Dave Calhoun, the CEO of Boeing, a man groomed in the “screw the last dime out of a company” culture under Jack Welch at General Electric before taking over at Boeing, delivered a gem of management-speak in trying to explain why the company’s 737 MAX jets are so plagued with problems: there had been a “quality escape” on the production line.
Under Calhoun, Boeing, in just four years, has lost all trace of its legendary reputation for pioneering the jet age and keeping a relentless focus on safety.
The most egregious thing about today’s Boeing is not “quality escape” but the escape of Calhoun and his C-suite colleagues from all accountability for systematically destroying the institutional memory and gutting an engineering culture that supported a peerless planemaker.
Numerous accounts have shown how bean-counting pressures from above have worked like a contagion by infecting every level of managers and supervisors, driving them to get new airplanes delivered without due diligence being given to safety. Many experienced engineers have left.
In 2019 John Barnett, a quality control manager at a plant at North Charleston, South Carolina, turning out the 787 Dreamliner, went public with his concerns: “As a quality manager you’re the last line of defense before a defect makes it out to the flying public. And I haven’t seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I’d put my name on saying it’s safe and airworthy.”
Last Saturday, Barnett committed suicide in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston, a day after giving evidence to lawyers in a case heading for trial this summer in which he appeared as a whistleblower accusing Boeing of giving priority to profits over quality and safety.
Ironically, by then there could have been no doubt about the issues Barnett had raised. Years of sub-standard engineering have left airlines furious about the company’s failure to deliver airplanes on time, often causing drastic reductions in their ability to meet planned increases in peak time schedules.
The North Charleston plant was a big departure for Boeing. For the first time it took away the final assembly of a jet from Boeing’s home turf in Seattle, and also away from the traditional engineering skill pool of Washington state—and the negotiating power of the unions based there.
The 787 was a radical departure in the way jets were built, replacing the metal airframe with composites making it both lighter and stronger. It was also the first design that Boeing subjected to the scrutiny of passenger focus groups and airline crews, resulting in a cabin that in its climate and ergonomics has won passenger approval and loyalty.
But the composite structure meant a steep learning curve for those who designed the new plant and its production lines. As production was stepped up there were mounting problems about reaching the demanding standards of how the finite precision of joining parts together could be met. This was the collision of interests that Barnett witnessed, between engineers who saw quality slipping away and managers who, in their turn, were being pressed to get the airplanes delivered, no matter what.
By 2020 the situation was so bad at North Charleston that over the next two years correcting production flaws resulted in “abnormal costs” of $6.3 billion. Analysts believe that Boeing will never see a profit from the 787 program.
This inevitably affected the mindset of a new generation of top managers who were committed to the idea that Boeing should make money as readily as it made airplanes. If the Dreamliner made airlines and passengers happy but not money, where could they turn to for a milk cow?
For years the 737 had been the best-selling single-aisle jet in the world, and Boeing’s only big profit maker. Given another life extension as the 737 MAX, with more fuel-efficient engines and avionics upgrades, it promised decades more of profits for a company that could, in effect, be used as an ATM for stockholders and senior executives – between 2014 and 2018 alone it produced $53 billion in dividends and buybacks.
That bonanza was cast into doubt when the two crashes involving the 737 MAX, in 2018 and 2019, killed 346 people. The crash investigation exposed the same corporate culture pressures that pervaded the 787 production line. Although the direct cause of the crashes was faulty software, managers at every point in the 737 MAX production chain felt the imperative from above to get airplanes delivered. And they had—there were 387 of them flying worldwide when the whole fleet was grounded for twenty months.
The CEO at the time of the crashes, Dennis Muilenburg, was fired—but he collected more than $80 million in pay and benefits. He was succeeded by Calhoun.
The crash investigation found an unhealthy collusion between Boeing and the FAA in cutting corners to certify the airplane as safe. The FAA has since transformed its oversight of Boeing, putting every part of the design, testing and production of airplanes under intense scrutiny. But the Boeing management wanted a scapegoat and—exhibiting a proclivity to reach down rather than up to place the blame—landed on a seasoned test pilot, Mark Forkner.
It was Forkner’s job to assure airlines that pilots moving from the previous generation of the 737 to the 737 MAX would not need an expensive training course on simulators to adapt to the new jet’s cockpit.
Forkner became the only Boeing employee to face a criminal charge brought by the Department of Justice. There were conflicting views about whether Forkner had known about the fatal software flaw before the first crash and failed to warn the airlines. Forkner denied that he had.
Four years after the crashes the case against Forkner collapsed. In 2022, after a four-day trial, he was found not guilty by a jury in Fort Worth, Texas. Today, Boeing veterans I have spoken to all point to the treatment of Forkner as a salutary example of the company’s corporate practice: absolution for the top executives and selective punishment for anyone found to be overzealous in carrying out orders.
This clearly has an intimidating effect on would-be whistleblowers, even though quality control on the 737 MAX production lines in Wichita, Texas and Seattle remain unable to meet required safety standards. This week The New York Times reported that a six-week audit of the production lines by the FAA found that Boeing failed 33 of the 89 audits.
Meanwhile, NPR reported that Barnett’s family said that he had been hoping that his day in court would “force Boeing to change its culture.” They added that he was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks “as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing, which we believe led to his death.”
In 2019 Barnett told Ralph Nader that the stresses of being a whistleblower had taken “a serious mental and emotional toll.” He added that “the last thing I wanted to do is wake up in the morning and see a 787 has gone down… I mean, it’s just, it keeps me up at night.”
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