Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Mike Whitaker said Thursday that it will take Boeing considerable time to move toward the right safety culture, but that the agency's new, direct oversight of the company will ensure air travel is safe.
“This is the beginning of a long journey. We need to fundamentally change the safety culture of the company to address quality and safety issues holistically,” Whitaker said at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Until Boeing gets there, production of the planes will be closely monitored by FAA inspectors working inside Boeing and its suppliers' factories, he said.
After the shocking January crash of a Boeing 737 Max fuselage panel ruptured in mid-air during an Alaska Airlines flight, the FAA initially sent 24 inspectors to Boeing's Max final assembly plant in Renton and a fuselage assembly plant in Wichita, Kansas, run by supplier Spirit AeroSystems.
He said the inspectors were a “highly skilled team” with decades of experience.
Whitaker said Boeing and Spirit currently have more than 30 inspectors on staff, and the FAA is conducting a hiring drive with the goal of having 55 inspectors on staff.
He added that the FAA has “put its best people on this. This is absolutely the most important issue we're working on right now.”
“Air travel remains, by far, the safest mode of transportation,” Whitaker said, “and we will continue to maintain that position.”
Changes in monitoring method
Whitaker, who took over as FAA administrator in October, acknowledged that the Alaska incident in January exposed weaknesses in the FAA's oversight system.
“The FAA's approach has been too laissez-faire, too focused on paper audits and not enough on inspections,” he said. “We've been too caught up in a reactive mode of waiting for events to happen, analyzing those events and figuring out how to respond differently. So we're shifting to a much more proactive approach.”
About Alaska Airlines and the Boeing 737 MAX 9
In addition to deploying additional inspectors to focus on production, Whitaker said the FAA will closely monitor Boeing's implementation of a plan it submitted on May 30 to review its manufacturing quality controls.
This includes measures to increase the amount of training maintainers receive and streamline the instructions and installation procedures given to new recruits, especially those with limited aerospace experience.
Whitaker said Boeing measures employees' ability to perform the tasks required of them.
The ultimate goal is a comprehensively implemented safety management system that encompasses both Boeing and its suppliers, proactively uncovering risk trends through employee feedback.
This requires a company culture that encourages employees to speak up about safety issues without fear of retaliation from managers focused on maintaining the pace of production.
Whitaker said the FAA will insist on a clear view of employee safety reports within the company.
Sen. Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, called on Whitaker to require Boeing to directly involve its labor unions — the International Union of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the Society of Aerospace Professional Engineers — in developing the safety management system.
Markey displayed several Boeing internal slide posters from a training course that instructed managers on how to handle union organizing efforts.
He said the case exposed Boeing's “encouragement of managers to limit interactions between union and non-union members” and a “concerted effort to move critical Boeing safety functions away from the union site in Everett.”
Markey said Boeing's hostility toward unions has a “direct negative impact on safety.”
“We have to make sure we're doing it safely,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
“There's a lot of work to do to make the aviation industry more competitive and create more jobs, but the one thing that will really make that happen is safety,” Cantwell said.
Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com; Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.
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