With protesters in the audience holding pictures of loved ones killed in Boeing crashes, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun prepares to testify
Callum Jones – The Guardian June 18, 2024
The CEO of Boeing has acknowledged “something went wrong” at the embattled planemaker after another whistleblower came forward, alleging that corners were cut on its production line.
Dave Calhoun acknowledged some employees who raised concerns about safety and quality inside the company faced retaliation.
The executive did not have the number of managers fired for retaliating against whistleblowers “on the tip of my tongue”, he told senators, “but I know it happens”.
At a hearing entitled “Boeing’s Broken Safety Culture”, Richard Blumenthal, chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, declared that the company was facing a “moment of reckoning” – and called for prosecutions.
In heated exchanges, Calhoun – who has already announced plans to step down later this year – and Boeing executives were accused of “strip mining” the company for profit. “You’re cutting corners, you’re eliminating safety procedures, you’re sticking it to your employees,” said Josh Hawley, the Republican senator.
“It’s working out great for you,” Hawley added, citing Calhoun’s “extraordinary” $33m pay package and asking why he had not yet resigned. “I’m sticking this through,” Calhoun replied. “I am proud of every action we have taken.”
Hours before the session Sam Mohawk, a quality assurance inspector for the company in Renton, Washington, became the latest Boeing employee to go public with claims of safety issues. He alleged that he was instructed by his supervisors to conceal evidence from regulators.
Boeing has come under intense scrutiny since a terrifying cabin panel blowout in January prompted fresh questions about quality and safety.
“More than a dozen” whistleblowers have now come forward, according to Blumenthal, who urged other concerned workers at Boeing to contact his office. “Boeing needs to stop thinking about the next earnings call and start thinking about the next generation.”
Calhoun insisted that he did not “recognize any of the Boeing you describe” when senators accused the company of weakening safety systems. “Our culture is far from perfect,” he said, “but we are taking action, and we are making progress.”
As he spoke, the families of victims of two Boeing plane crashes, in 2018 and 2019, in which 346 people were killed, and whistleblowers who spoke out about their experiences at the company, were sitting with him in the room.
Turning to the families before starting his evidence, Calhoun apologized to them directly for their “gut-wrenching” losses.
The company has delivered a quality improvement plan to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and claimed that employees have been emboldened to come forward with safety and quality concerns on the factory floor.
But accounts from inside Boeing’s facilities have raised further questions. Earlier this month the Guardian reported on claims the firm’s largest factory was in “panic mode”.
Whistleblowers including Sam Salehpour, a current engineer at Boeing, and Roy Irvin, a former quality investigator, have gone public with allegations about safety in recent months.
“This is a culture that continues to prioritize profits, push limits and disregard its workers,” Blumenthal said of Boeing before Tuesday’s hearing. “A culture that enables retaliation against those who do not submit to the bottom line. A culture that desperately needs to be repaired.”
Blumenthal said Mohawk recently told the panel he had witnessed systemic disregard for documentation and accountability of nonconforming parts.
In a report released by the committee, Mohawk said his work handling nonconforming parts became significantly more “complex and demanding” after the resumption of production of the 737 Max, its bestselling commercial jet, in 2020. Production had been suspended following the two crashes in 2018 and 2019.
Mohawk alleged the number of nonconformance reports soared 300% compared with before the grounding of the Max. The 737 program lost parts that were intentionally hidden from the FAA during one inspection, he claimed.
Mohawk filed a related claim in June with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal regulator.
Boeing said: “We received this document late Monday evening and are reviewing the claims. We continuously encourage employees to report all concerns as our priority is to ensure the safety of our airplanes and the flying public.”
“You’re cutting corners, you’re eliminating safety procedures, you’re sticking it to your employees…”
That is, doing what all American corporate chiefs have done since Reagan, if not before.
We all remember the Pentagon’s $2000 gold toilet seats. It sure kept something safe and warm.
American business, which is business as usual. Nothing will change.
The Congressional do-nothings are merely trying to maximize their images by their grandstanding. What has Congress done to prosecute scum that have resulted in over a million US deaths from the Covid vaccines? It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. Blumenthal is one of the top 10 grandstanders. Congress is an overall disgrace.
If the old saying ‘the last thing a crooked government does is loot the treasury’ is applied here, it suggests these crooks know the economy and the banks are about to fail, big time. We’ll all be too busy surviving to go after them and they know it. The worst thing is an aircraft failure usually only shows itself once it’s in the air under stress, not on the ground. They risk people’s lives, not in small numbers but every planeload.
Typical government witch hunt.
Lina Khan’s Defective Critique of Boeing as “National Champion”
By Dorothy Robyn|March 27, 2024
“The chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, is using the crisis facing aerospace giant Boeing to press her case that “national champions”—firms deemed too important to face antitrust enforcement—invariably behave badly because they are protected from competition. Whatever their source, Boeing’s massive problems are not due to a lack of competition, as Khan tried to argue in a recent, head-scratching speech that ignored the U.S. plane maker’s decades-long rivalry with Europe’s Airbus Industrie. Khan misconstrued other events and issues as well, including the 1997 Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger, which is central to her story, and Europe’s history of subsidies in civil aviation. The economics of the commercial aircraft industry, which has traditionally limited the number of viable global producers to two, were nowhere addressed.”
https://itif.org/publications/2024/03/27/lina-khans-defective-critique-of-boeing-as-national-champion/
Big Dot: Boeing has to make a profit or go under.
Big Dot: Competition has grown in the commercial airplane manufacturing industry.
Big Dot: EU Airbus has taken over 60% of the market and is more reliant on government subsidies.
Americans have to WAKE UP stop their heated infighting and crazy outfighting and FIX their problems both internally and externally. To do this they have to start with a good dose of HONESTY. They ought to begin by cleaning out their capitals and they can now do that by exposing ALL of the top-down COVID crimes, uprooting the giant weed which is killing everything decent.
Is Calhoun a crypto jew…..he doesn’t look it…but you can’t always tell.
However Josh Hawley the senator putting the questions to the CEO of Boeing definitely is a crypto jew.
Is there another agenda at work….you always have to consider this as a possibility.
Boeing has been raided for assets and money….a perfectly good company brought down by graft and corruption.Maybe Israel is after cut price jets??.
The two comments at the top by Franz and Sigg Huyl nail it.
“Dave Calhoun acknowledged some employees who raised concerns about safety and quality inside the company faced retaliation.” That’s the corporate way, and has been for far too long. It is the exact opposite of sound principles of risk management, but fits right in with the profit over people principle. Just another byproduct of the dystopian world of satanic inversion in which we suffer…until we get off our asses and start executing the scum.
This is why the founders of the US did not allow FOR PROFIT corporations to operate in the US.
They had dealt with the East India Company.
Corporations are a creation of the state..they have advantages under law not given to citizens.
Corruption is built into for profit corporations- it is their very nature.
These days, we are told that brain-size and intelligence have no connection, so that we will not look at Blacks and notice the tiny brains they often have, like the one in the picture on the front row
This is part of long term JWO plan to discourage / restrict air travel. The airline delays , personnel shortages, equipment failures / crashes etc. are due to deliberate mismanagement and neglect, not incompetence, Eventually the goyim will be limited to transport only within their 15 minute cities. Of course the parasites always manage to accumulate more shekels when destroying companies like Boeing and lives of hard working employees.
Similar ‘problems’ are occurring with other transportation systems in the U.S. I live an hour out of Boston. Every other week there are reports of MBTA -public transit train derailments , technical problems, shut downs and delays. All of the sophisticated computer tech and electronics in our Orwellian world , yet we don’t know how to keep trains and airlines running properly ? Hegelian dialectic – deliberate neglect and possibly sabotage to justify eventual ‘privatization’ of system i.e. selling off to multi national corporations under the guise of promising better service. This has already taken place. in many states with public road , water, utilities, transit systems privatized. The JWO cartels will eventually control all hard assets while we’re left holding greatly devalued or worthless currency.