As a reporter who writes about Boeing, I get asked all the time: "So, are the planes safe?" And I'm like, "Yes, you're in far more danger driving to the airport." But that doesn't mean the questions don't get asked.

The events that have occurred have truly been extraordinary. People died because of a very lax approach to safety. 346 lives lost; it should never have happened. The FAA has limited their production. And still, we had the door plug blow out.

Their decision to plead guilty to defrauding the government could lead to all kinds of consequences. The regulatory authorities, airlines—I don't think anybody trusts Boeing at this point. Boeing is the archetypal national champion.

It employs tens of thousands and is a real source of pride for the United States. A gem, in terms of corporate America. It's a massive name and, in terms of aerospace specifically, a huge player.

It's one of the world's two big manufacturers of commercial aircraft. It built the 747, which helped usher in the global jet age. It's systemically important to US manufacturing and the US government. It's a really big exporter for the US.

And it's also important for national security. In the defense sector, it's one of three companies that can design and build combat aircraft: F-15 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters, transports, and missiles.

They're one of the top defense primes. So everyone needs Boeing to succeed. Everyone wants Boeing to succeed. But they are not succeeding. Earlier this year, Boeing admitted guilt in a conspiracy to defraud the government.

The US prosecutors accused it, actually, of breaking a previous agreement following the crashes of 2018 and 2019. They were supposed to clean up their act. That was part of the terms of their deal.

The company is also in a manufacturing crisis, an operational crisis. They slowed down their factories. And because of that, they have just burned cash. They get their money when they deliver planes. This came about as a result of an incident in January where

a door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane blew out at 16,000 feet. It was an incredibly terrifying incident for the passengers on the plane. One little boy sitting nearby had his shirt sucked off. So this is very serious.

If that had been at maximum altitude, they might have lost the plane. They definitely would have lost some passengers. After the door panel blew out in January, there was immediate pressure on Boeing. Not just from the regulatory agencies

responsible for aviation, but Congress, too. You have to remember this comes after several years of safety concerns and incidents, which all followed two fatal crashes back in 2018 and 2019. Our breaking news: an Ethiopian Airlines flight

A plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa. 157 people died, including eight Americans. Ethiopia's transportation minister declared the crash shows, quote, "a clear similarity" with the Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October.

In 2018 and 2019, two separate crashes involving Boeing jets were horrendous events. Almost 350 people died. These crashes exposed egregious failures of safety and quality at Boeing.

Two planes crashed because of an engineering design change affecting how the plane is flown.  They didn't tell anyone. This pushed regulators not to include, or demand, extra pilot training on this software system

called MCAS. Pilots should have been aware of how it worked differently, because their response to the aircraft's flight behavior was unusual. Quickly, we learned from the FAA and Boeing,

after takeoff, the trim could aggressively push the nose down. We wondered what was causing that. Right after the crash, they told us about this system called MCAS. So, MCAS, which stands for Maneuvering Characteristics

Augmentation System, was a flight control software system Boeing installed on the 737 Max. It was designed to prevent the plane, with its heavy engines, from stalling. But engineers said, well, you've only

Wired it to one angle of attack indicator. If that indicator fails, then what's going to happen? We're in the simulator today, and we're going to do our best to show what the Lion Air pilots went through.

And this is before anybody ever heard of MCAS. So right after takeoff, the airspeed is getting inputs that the aircraft is stalling. So they get an immediate stick shaker right at rotate. That tells them that they are about to stall.

Well, they're not about to stall. They recognize that. They're climbing out. They get the gear up, just like I would do in the airplane. They're recognizing there's a problem, but they're getting confusing information.

But here's the catch. When they go to clean up the airplane, like we're trained to do, and they bring the flaps up, that lets the MCAS out of its cage. The MCAS kicks in and pushes the nose down with a power and speed

that the pilots have never seen before. They pull back on the airplane. So now, the aircraft is in this zero G's, positive G's, this roller coaster ride. They interrupt the MCAS with the trim, and then the MCAS pushes the nose back down again.

After five seconds, it'll run for 10 seconds down. So they're in a lost situation. And within a handful of seconds, the airplane goes into the ocean. The solution to the problems with the MCAS system is the pilot.

But if the pilot doesn't know, like the pilots on Lion Air didn't know the system existed, they have no idea why it's getting all these uncommanded nose-down inputs. There was, I would say, deliberate

concealment of this system, the MCAS system. Following the crashes, the US Congress starts looking into Boeing and starts a series of probes. One of them is spearheaded by House representatives, including Peter DeFazio, that basically

tries to understand what had caused these crashes to begin with. What we discovered in the wake of those crashes and in the investigations is that Boeing was deliberately withholding details and information about how the system worked in order to minimize training costs.

They did not want to have pilot training on the airplane because the customer would say, 'Well, now I've got to train pilots. I've got to take them off trips. I've got to get the simulator.' It adds cost to something that Airbus is not proposing.

So we're going to say it's just an addition to the trim system. And nobody outside of Boeing will hear the words or the acronym, MCAS. No one will know about it. That was one of the first really big red flags we found.

Do you think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to not inform pilots of the existence of the MCAS system? Congressman, a few things on that... and, I agree, we made some mistakes on MCAS.

A lot of the evidence of what happened came out in congressional hearings. More and more things kept coming up. And you realize that there was a huge problem. There was a group of emails where two test pilots said, "Look,

the software is going crazy on this simulator. I've unwittingly told lies to the FAA about it." That was unthinkable. They knew that this was deadly. And they let that airplane fly. Mr. Forkner, so, basically, "I lied to the regulators

unknowingly." Gustavsson: "It wasn't a lie. No one told us that was the case." Forkner: "I'm leveling off at, like, 4,000 feet, 230 knots. And the plane is trimming itself like crazy."

I'm like, "What?" 346 people are dead because of what these chief pilots described as egregious and crazy—that's their language. That's Boeing's internal language in this exchange. Dennis Muilenburg, the then-chief executive of Boeing,

his public appearances at some of these hearings didn't do the company any favors. They fired the previous CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. They brought in David Calhoun. And within a handful of days, he says, "We're doing the pilot training."

And, frankly, I admit, I thought, "All right, this is the road to recovery." He was a better communicator than Dennis Muilenburg. I think the view at the time was that he would be able to steady the ship.

He'd also set up that the company's chief engineer was reporting directly to the chief executive. So, on the outside, it looked like Boeing was doing something to improve its safety. They agreed to establish safety management systems and do a whole host of things; have a new committee,

subcommittee, of the board, which would only focus on safety. As far as the MCAS goes, the airplane has been redesigned. The software has been redesigned. The system is disconnected from the airplane through its own software logic,

and it also doesn't trigger repeatedly, which is what it was doing during the two Max crashes. There was a period where it looked like it might be coming out of the darkest days of this crisis. And then COVID hit.

COVID devastated the aviation industry. Nobody could fly. Nobody could travel. Airlines saw their revenues plummet. And if you don't know where your revenue is coming from, you're definitely not buying a jet. Suddenly, there was no need for new aircraft to be built.

So that was a huge hit for the entire industry. Boeing shed a lot of employees during that period, whether through encouraging people to take retirement buyouts. A lot of people who had been there for a long time left,

and they did not come back. We also know that there's a massive issue in the supply chain. Factories were closed for some time. Shipments were disrupted. And they had to lay off a lot of people. So even post-COVID, they've struggled.

to find the people they need as the markets recovered, to actually do things properly, to keep up with demand. Everybody's lost people, so everybody's trying to hire. Some of the smaller suppliers have got financial problems. And you're only as good as your worst supplier.

We are now five years on, but we're still having incidents. We're still discovering that the wrong holes are drilled on the fuselage, that bolts are rolling around in rudder systems. Maybe some of this is stuff that was inevitable to discover.

It's not a sign that it wasn't trying to deal with the problems. It's, in fact, perhaps a sign that it is dealing with the problems. I think there is an important difference between what happened this year, in 2024, and what happened with the Max

crashes in 2018 and 2019. What happened with those aircraft and what led up to that was a design flaw. This year, the focus is on Boeing's manufacturing processes and those of its suppliers. Unfortunately, all of the problems

that had been baked into the production system at the workforce level, at the supplier level, at the cultural level, were still very much in place. And it became really clear, finally, when the door plug blew out. I mean, the bolts are missing.

The plug was held on by paint. New details tonight about a midair scare last month. The NTSB says four bolts were missing from an exit door that blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight. The NTSB is now saying it has photographic evidence

It was not properly bolted in place when that plane left the Boeing factory. After the Alaska Airlines incident, other questions were raised about the company's factories. As evidenced by the fact that part of the plane blew off,

clearly, there are some problems. The Senate panel revealed something called "travelled work," whereby Boeing workers would allow an aircraft that they were building, or was being assembled, to travel through different production stops, even if certain things hadn't been completed.

A plane moves through the factory in stations. And it has certain work done on it at each station. And you want to do the work in sequence, one thing after another. But sometimes you can't do work where it's supposed to be done.

And so, the plane moves down the line, and the work still hasn't been done. So that meant that something that was supposed to happen three stations ago, you might have to take stuff off the plane to put those things in later.

They're having problems with suppliers. Okay, that sort of stuff. The fuselages for the 737 Max are made in Wichita, Kansas, by Spirit AeroSystems. And then they are shipped by train to Washington State, and the final assembly of the plane is done.

Well, they used to be shipped with defects. The door plug blew out because of defective work by Spirit, which had to be fixed. And it had to be fixed way down the line. They had to take the plane apart.

And then the Boeing employees didn't properly reassemble the plane. When that fuselage was in Renton, Washington, at the factory, the door plug was opened to allow workers access. Then it was closed at some point.

And the bolts were never reinstalled. The Alaska incident revealed flaws in the paperwork process.  There should be documentation for every crucial step, including reinstalling bolts on a door plug.

The National Transportation Safety Board found significant confusion due to unfollowed protocols and uncompleted forms. It sounds like a small thing, but it's actually not, because the documentation

is how you know all necessary work has been completed and that it's safe. That essentially explains why the bolts were missing: the process ensuring bolt reinstallation

was not followed. It's not about the nuts and bolts themselves. It's about personnel showing up and sufficient resources—time, personnel, etc.—

being provided to safely complete the job.  I find it striking that it took this long, and an incident like the Alaska Airlines crash, for prosecutors to acknowledge the problem.

Coming out of the two Max crashes, there was this view that a lot of people had tried to speak up, raise red flags, but weren't either listened to or were told not to say anything.  There were whistle-blowers who weren't being listened to and who were being bullied into keeping quiet. My name is Ed Pierson, and I started working at the 737 program in about 2015. I was a senior manager in the production system support organization.

So our team supported the manufacturing employees as they built the planes. Certainly, going into 2017, it was very obvious that the company was having a lot of problems. This led to a bunch of mandatory overtime. Employees were working when they were tired and fatigued.

And we started seeing a lot of defects. Our defect rate started climbing. There were manufacturing defects at an alarming rate. There were process breakdowns. There was chaos. Ed Pierson brought that up six years ago, and no one listened to him.

In 2019, I testified as a Boeing whistle-blower. I had previously warned the 737 general manager before the Max crash to shut down the factory. I also warned Boeing's general counsel, the CEO, 

and the board of directors before the second crash to shut it down. They ignored my warnings. The concerns and issues that we were bringing up to management, there was this kind of sense of, 'Hey, we've got to get the job done.'

We've got to get these planes out the door as fast as possible. Our customers are expecting them. This very severe level of undue pressure. Everywhere, there were countdown clocks: 'Launch the plane. Get the plane out the door.'

The pressure was just... it permeated all the way down to the people sweeping the floor. Post the Alaska incident, more people did come out as whistle-blowers. And there was still a feeling amongst some Boeing workers

that speed of production was being prioritized over safety practices. Multiple whistle-blowers decided to come forward in public, which is not an easy thing to do. Sam Mohawk is one of a dozen who have come to us in recent months.

And his account of the retaliation against him is particularly chilling, the pressure that was exerted on him to stay silent. They have a program called 'Speak Up.' Well, he was told to shut up. Boeing has said they've launched a campaign called

'Speak Up' to try and allow employees to raise concerns. But I think even after they started that whistle-blower program, some whistle-blowers were complaining that they were being encouraged not to say anything or that they were being

sidelined. You said you'd listen to whistle-blower testimony. We've had multiple whistle-blowers come before this committee and allege that Boeing is cutting every possible corner on quality and safety, not just in the past, but now.

That doesn't sound like attention to quality to me. And yet, you're getting paid $33 million a year. Senator, I'm sticking to this. I'm proud of having taken the job. I'm proud of our...

Proud of this safety record? ...And I am very proud... You're proud of the safety record? ...of our Boeing people. You're proud of this safety record? I am proud of every action we have taken.

After four years, it's very hard to say that Dave Calhoun has turned the company around. The company, several times, has had to stand before Congress and say, 'We pledge that we will improve safety measures.'

Well, you shouldn't have to do that twice or three times. That is what Boeing is trying to address through changes in how it builds, in its Renton factory, trying to improve training, even overhauling its instructions on how to make things so that they're

simpler. You can have the best safety protocols in place. But if there is a culture of not being allowed to speak up if you spot a mistake, I think that undermines these processes. What you've basically got is

a culture that broke down and wasn't able to keep the lines of communication open between people at the top and people who design and manufacture jets. It's a recipe for disaster. 33,000 Boeing machinists walked off the job Friday after union

Members voted to reject a tentative deal with the aircraft manufacturer. Workers have been operating without a paycheck. Boeing is reportedly losing more than $1 billion each month this strike continues. To guarantee things go well, and safety isn't an issue,

and, of course, production rates can be met in a timely way, you want a workforce that is, well, content. In terms of wages and benefits, look at the cost of living. Look at how much it costs to eat,

look at how much it costs to buy a home, buy a car. How long can you go in today's economy without an increase? Workers see this as a big catch-up in terms of actual pay and better benefits.

And there is also a lot of resentment that has built up over several decades. The employees do not feel respected. They don't feel valued for what they provide. And yet, it's critical to the safety and quality of the product.

In general, you're a commodity. You're a number. And, hey, we'll just take you out of the starting lineup. And we'll plug in the backup. Away we go. And three days later, it's like, well, who was that guy?

The strike went on for seven weeks, which is a very long time if you're not building planes and not getting any money coming in. Analysts have estimated that the strike was costing Boeing $50 million a day. The new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg,

has been quite open about the fact that Boeing needs a big reset. As soon as Kelly Ortberg became CEO, the first thing he did was say, "I'm moving to Seattle." I'm not really clear if and when Dave Calhoun went to Seattle.

So the idea of moving there, even though the headquarters is still based in Washington, D.C., shows the importance of, frankly, showing up, showing the flag, and making sure that management is intimately involved with the process of manufacturing jets.

They also announced a mammoth equity raise recently. They're raising just over $21 billion, the largest ever equity fundraising in US history. It's given them some breathing space in order to now focus on turning the company around.

I think Boeing will recover. It has to. The world needs more than one aircraft manufacturer. The world needs a healthy Boeing; it needs a healthy competitor to Airbus. They've already lost a great deal of market share to Airbus.

But all the airlines still want there to be two plane-makers to buy from. Boeing can turn things around, but it's got to be about how many *quality* airplanes can we get out the door, not how many airplanes we can get out the door.

The people we represent care about quality and safety. They always have, and they always will. The men and women the IAM represents, they truly care about the products they build. But Boeing has to provide the resources to allow that to happen.

The workforce, the supplier network, customers—all of these have to be valued as partners. It's pretty basic. It's treating people respectfully, not retaliating against people, encouraging people to speak up,

those kinds of things. They did not get into this position overnight, and they are not going to get out of it overnight.

How safety lapses hit Boeing's reputation | FT Film

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How safety lapses hit Boeing's reputation | FT Film

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