RENTON, Wash. — A United States Senate panel released a damning report on Boeing's safety failures and the company's pressure on employees to prioritize profits.
The report is from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and is dated from March. The report has several key findings, including that, "Boeing personnel continue to feel pressure to prioritize speed over quality."
KING 5 showed the report to machinists in Renton who are on strike.
"There has been pressure to speed up the line faster than it should be able to go and that’s what’s happening right now," Morey said.
Morey has been with the company for 45 years.
“To see a report that shows a lack of quality, it’s embarrassing for us," Morey said.
The report said Boeing "struggles to ensure its employees are adequately trained." Josh Hajak works on the 737 and said he sees this happening a lot.
“We’re still getting new hires to the floor who are not ready to perform their tasks, it’s not their fault but we’re not given the time to properly train them," Hajek said.
Morey believes the company is no tgetting quality new candidates partly because of the pay.
“This job used to be the hardest job to get out there, now it’s like hey this guy’s breathing," Morey said.
The FAA found that Boeing is "failing to ensure that non-conforming parts are appropriately documented." Morey believes this speaks to what happened when a doorplug blew off a 737 MAX 9 in January.
“Our NCR’s should have been generated right there to give them that ability to take the plugs out and then automatically they’d have something that told them to put it back in, they forgot that or they skipped it," Morey said.
The report raises questions about the qualifications of the individuals performing the inspections.
“They have some inspectors that don’t even speak or hardly understand the American language, where they can read and write so how do they read all the manuals?” Morey said.
Boeing responded to the report saying, “We’ve taken important steps to foster a safety culture that empowers and encourages all employees to share their voice, but it will require continuous focus. Under the FAA’s oversight, we are continuing to implement our comprehensive plan to strengthen Boeing's safety management, quality assurance and safety culture.”
The FAA released a statement saying, "The FAA will continue our aggressive oversight to hold Boeing accountable and ensure the company fixes its systemic production-quality issues. We took immediate action after the Jan. 5 door plug incident, including grounding affected aircraft, halting production expansion of the 737 MAX, adding FAA inspectors in the Boeing and Spirit AeroSystem facilities, and conducting more audits and unannounced inspections. We are closely monitoring Boeing’s progress and the FAA continues to issue airworthiness certificates for all newly produced 737 and 787 aircraft. Administrator Mike Whitaker has made it clear “this won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing.”