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A Boeing 737 MAX jetliner is pictured at the Boeing factory in Renton, Washington, November 18, 2020.
Washington
CNN
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Boeing executives outlined sweeping changes to the company’s production process and safety systems Thursday during a three-hour meeting with the Federal Aviation Administration. The plan aims to reassure the public, airline customers and regulators that the troubled airline’s planes can fly safely.
“This is a guide to a new way for Boeing to do business,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said after the meeting. He said he expected the company to produce “systemic change.”
Going forward, Boeing and FAA executives said they would meet weekly to discuss progress in implementing the plan and the FAA would conduct monthly reviews.
The plan includes several elements aimed at improving employee training, clarifying instructions for assembly line workers, preventing suppliers from shipping defective components to Boeing and submitting to additional FAA audits, the agency said.
The FAA had ordered outgoing Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun and his aides to develop the road map after two reviews in February revealed serious problems at the planemaker.
The meeting included Calhoun and other company executives, the FAA said. Whitaker said the meeting included a “detailed PowerPoint presentation that broke the plan into components.”
Whitaker said he expects the company to develop “robust” safety and quality management plans. He said the FAA would not allow Boeing to increase the number of planes coming off its Max assembly line each month until it was satisfied with the quality of production.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next few months,” Whitaker said.
He added that Boeing had not asked the FAA to deviate from these limits. “We haven’t even had preliminary discussions on this,” he said. And Boeing’s chief financial officer was at an industry conference last week and signaled that the company was far from ready for raises.
Whitaker said the FAA changed how it monitored work on Boeing’s assembly line. “We changed that model,” he said, moving from administrative audits to inspectors on the assembly line.
Whitaker said the FAA and Boeing will have “constant engagement,” ranging from FAA inspectors at Boeing factories on a daily basis to weekly high-level meetings and quarterly meetings between the FAA CEO and administrator.
At Boeing, work has begun on its quality improvement plan, which includes hundreds of hours of training for new employees and more time for managers to supervise work on the production line.
The improvements include 7,500 new tools and equipment, 400 improved work instructions and 300 hours of employee training materials, the company said.
Boeing says it is strengthening employee supervision and eliminating some responsibilities so managers can spend more time supervising employees on the factory floor.
“Many of these actions are underway and our team is committed to executing every element of the plan,” Calhoun said.
His deputy who oversees the commercial aircraft program, Stephanie Pope, urged employees in a company email today to “continue to speak out” on safety issues. That company said an earlier request for comment increased the number of reports fivefold, and some of those are reflected in the new plan.
“We will succeed as a team and execute with safety, quality and compliance in everything we do,” wrote Pope, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
Boeing has seen a string of bad news this year, from an in-flight fuselage explosion in January to investigations by regulators to a report blaming Boeing for major quality problems. The new report aims to show that the company – and Calhoun – can turn around what was once an international brand of manufacturing quality.
Boeing’s plan could also shed new light on FAA inspectors’ findings at Boeing’s Renton, Wash., plant that builds the 737 Max, as well as the Wichita, Kansas, plant. , from leading supplier Spirit AeroSystems. The FAA provided the findings to both companies, but hid the report from the public and has so far refused CNN’s requests for a copy.
Neither the FAA nor Boeing has made the actual plan public. Whitaker said the plan belonged to Boeing and he could decide how to make it public.
The plan is seen as a crucial step toward rebuilding the safety culture and practices of the country’s largest exporter.
Boeing has begun implementing changes to its production process that it says will produce safer planes. Changes include clearer assembly line instructions, training improvements and more tools. The company says it also ordered that each station be completed before a plane entered the assembly line and ordered Spirit not to ship defective fuselages to Boeing’s Renton factory.
Whitaker commissioned the plan from Boeing after reviewing the findings of FAA auditors who visited the company’s 737 Max assembly line. The auditors were deployed in response to the door jam explosion on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Jan. 5, which occurred a few months ago. The National Transportation Safety Board believes Boeing delivered the plane to the airline without the critical bolts that hold the door plug in place, and Calhoun admitted to a “quality escape.”
After the explosion, the FAA grounded the Max 9s for three weeks and ordered inspections of each door plug.
This is the second grounding since the first delivery of the 737 Max in 2017. The Max 8 spent 20 months on the ground after crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
The project could be one of the last major moves for Boeing under Calhoun, who announced following the explosion that he would join other senior executives in leaving the company this year. The board of directors is looking for a new general manager.
A previous review of safety culture – including the FAA and outside experts – was broader than the Max assembly line and found a “disconnect between Boeing’s senior management and others in the organization when it comes to safety culture”. The timing couldn’t have been worse for the company: The panel was finishing its work just as the door shutter burst, and it landed on the FAA’s desks along with the results of the initial audit of the production chain.