Nothing to Be Proud Of
By Philip Mattera, director of the Corporate Research Project for the Dirt Diggers Digest |
| It's not just airliners - Boeing's new - but badly malfunctioning - Starliner capsule has stranded two US astronauts "indefinitely" at the Int'l Space Station. Leaking helium and thruster problems have so far been unresolved. NASA photo |
He apologized to the families and admitted that the company has to work hard to regain the public’s trust, but he avoided taking personal responsibility and sought to preserve some remnant of Boeing’s reputation.
“I’m proud of every action we have taken,” he declared,
eliciting an incredulous response from Sen. Josh Hawley, who accused Calhoun of
cutting corners on safety to maximize profits: “You are strip-mining Boeing.”
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal called the hearing “a moment of reckoning”
for a “a once iconic company that somehow lost its way.”
These comments and others designed to put Calhoun on the
defensive imply that Boeing was a model company before the 737 Max debacle. In
fact, the company has been the subject of safety concerns for several decades.
For example, after a Japan Air Lines 747 crashed during a domestic flight in 1985, killing 520 people, Boeing admitted that it had performed faulty repairs on the plane’s rear safety bulkhead.
In 1989 the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections
of engine monitoring and fire alarm systems on more than 700 Boeing 737s—all of
those built since the end of 1980—after one of those jets crashed in Britain as
a result of malfunctions in two engines.
In 1994 the Seattle Times, after reviewing 20 years of
reports submitted to the FAA, concluded that
more than 2,700 Boeing 737s then in service were flying with a defective part
that could cause the plane’s rudder to move unpredictably, possibly turning the
aircraft in the opposite direction being steered by the pilot.
In 1999 the FAA proposed a
penalty of $392,000 against Boeing for failing to notify regulators of a safety
defect in the fuel valves of its 757 jets.
In 2002 the FAA ordered U.S.
airlines to inspect more than 1,400 planes manufactured by Boeing see if they
were equipped with an improperly wired fuel pump that could cause an explosion
in the rare event that fuel went below minimal levels.
In 2012 the FAA proposed a
civil penalty of $13.57 million against Boeing for failing to meet a deadline
to submit service instructions that would enable airlines to reduce the risk of
fuel tank explosion on its 747 and 757 jets.
In 2013, after several incidents in which lithium-ion
batteries in 787s caught fire, the FAA ordered the
grounding of all U.S.-based Dreamliners. A federal official accused the
company of having submitted flawed safety test results on the batteries.
Boeing has also been accused of doing faulty work in its
military contracts. For example, in 2000, the company agreed to
pay up to $54 million to resolve two whistleblower lawsuits charging that the
company placed defective gears in CH-47D Chinook helicopters and then sold the
aircraft to the U.S. Army.
In 2009 Boeing agreed to
pay $25 million to settle allegations that it performed defective work on the
entire KC-10 Extender fleet, a mainstay of the Air Force’s aerial refueling
fleet used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Boeing had a glorious history from the 1920s, when it
pioneered the aviation industry, through the 1940s, when its bombers helped win
the Second World War, and into the postwar era, when it played a major role in
bringing about the jet age and mass airline travel.
The company’s record in recent decades has been much less
impressive. The 737 Max scandal is not an anomaly, but rather the culmination
of a long-term decline that is nothing to be proud of.
