Whistleblower raised safety fears over Boeing Dreamliner factory

Telegraph

2 days ago

A whistleblower raised safety concerns about a factory that makes Boeing's Dreamliner model, which crashed in India on Thursday.
John Barnett alleged that the company had attempted to 'eliminate' quality checks at the factory where he worked in North Carolina.
Mr Barnett, who was found dead in March aged 62, accused the company of 'countless' violations of US law.
His claims included that paperwork had been falsified and that a contaminated tube designed to work in an oxygen system was removed from a scrap bin and may have been installed in an aircraft that was now in service.
He said that without the part having been sterilised, there was a risk it could cause an explosion and 'bring the whole plane down'.
In response to Mr Barnett's claims, Boeing said it was 'saddened' by his passing, but the quality issues that he raised before his retirement in 2017 had been addressed.
The airline added: 'Engineering analysis determined the issues he raised did not affect aeroplane safety.'
Thursday's crash in India will send a chill through an aviation industry only just recovering from years of upheaval linked to the US firm's safety record.
The Air India flight from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick came down soon after take-off on Thursday morning, with 242 passengers and crew onboard.
Video footage showed the Boeing 787's last moments as it lost altitude over the runway before briefly disappearing from view and exploding in a cloud of flame.
The Flightradar24 flight-tracking website showed the plane as having reached a maximum altitude of 625 feet. With the airport located at an altitude of about 200 feet, it suggests the aircraft managed to climb to a height of little more than 400 feet.
It then began descending with a vertical speed of 475 feet per minute.
Flightradar24 listed the crashed plane as having completed return flights from Delhi to Melbourne, Tokyo and Paris over the past five days before flying from the Indian capital to Ahmedabad overnight.
The jet, registration number VT-ANB, came off the production line in 2013 and was powered by General Electric engines, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
While the crash is the first involving the 787, a model also known as the Dreamliner, it comes six years after the loss of two smaller 737 Max planes claimed 346 lives and plunged Boeing into a near existential crisis.
The Max, Boeing's top seller, was grounded for more than 18 months around the world after investigators found that the crashes in 2018 and 2019 had been caused by software meant to improve the handling of the model.
Instead, the system effectively wrestled control away from the doomed planes' pilots, who were unaware of how it worked and how it might be overridden.
The Air India tragedy comes days before the start of the Paris Air Show, where Boeing executives had been expected to proclaim that the firm was ready to bounce back from a more recent crisis involving the 737.
The latest meltdown came after a panel blew out of an Alaska Airlines plane in January last year as it climbed through 16,000 feet, leaving a hole in the side of the fuselage through which passengers were almost sucked to their deaths.
The pilot was able to descend to a lower altitude and bring the aircraft under control, narrowly averting disaster.
However, subsequent investigations by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and the US National Transportation Safety Board linked the incident to a litany of production glitches and quality control issues at Boeing and key supplier Spirit Aerosystems.
The Max was once again grounded, and even though it was allowed to return to service, a cap was imposed on build rates, reducing deliveries to airlines around the world to a trickle.
The production slowdown further disrupted a supply chain that was still struggling to recover following Covid, and handed a huge advantage to arch-rival Airbus, which established a comfortable lead over Boeing in annual airliner deliveries for the first time.
There is no suggestion in the immediate wake of the Indian tragedy that Boeing is in any way to blame.
Plane crashes on take-off can result from a number of causes, ranging from bird strikes and maintenance issues to pilot error.
The 787 has had an exemplary safety record since the early teething problems that followed its entry into service almost 14 years ago.
Those early issues saw several aircraft suffer problems with electrical systems linked to the model's lithium-ion batteries.
Those included fires in 2013 on planes operated by All Nippon Airlines and Japan Airlines that led the FAA to temporarily ground the model, with Boeing halting deliveries until the issue was fixed.
'It has an impeccable safety record'
Alex Macheras, an independent aviation analyst, said Air India had a good safety record and had not suffered a fatal accident for decades.
Boeing's Dreamliner has also had an unblemished record since its launch 15 years ago, he added, with more than 1,100 in service globally. The planes carry an estimated 400,000 passengers every day.
Mr Macheras said: 'The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is an aircraft that has never had a fatal accident since it entered into service 15 years ago. It has an impeccable safety record that is, at the moment, separate to the recent quality concerns that have hampered Boeing over the last couple of years.
'Those concerns are mostly related to a separate aircraft programme, the 737 Max.
'So it is deeply concerning as to why this 787 was struggling to gain altitude in the take-off phase.'
With an investigation already underway, parallel conversations would also now be taking place between the airline, Boeing and authorities to 'rule out what could have gone wrong, and if there is a concern with the 787', he added.