Washington
CNN
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Boeing executives announced sweeping changes to the company’s manufacturing processes and safety systems in a three-hour meeting with the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday, plans aimed at reassuring the public, airline customers and regulators that the company’s troubled planes are safe to fly.
“This is a guide to a new way of doing business for Boeing,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said after the meeting, saying he expected the company to make “systemic changes.”
Going forward, Boeing and FAA officials will meet weekly to discuss the plan’s progress, and the FAA will conduct monthly reviews, the agency said.
The plan includes several elements, the FAA said, including improving employee training, clarifying instructions for assembly line workers, preventing suppliers from shipping defective parts to Boeing and undergoing additional audits by the FAA.
The FAA tasked outgoing Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun and his top aides with developing the roadmap after two reviews in February found significant problems with the company.
The FAA said the meeting, which was attended by Calhoun and other company executives, included “a detailed PowerPoint presentation breaking down the plan into its component parts,” Whitaker said.
Whitaker said he expects the company to build a “robust” safety and quality program. He said the FAA won’t allow Boeing to increase the number of planes rolling off the Max assembly line each month until it’s satisfied with production quality.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen within the next few months,” Whitaker said.
He said Boeing hasn’t asked the FAA for deregulation. “We haven’t even had a preliminary discussion about it,” he said. And Boeing’s CFO suggested at an industry conference last week that the company is nowhere near ready for deregulation.
Whitaker said the FAA has changed how it monitors operations on Boeing’s assembly lines. “We’ve changed the model,” he said, going from paper audits to inspectors on the assembly lines.
Whitaker said the FAA and Boeing will have “ongoing engagement,” ranging from daily visits by FAA inspectors to Boeing factory sites, to weekly senior meetings and quarterly meetings between the CEO and FAA administrator.
Boeing has begun work on a quality-improvement plan that includes spending hundreds of hours training new employees and giving managers more time to oversee work on the production line.
The company said improvements include 7,500 new tools and equipment, 400 improved work instructions and 300 hours of employee training materials.
Boeing says it is increasing employee coaching and eliminating some job roles to give managers more time to supervise workers on the factory floor.
“Many of these actions are ongoing and our teams are committed to executing each element of the plan,” Calhoun said.
Stephanie Pope, vice president overseeing commercial aviation programs, urged employees in an internal email today to “continue to speak up” about safety issues. The company said a previous request for feedback had resulted in a five-fold increase in reports, some of which are now being reflected in the new plan.
“We succeed as a team, executing with safety, quality and compliance in everything we do,” wrote Pope, the Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO.
To prevent safety defects on its 737 assembly lines, Boeing says it will not move any planes from one production line to the next until all previous work is completed.
The so-called “Move Ready” changes are procedural, but they address a key concern of the Federal Aviation Administration: that basic factory procedures are breaking down.
The company also identified the number of tasks left unfinished when a plane moves to the next station as one of six key figures it will monitor to determine whether its improvement plans are working.
The changes are outlined in an 11-page summary of plans to address quality and safety issues that Boeing filed with the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday.
Boeing has faced a string of bad news this year, from an airborne explosion in January to regulatory investigations and reports slamming the company for major quality problems. The new report aims to show the company, and Calhoun, can turn around what was once an international hallmark of manufacturing quality.
Boeing’s plan may also shed new light on the results of FAA inspectors’ investigations of the Boeing factory in Renton, Washington, that makes the 737 MAX, and of key supplier Spirit AeroSystems’ factory in Wichita, Kansas. The FAA provided the companies with its findings but has not made its reports public and has so far denied CNN’s request for a copy.
Neither the FAA nor Boeing have released the actual plans, and Whitaker said the plans are Boeing’s and the company can decide how to make them public.
The plan is seen as a key step in rebuilding the safety culture and safety practices at the country’s largest exporter.
Boeing has begun implementing changes to its manufacturing process to produce safer planes, including clearer assembly line instructions, improved training and additional tooling. The company also says it has ordered each station to be completed before a plane moves down the assembly line and has told Spirit Airlines not to ship defective planes to Boeing’s Renton plant.
Whitaker directed Boeing to make the plan after reviewing the findings of FAA inspectors who visited Boeing’s 737 Max assembly line. The inspectors were dispatched after a door plug burst on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, a Max that had been delivered for several months, on Jan. 5. The National Transportation Safety Board believes Boeing delivered planes to the airline without installing a critical bolt that secures the door plug, a “quality deviation” that Calhoun acknowledged.
After the explosion, the FAA grounded the Max 9 for three weeks and ordered inspections of the door plugs.
This marks the second grounding since the first 737 MAX was delivered in 2017. The MAX 8 had been grounded for 20 months after two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
The plan could be one of Boeing’s last major milestones under Mr. Calhoun, who announced in the wake of the explosion that he would leave the company later this year along with other senior executives, while the board is in the process of selecting a new CEO.
The previous safety culture review (which included the FAA and outside experts) was broader than the MAX assembly line and found “a disconnect between Boeing’s senior management and the rest of the organization on safety culture.” The timing couldn’t have been worse for the company: The committee was wrapping up its work around the time the door plugs exploded, and its findings arrived on the FAA’s desk at the same time as the results of the first production line audit.
