Former Boeing Manager Says Workers Mishandled Parts to Meet Deadlines

"Mr. Meyers, who wears a ring on his right hand commemorating his 30 years at Boeing, said he had begun to notice slipping in the company’s high standards after its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. He said Boeing’s engineering-first mentality had slowly given way to a stronger focus on profits after executives from McDonnell Douglas assumed top jobs at Boeing.

Mr. Meyers said he was particularly troubled that workers at Boeing’s Everett factory felt such pressure to keep production moving that they would find unauthorized ways to get the parts they needed. That included taking parts assigned to other planes, taking newly delivered components before they could be inspected or logged, or trying to recover parts that had been scrapped. To Mr. Meyers, managers did little to dissuade or punish workers from such shortcuts.

“What gets rewarded gets repeated,” he said. “People get promoted by hustling parts.”

Thousands of people work at the Everett building, which is generally regarded as the world’s largest by volume, and Mr. Meyers acknowledges that his observations were limited to a portion of the work carried out there. But the pressures he described are similar to those identified by other current and former employees.

In one investigation from 2015, Mr. Meyers found that workers had used an unauthorized form to recover scrapped parts, such as landing-gear axles, at least 23 times over 15 years, according to email correspondence. Components are usually scrapped because they are substandard or defective, but workers in several cases said the parts had been removed mistakenly, an explanation that Mr. Meyers said was hard to believe. The movement of parts is generally highly documented and regulated to ensure quality and safety.

“Parts don’t just end up in scrap,” he said. His findings ultimately helped to end the practice, according to the documents provided by Mr. Meyers.

In 2021, his team identified multiple instances in which employees removed parts from receiving areas before those components could be inspected, according to the documents. In one case, an employee took parts and disposed of the associated paperwork and shipping crates. In another instance, Mr. Meyers shared with corporate investigators an annotated email chain showing that several 787 bulkheads had been removed from a receiving area without the knowledge of quality inspectors." [1]

1. Former Boeing Manager Says Workers Mishandled Parts to Meet Deadlines. Chokshi, Niraj.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 24, 2024.