On July 5th, Caijing News (editor: Niu Zhanlin) reported that the Boeing scandal is still fermenting. In addition to the "Interstellar Aircraft" spacecraft being unable to return to Earth, another whistleblower has come forward to identify that the company intentionally used defective parts in its planes.

Former Boeing Quality Control Manager Merle Meyers recently revealed that for many years, workers at the Boeing 787 Dreamliner factory in Everett, Washington often took defective parts from the internal scrap yard and then put them back on the assembly line to install them into new airplanes.

Meyers has worked at Boeing for more than 30 years, and his mother is also an inspector at Boeing with rich work experience.

After witnessing the occurrence of the door jam and a series of accidents of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 passenger plane in January this year, Meyers also had the idea of reporting Boeing.

Since the beginning of this year, a series of whistleblowers have accused Boeing of making mistakes, stating that Boeing has many safety issues in the aircraft manufacturing process, including an employee who reported to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that Boeing concealed potentially defective parts.

Another whistleblower, Richard Quares, said last week that Boeing and its major supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, used damaged parts to reduce production bottlenecks and accelerate production and delivery speed.

Meyers claimed that the mistakes he witnessed were intentional and organized actions that aimed to destroy the quality control process, in order to try to keep up with the rigorous production schedule.

He pointed out that over more than 10 years, he estimated that about 50,000 defective parts "escaped" quality control and were used to manufacture airplanes and then delivered to airlines. These parts ranged from screws to complex components such as wing flaps.

"This practice puts people's lives in danger, not only passengers but also crew members, many of whom are critical flight components, and these components later return to the production system," he said.

Meyers said he had reported this issue to company investigators many times, pointing out that what he said was a blatant violation of Boeing's safety regulations. He wrote in an internal email in 2022, "But investigators often do not follow these regulations and even ignore the observations of witnesses and the hard work done to ensure the safety of future passengers and crew members."

Meyers added that he believes he was forced to leave Boeing last year and he is worried that Boeing still has safety issues. "I think Boeing needs to be punished. Those who openly violate procedures and endanger public flight safety need to be fired. This is a huge problem. One core requirement of the quality system is to separate bad parts from good ones."

Boeing's Response

Boeing did not deny Meyers' allegations. The company stated that it encourages employees to speak out and said that it will investigate all allegations of inappropriate behavior, such as unauthorized movement of parts or mishandling of documents, and make improvements at the appropriate time to ensure product safety.

However, just recently, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun admitted that Boeing had retaliated against whistleblowers internally, but he could not give an exact number.

In addition, two whistleblowers at Boeing have died under mysterious circumstances this year. On March 9th, John Barnett, a former senior employee at Boeing who repeatedly exposed problems with the company's aircraft manufacturing, was found dead in his truck parked in a hotel parking lot. On April 30th, the second whistleblower, Joshua Dean, died suddenly at the age of 45 due to an illness. These two deaths refocused attention on Boeing's quality problems and internal operations.