by AUSTIN DENEAN | The National DeskFrom Left, Boeing Quality Engineer Sam Salehpour; Ed Pierson, Executive Director of The Foundation for Aviation Safety and a Former Boeing Engineer; Joe Jacobsen, Aerospace Engineer and Technical Advisor to the Foundation for Aviation Safety and a former FAA Engineer; and Shawn Pruchnicki, Ph.
“We need to completely fix what has not been working, and that's a change of culture, part of which is through leadership,” said Dan Bubb, associate professor in at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Honors College, and former airline pilot. “But also it's through structure, through, checkpoints, through stages where work has to be scrutinized, and it takes multiple signatures to sign off on whatever was done.
“I doubt the Senate Commerce Committee hearing will help improve the safety culture at Boeing. Otherwise, we would not be facing more troubling issues regarding the 737 MAX aircraft after the former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg testified before the very same Committee on Oct. 29, 2019,” Syracuse University professor and commercial aviation safety expert Kivanc Avrenli said.
“In a rush to address the bottlenecks in production, Boeing hit problems, putting pieces together with excessive force to make them appear that the gaps don’t exist even though they exist,” Salehpour said. “The gap didn’t actually go away, and this may result in premature fatigue failure. Effectively, they are putting out defective airplanes.”and said their planes go through a rigorous testing process and that the material that the panels are made of is nearly impervious to metal fatigue.
“It was all about money,” Pruchnicki said. “It was all about getting those airplanes to Southwest, and it was all about money. That’s why those people died.”