Posted on 05/09/2024 12:55:22 PM PDT by Red Badger
A Boeing whistleblower recently claimed he was chided for slowing production when he found defects in airplane parts.
The former quality inspector, identified as Santiago Paredes, who previously worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, told the BBC that plane bodies were regularly shipped out of the factory with serious issues, the outlet reported Wednesday.
Paredes claimed he used to find nearly 200 defects in the parts, and he tried to slow production to deal with the problems.
He also alleged that leadership put him under pressure to not be so meticulous.
“They always made a fuss about why I was finding it, why I was looking at it,” the former Air Force technician alleged:
They just wanted the product shipped out. They weren’t focused on the consequences of shipping bad fuselages. They were just focused on meeting the quotas, meeting the schedule, meeting the budget…If the numbers looked good, the state of the fuselages didn’t really matter.
The allegations come as Spirit AeroSystems and Boeing grapple with scrutiny after a door flew off a 737 Max airplane while it was in the air in January.
“According to investigators, the door had originally been fitted by Spirit, but had subsequently been removed by Boeing technicians to rectify faulty riveting,” the BBC report said.
Paredes told CBS News he found problems “every day.”
VIDEO AT LINK..........................
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Aviation Ping!......................
Hope he has life insurance!
“According to investigators, the door had originally been fitted by Spirit, but had subsequently been removed by Boeing technicians to rectify faulty riveting,” the BBC report said.”
Is this a BOEING or SPIRIT issue?
Both.........................
Boeing sold off their Wichita fuselage factory to Spirit, then pressured Spirit to increase 737 fuselage deliveries to meet increased production demand, and also squeezed Spirit on pricing.
Technically, it was Spirit that ignored the faulty fuselages, but it was Boeing who accepted the fuselages and allowed Spirit to perform rework to repair the defects on the Boeing assembly line.
In fact, it was this rework to repair a Spirit defect that led to the Alaskan Air door plug to be reinstalled without its fastening hardware. Boeing removed the door, Spirit performed remedial work on the door opening area, then Boeing reinstalled the door plug without putting the fasteners back in that lock the plug in place.
Ultimately, had Spirit not shipped a defective fuselage, the door plug would not have been removed by Boeing in the first place.
This all leads back to when Boeing merged with McDonnel Douglass and M-D's "the next quarter is more important than the product" mindset crept into Boeing management. It was former M-D managers who came up with the idea of selling off Wichita to Spirit in order to make Boeing's bottom line look better.
Just change product and fuselage to students and you’ve got a good description of public education today.
Yeah...sure. This really, really, really happened. No joke. It’s the truth. No lie. /s
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