Boeing responded to whistleblower allegations that its planes are defective ahead of a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Two Boeing executive engineers issued a strong defense of how the company’s 787 Dreamliner is built during a news conference Monday.
It has been suggested that the aircraft’s carbon composite panels are immune to the metal fatigue that often weakens traditional aluminum fuselages.
Steve Chisholm, Boeing’s vice president of structural engineering, said the company tested the safety of the 787 by replicating 165,000 flights and found no evidence of fatigue in the composite structure.
His comments come just a week after Boeing whistleblower Sam Salehpour claimed he “literally saw people jumping on pieces of the plane to align them.”
“That’s not how you build an airplane,” said Salehpour, who worked as a Boeing engineer for more than a decade and will now testify on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
A door plug exploded midair on an Alaska Airlines flight on January 7, 2024 in Portland, Oregon.
Pictured: Outgoing Boeing CEO David Calhoun speaking to reporters weeks after a Boeing 737 door plug exploded.
Whistleblower Salehpour claims he saw people jumping on airplane panels to align them.
Boeing has faced enormous scrutiny since a faulty plug in the door of an Alaska Airlines 787 Max 9 plane exploded at 16,000 feet in January. A month later, three passengers on that flight filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Boeing and Alaska Airlines.
Salehpour is the latest in a series of Boeing whistleblowers who have come forward to raise safety concerns.
Former Boeing employee John Barnett, 62, expressed concern that under-pressure workers were deliberately installing substandard parts on airplanes on the assembly line earlier this year.
After denouncing that his bosses were spying on him, Barnett then committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. at the beginning of March.
Meanwhile, Boeing is in damage control mode. The plane maker has strongly disputed Salehpour’s claim that people were jumping on the panels to get them into place.
The company issued a statement last week expressing full confidence in the 787 Dreamliner, a wide-body aircraft often used for international flights, while calling concerns about its structural integrity “inaccurate.”
The company said the actual way the fuselage is assembled is by adding shims to fill the gaps.
Additionally, fasteners are placed to apply what is called a “pull force” that the company says produces gaps the width of a human hair, about 0.005 inches, 99% of the time.
But problems with the Dreamliner model date back to at least 2021, when the FAA and Boeing halted deliveries of the plane while they examined small gaps in the fuselage that were wider than Boeing allowed.
Just over a week ago, a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 was forced to make an emergency landing at Denver International Airport after part of the engine exploded.
In March, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 landed in Portland with the cargo door slightly open. Passengers’ luggage and pets were underneath, but Boeing said the animals were not harmed.
Pictured: Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, who was found dead in March after an apparent suicide.
Barnett posing for a selfie with his niece
A door plug area of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft awaiting inspection
NTSB officials examining the door plug from the Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft incident on January 5
Pictured: Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.
The Senate will hold dual hearings on Boeing safety concerns on Wednesday.
First, the Senate Commerce Committee will hear from three aviation experts from MIT, NASA and the University of Southern California who will discuss improvements Boeing can make.
A Senate subcommittee headed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal will meet the same day to speak with Salehpour after the whistleblower contacted the senator’s office last month.
Blumenthal has also requested that outgoing Boeing CEO David Calhoun make an appearance, but there is no update on whether that will happen.
These hearings come as the FAA has ordered Boeing to develop a robust quality assurance plan for its suite of aircraft by next month.