FOD was implicated in a massive engine fire aboard a 787 test flight in 2010, and another test flight in Charleston in 2016 that Boeing was so keen to sweep under the rug it appealed to the Supreme Court rather than allow employee-witnesses to be deposed. (That case was settled before the Supreme Court made a decision.)A now-defunct Norwegian airline claimed in a 2020 lawsuit blaming Boeing for its demise that it had been forced to divert flights and cancel whole routes due to engine problems, and replace the engines on its Dreamliner fleet hundreds of times. In 2023 one of the airline's former 787s was dismantled for scrap, a literally unheard-of fate for a 10-year-old plane with a nine-figure list price.But there's something else: two people deeply familiar with the Charleston 787 plant told the Prospect they had particularly acute quality concerns over planes that were delivered to Air India.Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager who worked at the Charleston plant between 2009 and 2016, has a binder full of notes, documents and photos from her frustrating years at Boeing, one page of which lists the numbers of the eleven planes delivered between early 2012 and late 2013 whose quality defects most kept her awake at night. Six of them went to Air India, whose purchases were bolstered by billions of dollars in Export-Import Bank loan guarantees. The plane that crashed was delivered in January 2014 from Boeing's now-defunct assembly line in Everett, Washington, though its mid- and aft- fuselages were produced in Charleston.As it happens, that particular plane was delivered not long after a camera crew from Al-Jazeera showed up in Charleston to investigate the horror stories its reporters had been hearing about the workmanship and corporate culture of the plant. The channel's journalists had started digging into the plane's quality standards a year earlier, when the FAA grounded the planes for a few months after two small battery fires broke out on Japanese planes over the course of three days. Their findings were alarming: the company had outsourced most of the non-conceptual design of the plane to its suppliers, the FAA had fast-tracked the batteries and a host of other novel features aboard the planes without anything approaching the rigorous testing they had required for earlier planes, a major battery supplier's testing lab suffered a massive explosion whose precise cause had never been determined and an engineer had been fired for refusing to 'dumb down' his instructions for repairing flaws in the lightweight composite structures Boeing used to build the plane's fuselage.Perhaps most harrowing, however, was the footage filmed by an assembly line worker who wore a hidden camera as went about his day chatting up colleagues, virtually all of whom said they would never allow their family members to fly one of the planes the factory was producing.Kitchens was on medical leave with cancer when the footage was filmed, but the documentary premiered shortly after she returned, and leadership convened a meeting to encourage managers to snitch on anyone they recognized from the undercover footage.'I raised my hand and said, 'No one who works in this factory wants to fly these planes, I mean, that's just the truth,'' Kitchens said. A woman she didn't know, who was wearing a bomber jacket emblazoned with the FAA logo, shot her a scowl. But it was hardly the first time she'd expressed anxiety over the planes' safety with upper management. Years earlier, she had asked a boss if he would let his children fly on a plane with the litany of flaws and non-conformances he was urging her to 'pencil-whip': 'Cindy, none of these planes are staying in America, they're all going overseas,' he retorted, much to her horror.An investigator who worked on the documentary told the Prospect that employees he interviewed were especially anxious about three planes they had worked on that were scheduled to be delivered to Air India during the first months of 2014. The planes all had serious flaws that required them to be flown to the union assembly line in Everett to be re-worked. The Air India Dreamliner that crashed today took off from the Everett airport en route to Delhi for the first time on January 31, 2014.Maureen Tkacik is investigations editor at the Prospect and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project.

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