What Really Wrecked Boeing
Democracy JournalApr 10
Boeing Whistleblower Testifies Before US Senate
The Facts
Boeing whistleblower Sam Salehpour told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations on Wednesday that the company has produced defective airplanes, with gaps much wider than what its own standards allow.
According to the quality engineer at Boeing, the planemaker has sped up the production of its 787 and 777 aircraft and ignored safety standards. On Monday, Boeing challenged these allegations.
The Spin
Narrative A
For years, there have been whistleblower leaks and government warnings about the safety of Boeing's planes — those concerns came to a head after a door plug blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight in January. Boeing's greed and fixation on profits led the company to cut corners on quality control and created a culture of intimidation. Numerous whistleblowers have spoken out against Boeing's reaction to safety hazard reports, but the company is clearly more concerned with a culture of silence than it is with safety.
Narrative B
While the "profits-over-people claims" that media in the US has pushed to explain Boeing's safety problems may be appealing, the very idea that safety and shareholder returns are inversely related is entirely wrong — in fact, safety has enormously increased since the aviation industry was reorganized on competitive profit-and-loss lines in the 1970s. Boeing indeed has at least partial responsibility in recent incidents, these problems will be eventually sorted out with training, repetition, standardization, and documentation.
Nerd narrative
There's a 3% chance that commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes by 2030, according to the Metaculus prediction community.