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Brave Boeing QA Manager Whistleblower Comes Forward Corroborating Rampant Boeing QA Management Fraud Endangering Your Safety, and Exposes that in a 787 Emergency, Only 75% May Be Able to Get Emergency Oxygen

4/18/2018

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​Welcome back to the only place you can read about the massive ongoing Boeing and FAA fraud that endangers your safety.

A brave whistleblower from Boeing QA Management has contacted me, The Last Inspector (Gerald Eastman), to expose exactly what I witnessed in my almost ten years as a Boeing QA Inspector is still going on at Boeing, and has only worsened since I was a Boeing QA Inspector there.

And this blog concerns the first revelation of several to come in their brave decision to go public with the rampant Boeing and FAA fraud/corruption they witnessed. This Boeing manager is the rarest thing in my experience in Boeing mismanagement, a Boeing QA Manager who actually tried to do their critical job to assure the quality and safety of Boeing airplanes, instead of ever further subverting quality assurance at Boeing in order to enhance Boeing profitability, as most QA managers at Boeing do, as they are directed to do so by upper management, who directs them to do everything they can to "go out and raise the stock price," everything else be damned, including quality and safety, as covered often here from my (and now other's) direct experience.

This whistleblower's first revelation revealed publicly anywhere (on this blog) is that if you or your loved ones fly on any 787, you only have approximately a 75% chance of surviving in an emergency if you require emergency oxygen.

That's right. Approximately 25% of 787 passenger oxygen bottles will fail and not give you oxygen in an in flight emergency, as the squib/firing pin that fires to release oxygen to your mask that drops down won't fire and release oxygen through the tubing to your mask. So if a depressurization occurs as happened with the Southwest 737 yesterday killing a woman occurs at altitude, you have approximately a 25% chance of death by asphyxiation on a 787. 

And, if you are unfortunate enough to be on a 787 during an in flight emergency requiring oxygen masks and you are unlucky enough to be in a seat served by one of the defective "dud" oxygen bottles, you won't die alone. The passenger(s) next to you will die of asphyxia at the same time, as there aren't individual oxygen bottles for every 787 passenger.

According to the Boeing QA Management Whistleblower, Each PSU (Passenger Service Unit, which is above your head when you are seated, where your lights, fasten seat belt indicator, and A/C nozzles also are on most airplanes) oxygen bottle serves 3 passengers in most cases. There were several different bottle sizes and types that had their squibs fail to fire when tested. The Boeing QA Management Whistleblower is not sure of all the other places these discrepant oxygen bottles are used, but they are mostly used in the PSU’s for passengers, they believe. However it is possible the pilots' and flight attendants' oxygen bottles may be affected as well. Here is a picture of the 787 PSU showing the usually hidden passenger oxygen bottle:
Picture
In the current rampant Boeing and FAA corruption situation, the only way to 100% assure your safety while flying from these defects Boeing and their FAA don't want you to ever find out about is to opt out of flying on any Boeing airplane, passenger or crew included, sadly.

So, as noted, don't count on the person next to you on a 787 having a non-defective and working oxygen mask when your defective oxygen bottle doesn't release oxygen. If you are doomed by losing the Boeing 787 lottery of death, the people next to you are probably similarly doomed. That's the kind of fate no one sane wants to share with anyone else.

​For the past 2 years, Boeing has known that at least 25% of the Passenger Emergency Oxygen bottles in the Passenger Service Units (PSUs) above your seat on 787s will not operate in the event of an emergency.

The whistleblower's group at the time, Boeing MRSA (Material Rejection and Segregation Area, as I remember, which is where QA keeps defective or suspected to be defective parts and assemblies to ensure they can't be stolen by manufacturing and installed on airplanes, as they frequently are at Boeing if not locked up, and sometimes even when they are locked up in such cages) discovered during a discharge of oxygen bottles in 2016 that 25% of the squibs on the O2 bottles failed to fire as designed when the electrical charge was applied.

The squibs did not fire so there was no oxygen released. After Boeing failed to take action to determine the root cause and correct the fleet after almost a year, the Boeing QA manager whistleblower reported this safety concern to the FAA and OSHA via a Whistleblower complaint.

Thus far, no actions have been taken to correct this safety issue, and the QA manager's career has been destroyed by corrupt (as I expose frequently here) Boeing Quality Leadership for insisting on following procedures and attempting to assure that the flying public is safe in this and other instances.

According to the FAA, Boeing Everett reported a higher failure rate than Boeing South Carolina did, but yet, the flying public remains unaware and are being left in harms way by Boeing, the FAA and OSHA.

This brave whistleblower has ample documentation to support this particular safety concern, as well as others. Here is the text minus identifying info of their Whistleblower complaint to the FAA:

December 13, 2017

DOT - FAA
(FAA Name)
1601 Lind Ave. SW
Aircraft Certificate Service
Systems Oversite Division
Renton Wa, 98057-3356

Dear ( FAA name),

As you may recall, I filed case (case number) with the FAA against The Boeing Co.  In my initial complaint, I disclosed a safety concern dealing with the emergency oxygen equipment on the 787s.  In my most recent complaint, (case number), I provided information regarding (another 787 safety issue). 
  
It appears that the oxygen issue was not identified properly nor investigated.  Next is a quick history that explains my concern.  In an effort to dispose of damaged PSU panels and other panels that contained oxygen supply equipment, we (MRSA) separated the plastic panels from the oxygen supply systems (metal) in order to send the parts to separate reclamation locations. In dealing with the oxygen supply equipment, we were required to discharge the pressurized oxygen bottles in order to send them off to reclamation.
 
During the discharge process in (Boeing Area) (July 2016), it was discovered that 25% of the squibs responsible for releasing the oxygen did not activate (fire). There were 300 oxygen bottles of varying sizes and shapes that we needed to discharge. Out of those 300, 75 squibs (25%) did not discharge when activated by the equipment. The discharge equipment was set up to mimic the airplane.

The 75 squibs that did not fire were removed from the oxygen bottles and were quarantined in MRSA (August 2016) for failure analysis. The failure analysis has never been performed and no corrective actions have been taken to correct in-service airplanes. When I left, the separated defective squibs were still located in the “explosives” area in MRSA.

There were an additional 200 PSU panels and oxygen bottle assemblies quarantined in MRSA for failure analysis and testing. I am aware the local FAA located the 200 oxygen bottles and panels in MRSA due to my initial complaint, but only wrote them up for not being marked correctly for scrap, they missed the fact that they were the ones set aside for failure analysis. No action has been taken to determine why the squibs are failing and no actions have been taken to insure the flying public is safe.

My concern is that Boeing has had data for well over a year that shows 25% of the emergency oxygen bottles currently in service will not operate in the event of an emergency.  So far it has been ignored and gone unaddressed. I feel it is imperative the defective squibs not go unaddressed any longer. I wanted to make you aware of my concern in hopes that you can help drive the appropriate actions to assure the aircraft being delivered and those that have already been delivered are safe.

I believe Boeing’s failure to properly address known defective emergency equipment and knowingly leaving the flying public at risk should be reviewed as well.

Attached, please find supporting documents.

Sincerely,
(Boeing QA Management Whistleblower) 

Cc: (Two names)

End of whistleblower complaint.

The FAA has so far not acted to eliminate the 787 safety threat per the Boeing QA Manager Whistleblower. Because of his concern that 787 passengers  and perhaps even crews are in danger of dying in a 787 depressurizing event at altitude, he has decided to go public with this so far unaddressed safety threat here at this time. 

I submitted a FOIA today to the FAA requesting all of their records on this serious safety threat. When I receive anything in response from the FAA is anyone's guess. Just like Boeing, they seem to hate showing their dirty laundry, so to speak, without an act by Congress. I'll keep you posted as time goes on.

The above document unfortunately shows what I experienced when I went to the FAA with my whistleblower report of massive QA management driven fraud throughout Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Reporting anything to the FAA is exactly the same as reporting it to corrupt Boeing management itself, and is just as ineffective. 

In fact, this Boeing QA Management whistleblower told me that another worker at Boeing reported to him that they had found his FAA whistleblower complaint above on top of a Boeing printer.

That's why it's imperative that you go to the FBI rather than the FAA for such deadly serious issues. I wish I had done so. Boeing's FAA management is just as corrupt as their Boeing management puppeteers in my unfortunate experience. Reporting such wrongdoing to your FAA or Boeing upper management will only end badly for you and the public.

And Boeing upper management is still so that corrupt that they will prosecute you rather than listen to your reports of fraud you witnessed at Boeing and address them in any way. Yes, years after the failed to instill any Boeing management ethics $650 million or so Boeing Global Settlement Agreement with our government, Boeing is still as fundamentally corrupt if not worse as it was during the 767 Air Force Tanker Druyun Affair where Boeing CFO Mike Sears went to prison, while all other corrupt Boeing management went free, as corrupt as ever, in my informed opinion.  

Only arrests and prison sentences for those inside Boeing and the FAA complicit in this fraud can end it one day, I strongly believe. Hopefully someone some day soon will report this Boeing/FAA fraud to the FBI on day so at long last it can finally be investigated and ended for the interests of the public and airline crews at risk from it.

The Boeing QA Manager whistleblower insisted on trying to have the defective squibs analyzed for failure analysis and all the appropriate actions taken to assure the fleet was corrected and the flying public was safe, but rather than getting the support they requested from Boeing QA management, they were removed from the investigation and the investigation was stopped.

I am so thankful that this Brave Boeing QA Manager whistleblower decided to turn to me for support in getting this existing deadly serious (literally) safety issue addressed and corrected.

Share this post with everyone you know and love. While I tell everyone on this site frequently to protect themselves from this ongoing and deepening Boeing/FAA fraud by never stepping on any Boeing airplane, it is critical that you warn your friends and loved ones now to cancel all travel on Boeing 787s until this fraud threatening your safety by Boeing management (and likely their FAA as well) is actually investigated and ended, rather than being covered up just for the benefit of corrupt Boeing management and their quid pro quo job rewarded accomplices in FAA Management as usual.

This yet again proves that you, the taxpayer and flier is not being served by the FAA, as you are required to be by the law. As corrupt Boeing management has long ago regulatory captured the FAA you actually pay for, it is Boeing that controls the FAA, not you or your so called representatives in the Federal Government. Write them anyway, and ask them to investigate and end the puppet relationship of the FAA to their eminently corrupt Boeing management puppeteers.

If this brave whistlebower from Boeing QA management coming forward finally gets the fraud at Boeing negating your safety and the corruption between the FAA and Boeing as noted on this site finally investigated and ended after all my years of trying to do so, they deserve the Nobel Prize and any other accolade the world can bestow on them.

I am so very thankful for the bravery of this Boeing QA Manager in coming forward, contacting me, and beginning his effort at exposing the fraud at Boeing and their FAA together.

And a final aside, longtime site visitors may want to know that I have finally become a President and CEO of a corporation! Not exactly my goal in life, but corruption at Boeing and the FAA kind of forced me (as any ethical person would be) to do so in furtherance of this unusual personal hobby of mine.

I am President and CEO of the Foundation Against Roller Stamping Fraud (FARS-Fraud.org for short, and less funny sounding, and more relevant as well, as the fraud at Boeing and the FAA I expose is fraud against the Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARS for short), which you can visit at www.farsfraud.org right now, if you wish. It's just a stub site now I started only to get public donations for my FOIA requests of the FAA and other agencies, as well as website costs.

​All you will see there now is the propriety logo of the site, taken from the "Post-Its From the Edge page," and the "What is Rollerstamping" page, the Briggs and Stratton powered rollerstamp my eminently corrupt QA Lead at Boeing used to brag that he used to buy off unlimited production records in record time for any corrupt Boeing QA Inspector/Lead or Boeing QA Manager. He is retired now, but his metaphorical lawnmower engine powered rollerstamp still lives on as an icon for all Boeing QA fraud, past and future, here and on the noted Foundation page. Feel free if you are a Boeing fraudster sycophant to use this information against me any way you wish, if you are really that desperate to discredit my efforts for some reason. It is just an idea, not yet realized that quite likely may never be followed through on. I just love the irony that I am President and CEO of my own corporation, exposing the fraud of other Presidents and CEOs of corrupt gigantic corporations. 

I will never use any money raised by the Foundation for personal use, if I ever complete the site. It has probably cost me more money than I will ever raise through it for FOIA and website costs anyway. The FARS-Fraud Foundation will not be limited to Boeing and their FAA's various frauds. It will be used to expose Boeing's Vast Network of Fraud as well, such as General Electric/CFM, whose engine's defect killed a lady yesterday as noted. At one time when I was allowed to inspect 737 CFM engines on receival at Boeing in my job as an inspector, most of them had obvious defects that I wrote up, even serious ones such as missing safety devices and missing core sefction attachment bolts. But I digress. Remember to share this with any of your friends and loved ones, especially if they have booked travel on a 787 or are considering doing so. They may well breathe much easier if you do so. Certainly much easier than they will potentially breathe in a 787 emergency requiring oxygen masks. ​

​Don't forget to comment on this post, if you wish to, by clicking on the little "Comments" blue link at the top or bottom of this post, or if you wish to contact me privately for any reason, click here or on the "About/Contact Me" navigation button at the very top of the page and fill out the "Contact Me" form at the bottom of the page.

​You don't have to enter your name or contact info if you want to remain anonymous to me for some reason. I'm especially interested in hearing about your own experiences with Boeing and/or FAA fraud, or their other crimes, ethical breaches, or other type of misconduct.  
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​Pentagon Cited Boeing Over Quality Concerns Going Back Years

4/16/2018

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Bloomberg just published an article about Boeing's QA fraud on it's F-15 and F/A-18 fighter jet programs in Boeing's St. Charles, Missouri, factory, as well as Boeing's St. Louis, Missouri, factory.

Per the article, the problems Boeing was written up for by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) extended to other defense program work done at the two factories in addition to the two noted fighter jet programs.

Visitors to this site won't be surprised about this news, as I have written about Boeing's defense contracting fraud on the "Other Boeing Fraud" page, as well as my blog just prior to this one, in which I detailed how Boeing is spreading its QA fraud across the corrupt enterprise to pretty much all of its commercial and military programs, including its NASA programs.

My further comments about this latest proof that Boeing defrauds all of us U.S. taxpayers, in addition to its other customers, are after referenced sections of the article below, in bold:      


"Pentagon Cited Boeing Over Quality Concerns Going Back Years

Problems include missing fastners on undelivered F/A-18 jets

Boeing says it’s working with watchdog to fix issues raised

Boeing Co. was cited by the Pentagon for continuing quality, management and other deficiencies first issued more than two years ago, including problems related to production of its flagship F/A-18 and F-15 jets, according to documents and officials."

Wow. These instances of Boeing fraud were first written up more than two years ago and are just coming to light now? Better late than never, I guess. No surprise that quality, management, and other deficiencies exist at the noted two plants, as they exist at all Boeing plants due to Boeing Headquarters intentionally spreading such quality subversion methods across the enterprise as noted in my last blog like cancer. 

As I have detailed many times before, Boeing has intentionally engaged in this fraud for decades, as they know it is easy to enhance the bottom line by having its mechanics and inspectors falsify production records that its products were fully inspected, tested, and conforming, when those inspections and tests are largely not done.

Boeing knows that the wider and deeper this fraud is extended across the corrupt enterprise, the more it profits via such fraud. The few cases like this article details that Boeing is caught doing so are so rare and inconsequential to Boeing's continuance of this fraud that Boeing isn't deterred at all in continuing to commit such fraud. As I've written before, Boeing makes hundreds of millions via this fraud every year.

If Boeing was forced to actually stop such fraud, it would lose those hundreds of millions in profit, as well as additional millions by having to slow down production lines so that mechanics and especially inspectors actually have the time they need to do their jobs correctly.

Boeing's Board of Directors first became undeniably the leader of this fraud on 10/13/02, when I reported rampant QA management fraud throughout Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) in detail to Doug Bain, then Boeing's Chief Counsel, and he refused to have the company do anything about it. Boeing has only doubled down on such fraud since then "leaning out" flow time from production lines to have inspectors actually inspect and document the defects in manufacturing's work before that work delivers to customers.     


"Flaws at Boeing’s St. Louis aircraft production facility ranged from missing, backwards and out-of-specification fasteners found on undelivered F/A-18s and F-15s to oversized holes, missing components and incorrect parts installed on the factory’s production line, according to four “Corrective Action Requests” issued by the Pentagon’s contractor watchdog."

Wow. Boeing really has spread BCA's QA fraud throughout the company. Those exact defects likely exist on every Boeing commercial airplane and commercial airplane military derivative Boeing almost builds and delivers, in addition to these fighter jets. Such things are inevitable when production flow time is too short, and you encourage Boeing inspectors in every way you can to rollerstamp inspections off rather than letting them actually perform them per procedure and the relevant planning, drawings, and specifications.   

"In other cases, planes under assembly inadvertently hit maintenance work stands or other equipment on the floor, damaging the aircraft, the Defense Contract Management Agency said in a statement to Bloomberg News."

This is pure carelessness by Boeing. It could be the exact kind of fraud I saw on the Boeing B-2 Program, where management refused to take a very old and extremely defect proned mechanic off of the job of drilling the hinges for the flight control surfaces on the outboard wing section, likely because he generated some very expensive rejection tags Boeing made a mint on in charging that repair work to the DOD. As I remember, the only thing that stopped him from generating more bad and crooked holes was his reaching retirement age and retiring. Inadequate manpower through management cost cutting to enhance Boeing profitability is likely the root cause for these mishaps. Not enough spotters during a line move is the likely cause. Although Boeing management are fraudsters, even I doubt they intentionally ordered mechanics to damage the fighters. That would be a new frontier in Boeing management fraud as far as I know.  

"Some of the issues remain unresolved after more than 904 days, according to records compiled by the agency. They included other programs at the company’s St. Charles, Missouri, facility as well as the St. Louis aircraft production line, the agency said."

Makes sense. Boeing management, as noted throughout this site has long tried to spread this fraud from its commercial airplane programs throughout the company, most recently as noted in the last blog before this one, where Boeing is replacing QA Inspectors' job titles across the country to "Product Acceptance Specialists," to officially designate their function as rollerstampers, and not inspectors at all.  

"As the Pentagon’s No. 2 contractor, Boeing’s situation is a sign of the types of accountability issues the Defense Department will increasingly have to show it can manage as companies benefit from a surge in military spending. The final appropriations bill for this fiscal year boosted defense procurement spending to $134 billion, $20 billion over the Pentagon’s initial weapons request for the year, and $131 billion is requested for procurement next year."

Sad. Boeing should get none of that extra DOD money, and should have its existing contracts cancelled and re-bid to every other company qualified to perform the contracts, except Boeing, which should be limited to unmanned and non-defense critical programs only, both commercial and military. It's nice that DCMA wrote these items up, but the actual level of Boeing fraud on the noted programs is almost surely vastly worse. The way these oversight agencies work, in my experience with the FAA, is that they will write up a few items each year to justify their jobs, and then just twiddle their thumbs the rest of the year, while Boeing continues to engage in their usual QA fraud on a massive scale. It is nothing more than pretend oversight. The FAA was regulatory captured long ago, and no doubt major portions of the DOD and its oversight functions have as well. Hence these very occasional Kabuki dances of audit results. If the DCMA were to actually perform its oversight function, the noncompliances found would be orders of magnitude greater.

As I futilely asked the FAA to do in my report, the only way to truly find out how much QA fraud Boeing engages in would be to replace Boeing inspectors with qualified and unbiased government inspectors who never worked at Boeing for a significant time. If the DCMA or the FAA did so, Boeing production lines would have to be massively slowed down, not because the government inspectors were slacking off, but because there was never enough time in the production process for Boeing inspectors, and even mechanics to do their jobs right. 


The Chicago-based company said it’s addressing the watchdog’s concerns.

“Boeing and the Defense Contract Management Agency work together to address open corrective action requests through the evaluation and implementation of solutions that resolve identified issues,” spokesman Philip Carder said in an email response to questions about the unresolved alerts."

How do you tell when a Boeing spokesperson is lying? Of course, when their lips move or their fingers move on a keyboard.

“Boeing is either currently implementing corrective plans already approved by DCMA or awaiting approval from the agency on corrective plans we have submitted” for the four open requests, Carder added.

Yeah right. As you will see later in this article, Boeing puts its "business imperatives" like profitability, and on time deliveries so Boeing gets paid as early as possible, over the quality and safety of its defect riddled products.
    
"The watchdog is responsible for monitoring the performance of defense contracts at company facilities. It issues Corrective Action Requests, or CARs, of varying degrees of severity from a Category I -- the most basic -- to Category III and IV alerts that go to top management. Boeing has four Category III requests outstanding."

This is a serious level of defense contract fraud. And, of course, corrupt Boeing management is responsible, as usual.

'Trump’s Support

President Donald Trump has become a vocal advocate of Boeing’s fighter jets, regularly promoting their capabilities to visiting heads of state. The president’s fiscal 2019 budget plan requests $2 billion to add 24 Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet jets next year and 110 jets through 2023. The Obama administration had proposed ending purchases of the plane this year.

“The F-18, my favorite plane, is a work of art,” Trump told an audience of Boeing workers in March at the St. Louis plant. “We just looked at different versions of it, and it is spectacular.”

Before this praise, however, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, Ellen Lord, brought up the unresolved quality alerts with Boeing Defense, Space and Security President Leanne Caret during a regularly scheduled Jan. 29 review of the company’s portfolio, the agency said in a statement to Bloomberg News.'

It would be better if Boeing fighters were just works of art rather than operational jet fighters, for the sake of military pilots. At least they have ejection seats, which are hopefully not built by Boeing. Even though they do, these fighters seem to be crashing more often than before. A South Korea Air Force Boeing F-15K fighter crashed at the beginning of this month, killing at least one of the two pilots. An F/A-18 crashed just last month, killing both pilots. On second thought, the ejection seats don't seem to be eliminating pilot death as much as hoped. 

'Oldest Cases

“Since Ms. Lord brought the issue up, the DCMA and Boeing have had more substantive discussions regarding resolution,” according to the agency.

A CAR issuance is often followed by a lengthy back-and-forth between the company cited and the agency as they discuss the form and substance of an adequate corrective plan, drafts of the plan, its implementation and, eventually, verification that the highlighted problems were fixed.

The two oldest outstanding cases with Boeing remain unresolved after more than 900 and 800 days, respectively. The oldest was issued because Boeing had an ineffective corrective system that “failed to prevent recurrence of” deficiencies “identified through multiple repeat ‘safety of flight’” flaws, or “non-conformances.”'

Wow. Boeing tries to delude everyone when these quality issues arise as a result of their QA fraud that the defects found never affect the safety of flight of the airplanes they are found on.

They will have a hard time doing so with this article. Looks like Boeing drug its feet even on addressing safety of flight defects. That fits in with my experience at Boeing. Boeing rarely acknowledges such defects, as it pokes holes in their QA fraud efforts if mechanics and inspectors find out that doing their jobs poorly actually could kill someone. Mechanics and inspectors might start actually reading drawings, specifications, and plans when they do their work, instead of just slapping parts together as fast as they can (mechanics) and rollerstamping production records off (inspectors, or as Boeing calls them, "Production Acceptance Specialists").


'The second-oldest unresolved alert was issued for what’s called “ineffective control” of material that didn’t meet specifications because of the company’s “departure from contractual requirements regarding the identification, control and disclosure of non-conforming material,” the agency said.'

Corrupt Boeing management has been at this for years. I've heard of Boeing managers tearing up pickups (now rework Non-Conformance Records) and rejection tags (Now repair Non-Conformance Records) that they wanted to get rid of to speed production flow. I imagine it is much easier for them to do now that everything isn't paper-based, and is online. Corrupt Boeing QA managers never have to leave their desks anymore, and can just cancel NCRs for manufacturing from the comfort of their offices. Of course known defective parts get installed on Boeing airplanes too, as they did in the Ducommon discrepant part situation, even if they have to be hammered into place. As a Boeing inspector, most of the few times manufacturing mechanics asked me to write an NCR were when they couldn't figure how to continue production because of a part's defect.

'F-15 Issues

A third unresolved request has been lingering for more than 737 days. It was originally issued to highlight inadequate “management responsibility” on the F-15 program. The agency found “repeat instances of aircraft damage” and safety “non-compliances” to technical orders that “demonstrated a failure in Boeing St. Louis top management” of a “commitment to ensure compliance to requirements.”

An agency synopsis prepared for senior Defense Department officials before Lord’s January meeting said that “to date, the CARs have been ineffective in preventing recurrence” of issues even after the agency invoked what at the time was $35 million in withheld payments intended “to focus and incentivize Boeing.” The company, however, “continues to display a pattern of focusing” more on actions to “maintain cash flow, increase profit and achieve contract award,” according to the synopsis.

While the four CARs remain unresolved to the Pentagon’s satisfaction, the amount withheld by the Pentagon has since been reduced to about $27 million, the agency said.'

This is more evidence of the corruption of Boeing management. I had a QA Supervisor when I was in flight test QA that sort of parodied his bosses direction to "go out every day and try to raise the stock price." Boeing management from the CEO on down was telling managers that their #1 job was to do anything they could to raise the Boeing stock price upon which much of their compensation was based. How do you raise the stock price if you are a Boeing QA manager when your entire department is determined a "non-value added" cost to the bottom line by Boeing management? Engage in QA fraud, so that QA costs and rework and repair costs are minimized, by ensuring as many defects as possible deliver unreworked/unrepaired to Boeing customers.

Boeing makes money from maintenance, spares, and AOG work, which is another incentive for Boeing to not build its products with the required levels of quality, safety, and conformity the first time.

This is a huge article giving just a peek inside the corrupt enterprise that is Boeing. Of course, as usual, you can see much more about such Boeing fraud here. It would be interesting to find out who leaked this to Bloomberg. I wonder if someone at the DCMA leaked it to get Boeing to finally fix these items. I know it wasn't the DOD's #2, who is a former Boeing Executive who never should have been given the Deputy Secretary of Defense job. The Swamp is getting bigger, especially between corrupt Boeing and the DOD. Sad. Read my blog below for the noted details on how Boeing is spreading this anti-quality, anti-safety fraud across the enterprise for "maximum value." 


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Boeing's FAA Lets It Write Rollerstamping into Its Quality Mismanagement System, and Boeing eliminates "Quality Assurance Inspector" Jobs Company-wide, Replacing Them With "Product Acceptance Specialists"

3/19/2018

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It is a very sad thing for the flying public to report that Boeing's regulatory captured FAA has let Boeing further subvert their quality system even more than its already severely compromised state by letting Boeing essentially legalize the rollerstamping of the most safety critical production processes used in the production of Boeing's already defect riddled as delivered airplanes.

This apparently started in 2013 in Boeing's union avoidance 787 factory in South Carolina, no doubt approved by Boeing's FAA Transport Airplane Directorate Manager of the time and unindicted  co-conspirator with corrupt Boeing management, Ali Bahrami.

It was Bahrami that ensured that my report to the FAA of rampant fraud in Boeing Quality Assurance management was killed without an actual investigation of over 90% of the 382 Boeing quality system noncompliances I reported to them, or an investigation of the main, central thing that I requested they focus their investigation on--the rampant Boeing QA management fraud that was the root cause of those 382 QA system noncompliances.

This change approved by Boeing's FAA puppet Bahrami allowed Boeing to go from 100% required inspection of many critical production processes to as little as 17% inspection (with an average of 19.5%) of those critical to commercial and military passenger and crew safety production processes.

This in effect writes Boeing management's QA rollerstamping fraud this site is largely about into Boeing's quality system.

I estimate that Boeing management directed and Boeing Legal approved rollerstamping fraud by inspectors at Boeing misses approximately 80% of the defects created by Boeing mechanics.

Those approximately 80% of defects Boeing mechanics create deliver as is to Boeing's commercial and military customers on their airplanes and other Boeing commercial and defense products, and Boeing then banks the hundreds of millions they illegally get each year by such fraud to their bottom line with the much faster production flow and lower rework costs the passing of those defects on to their customers produces. 

Is inspecting only 19.5% of processes so safety critical that they formerly required 100% inspection by Boeing Engineering and the FAA concerning to you? It should be. But that isn't the worst of it.

Who is doing these 19.5% "audits" of these safety critical production processes?--The same Boeing rollerstamping inspectors that Boeing QA mismanagement has groomed to rollerstamp for decades now.

So, considering that, how many of the defects in the 19.5% of safety critical Boeing production processes still required to be inspected by Boeing's puppet ran FAA end up being caught after all of the rollerstamping is said and done? 20% of the defects that could be found in that 19.5% of those safety critical production processes? That would mean only about 5% of the defects in all 100% of the work "inspected" would be found by Boeing's rollerstamping inspectors before the airplanes delivered to Boeing's customers as is. 95% of the defects in the noted safety critical processes are likely missed as a result of Boeing QA inspectors' rollerstamping the inspections of the 19.5% of those production processes they are still allowed to inspect. That's a staggering amount of QA fraud, and extremely dangerous to anyone risking flying on any of Boeing's already defect riddled airplanes.

This means Boeing's already defect riddled airplanes as documented on this site are now defect riddled on steroids.

Boeing does supposedly use "process survey questionnaires" during the 19.5% of those safety critical production processes its inspectors audit, but I wouldn't bet on anything on those surveys being accurate or complete before they are rollerstamped off by Boeing QA inspectors because Boeing Quality Engineers (who should be writing those surveys) in my experience are just as corrupt as your average careless Boeing rollerstamping inspector and the worst of corrupt Boeing management. 

This effective writing of rollerstamping into Boeing safety critical production process inspections made its way up to the Everett factory on the 787 program at the start of 2016, per my information.

The extent of the spread of the noted writing of Boeing QA rollerstamping fraud into safety critical production process inspections since the beginning of 2016 is unknown. It quite well could be standard procedure at all Boeing Commercial Airplane (BCA) sites as of now, anywhere in America and even at Boeing suppliers.

As you will see later, Boeing seems to have extended this formalization of rollerstamping fraud across all of Boeing--not just BCA production sites.      

Details are somewhat sketchy because I am no longer witnessing Boeing's subversion of its and its suppliers' quality systems first hand as much as I used to, but the safety critical processes that Boeing is subverting through this fraud are close tolerance hole inspections, safety critical torque witnessing by inspectors, hole cold working inspections, safety critical electrical bonding inspections, and other production processes.

These production processes could cause a crash if they are not done correctly 100% of the time. Safety critical structure could fail as a result of the wrong size close tolerance holes, cold working not done as required, and/or improperly torqued structural and flight control system bolts. Critical drawing designated fastener torques improperly done could imperil dozens of safety critical airplane applications, from flight control systems to critical engine related fastener torques. Safety critical electrical bonding inspections not done correctly could affect any number of critical to flight electrical systems negatively as well as destroy or cause a crash of an airplane as a result of a lightning strike.

That is why these production processes were designated by Boeing engineering and the FAA for 100% inspection in the first place when the Type Design of each Boeing airplane model was approved. Now at least 80.5% of those safety critical inspections will never be done because corrupt Boeing management and their FAA believe that smoothing production flow for Boeing is more important than your safety and your loved ones' safety when flying on a Boeing airplane.

This overriding of the original FAA and Boeing Engineering type design requirements designating which production processes were so critical to safety of each Boeing airplane model that they required 100% inspection (in the name of the pure greed of Boeing and the FAA management that approved this change, no doubt for future quid pro quo Boeing do nothing jobs post FAA retirement) is reprehensible, and willfully negligent to public and military personnel flight safety.

Here's a section of my report to the FAA that the FAA refused to investigate the vast majority of from my 4/1/07 Daily Report Quote:

'An incident that shows how useless the current non-system of inspecting drawing designated electrical bonds at PSD is illustrated by the following:

I stamped in on a "job complete" inspection on the call sheet for (name), 747/767 EBU mechanic (I believe the job number and unit was N93114A on RM245 POS 4). There was an electrical bonding inspection that wasn’t yet bought off, so I got the M1 meter and went to the EBU to do my usual "witness" (by doing the resistance test myself) of the electrical bonding of the two jumpers on the two valves of the 14th stage duct installation that were the subject of the inspection operation. 

(The noted mechanic) was right there, and as I hadn’t looked at the drawing yet, I asked him what the resistance requirement was on the two jumpers that he installed all of the time. He said, "I don’t know." I did the testing and looked up the requirement on the drawing. They were within requirements. I bought the inspection.


So much for the theory that, even though inspectors at PSD do not (except for the few inspectors like me) do the required testing of designated bonds (and instead roller stamp the buyoffs), that no one should worry, as the shop mechanics "self-inspect" them to make sure these critical bonds are per drawing requirements, anyway.'

This illustrates just how fucked up the system used to be when certain electrical bonds required 100% inspection by mechanics and inspectors on critical components of Boeing turbofan (jet) engine build-ups (EBUs). Most inspectors (except me) rollerstamped them off without inspection and mechanics never checked them either.

This change just writes that fraudulent system into Boeing's eminently corrupt quality system. 
 

And I wouldn't call this formalized rollerstamping fraud the end of Boeing's subversion of its quality system in the name of greed over your safety in the least. If they haven't already, Boeing and their FAA might be working to extend this rollerstamping fraud formalization into much more than the most safety critical inspections as noted--they are likely pushing to implement these less than 19.5% done inspections into everything inspected at Boeing--every part, every assembly, and everything now requiring more than 19.5% inspection, so, at best, only 19.5% of the Boeing airplane you fly on will ever be inspected, no matter how critical to your safety that inspection is. And, as noted, 80% of the defects in that 19.5% of the airplane will never be caught by Boeing's rollerstamping inspectors, so Boeing airplanes will deliver with approximately 95% of the defects mechanics created during production as is, unaddressed in any way.

Those are defects of random location and random severity, so the safety of each individual Boeing airplane is just as random as the severity of those hidden defects. 

Another aspect of this Boeing and FAA working together fraud to negate your safety that is corrupt Boeing management friendly is that the FAA is only requiring 17%-22% of the formerly 100% inspected critical to safety production processes to be inspected throughout each factory over a running total of any 90-day period. That means that Boeing mismanagement can skip inspecting 100% of those safety critical production processes on every airplane produced for approximately 72 days, and only inspect those processes for 18 or so days out of each 90 day period.

​So, every airplane produced for over 10 weeks straight can be made without any of the noted safety critical production processes being inspected on them at all, as long as 18 or so days of production are inspected at the end or start of each 90 period, and Boeing would be compliant with this ludicrous and obviously dangerous system.
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I am investigating this further, but Boeing's FAA coughs up information slowly, if at all. They don't want you to know that they are colluding with anti-quality and anti-safety corrupt Boeing management by this attempt to legalize Boeing's felonious rollerstamping fraud,  or their  other many abdications of their responsibilities to us, the public that funds them to protect our safety when flying. 

So, as noted here many times, Boeing and the FAA are always hard at work subverting QA inspections that assure your safety in the never ending search for the least safety while flying that you will accept that maximizes Boeing profitability the most, as well as maximizes  FAA management post retirement quid pro quo Boeing job payoffs the most.      

But that's not all the news related to the above corruption negating much of your safety if you foolishly choose to risk flying Boeing's ever more defect riddled airplanes.

Boeing is so anti-quality and anti-inspection of any kind across the Boeing enterprise (as this fraud is directed from Boeing Headquarters), that, around the time of implementing this formalization of rollerstamping fraud in 2013 in their South Carolina plant, they started to rename all "Quality Assurance Inspectors" that do the noted rollerstamped audits in lieu of 100% inspections to "Product Acceptance Specialists."

It's hard to believe that any company at all would be so anti-quality, anti-safety, and anti-inspection to do this, especially in a safety critical to millions of lives industry like the commercial and military airplane and helicopter industry, but Boeing has actually done it, as you will see below. 

There is nothing better to illustrate Boeing's contempt for all quality assurance and inspection of any kind than this. It proves yet again that corrupt Boeing management is behind the rollerstamping fraud detailed on this site that is only getting more and more extreme as time goes on.

They took "Quality Assurance" and "Inspector" out of Boeing Quality Assurance Inspectors' job titles at Boeing because those concepts are now verboten at Boeing.

What did they replace them with? Exactly what you would expect in a fraud based production system like Boeing's--inspectors no longer exist at most of Boeing. They are "specialists," instead. And what do they do? Assure quality and safety requirements are met? No. Their function is to accept everything they look at, and everything they don't. What is that called? Rollerstamping. Their new Boeing QA fraud friendly job title is now "Product Acceptance Specialists." 

Boeing, in addition to subverting even safety critical inspections as noted above, is renaming QA inspectors at Boeing to a job title that is essentially "Rollerstamper," and has nothing to do with quality assurance other than contempt for even the name of the QA process.

And, sadly for fliers, astronauts, and our national security, Boeing has implemented this fraud based job title across the entire enterprise: 

Boeing's 787 Program, South Carolina: ​
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Boeing's Apache Helicopter Program, Mesa, Arizona:
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​Boeing's NASA Space Launch Systems (SLS) Program at the Michoud Assembly Facility, New Orleans, Louisiana:
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Boeing's International Space Station Program, Kennedy Space Center, Florida:

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Boeing's International Space Station Program, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas:
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Boeing's CST-100 Starliner Commercial Crew Transportation System Program, Titusville, Florida (Boy our astronauts are really fucked if Boeing gets the CCTS contract):
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​Boeing's Space and Missile Systems, Heath, Ohio:
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Boeing's Networks & Space Systems DOD Classified Military Satellite Program, Smithfield, Rhode Island:

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Boeing's Spectrolab Satellite Solar Cells Program, Sylmar, California:  
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Boeing's Aircraft Wire Harnesses and Electrical Sub-Assemblies, Smithfield, Pennsylvania:
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Boeing's Cable and Wire Harness Assemblies, Salt Lake City, Utah:
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Boeing's Circuit Card Assemblies, Cable Assemblies, and Electrical Boxes for RS-68 Engine, Space Launch System, PAC-3 Interceptor Missile, F-15 Fighter, and B1-B Bomber Programs, El Paso, Texas: 
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Boeing's Argon ST Electronic Warfare Systems, Fairfax, Virginia:
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Boeing's AOG Aircraft Support, Garden Grove, California:
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Boeing's T-6A and T-38C Air Force Flying Training Wing, Sheppard Air Force Base, Wichita Falls, Texas:
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​Boeing's DOD Spy Satellite Program (as Judged by Other Boeing Job Ads for This Boeing Location), Chantilly, Virginia
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​Boeing's 787 Program, Everett, Washington:
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As you can see, anti-quality and anti-safety Boeing management has implemented this scam across the whole corrupt enterprise. Boeing management has long wished to effectively destroy real quality assurance across the company in order to massively reduce costs and radically shorten production flows.

They boast about the results of this fraud when they tout their moving production lines and "first pass quality" or "first time quality" to clueless investors. "first pass quality" and "first time quality" are just Boeing's public names for the rollerstamping fraud as documented across this site.

That is likely another reason they killed the QA Inspector job across Boeing, and replaced it with the "Product Acceptance Specialist" job title--"Product Acceptance Specialists" at Boeing largely accept whatever quality the 19.5% of the critical to safety processes they MIGHT actually look at and rollerstamp it as acceptable, no matter how defective the work is. 


Corrupt Boeing management has long wanted to completely implement the Toyota Production System Lean Manufacturing method (which optimizes production flow without independent inspections of any kind) so that Boeing satellites, missiles, commercial and military airplanes, launch systems, helicopters, space capsules and everything else they almost build will roll off the production line just like Toyota cars do--as fast as possible without any significant inspection at all, regardless of the quality and safety of the work done on those cars.

That is the real reason for these changes--to make Boeing airplane production lines move faster and more efficiently, like the worst of automobile factory production lines, without the interference of inspectors slowing it down by actually doing their jobs of finding and documenting defects on the production line to be reworked before the airplane or other Boeing commercial or military product is delivered. 

Proof? In 2013, Boeing hired Walt Odisho from Toyota's worst plant on the planet--its car manufacturing plant in Kentucky, where he was Vice President of Manufacturing. Yes, Kentucky, the armpit of America, where it's most famous offerings to the world are a yearly horse race with Latino jockeys, and Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey. It's not a state famous for its educated and skilled workers.  
Toyota and Boeing's affinity for Southern plant locations probably has much more to do with people in those former slave states being more willing to do anything for the least amount of compensation--for "slave wages," or "right to work for less" wages and benefits than anything related to the available workers' skills or education or ability to do the jobs they are assigned.

But truthfully, it doesn't matter what kind of people build the airplanes or other quality and safety critical products a company produces as long as they have a bulletproof QA system to ensure the defects they produce don't get passed on to customers. That's why Boeing's subversion of its quality system across the enterprise as noted is so serious. Boeing has shown it doesn't care about the quality of people they hire, as long as they get the work done faster and cheaper, regardless of the quality of the work they do. 
As noted, in 2013, Odisho was hired on to Boeing as Vice President of Manufacturing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes​, from the same position at Toyota. This shows just how incompetent and clueless Boeing management is. No, car production isn't like airplane production. Airplane production is much more complex and regulated than automobile production. This is just another reason why, if it's Boeing, you and your family should not be going. If an automobile company wants to hire an airplane manufacturing executive, so be it. But the reverse should never be done. This shows the extreme carelessness of Boeing executive management when it comes to the quality and safety of the airplanes and other defense products Boeing almost builds.

So Boeing obviously cares much more about making its airplane production lines work like Toyota's terrestrial vehicle production lines than it cares about the quality or safety of the airplanes they almost build. This would be a joke if it wasn't actually being done by Boeing, and threatening real peoples' lives.

As you can read on my There is No Quality in Boeing Quality blog, the Quality organization has been a shell organization at Boeing Commercial Airplanes for many years, being ran by a Boeing executive with absolutely no quality experience. That alone shows Boeing executive management's dereliction of their responsibilities to assure the quality and safety of the airplanes they almost build. I won't repeat that blog here, but check it out if you haven't read it. 

But that decrepit state of BCA's quality organization wasn't the worst it could be, so Boeing executive management hobbled it further. Less than a year ago, on July 14th, 2017, Boeing executive management shuffled the deck on its own Titanic further, hiring on another former Toyota executive into a critical position at BCA, hiring Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran as BCA Vice President of Quality, even though he had no aerospace QA experience at all. Neither did Lindsay Anderson, the previous VP of Quality, but at least he wasn't only just a freaking CAR PART Manufacturing executive.     

The noted organization change also made the BCA VP of Quality report directly to the BCA Manufacturing VP, as QA has illicitly done for decades at BCA. Odisho was promoted to the position of BCA VP of Manufacturing, Safety and Quality, and Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, VP of BCA Quality, reported directly to him, thereby making the QA organization report directly to the Manufacturing VP, and neither BCA Vice President had any experience in aerospace manufacturing, quality, or safety when Boeing hired them into senior aerospace VP positions.   

Unqualified BCA VP of QA Lindsay Anderson was out, which was a good thing, but his replacement, Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, doesn't know anything about airplane production or QA--he was only a CAR PART MANUFACTURING executive. What could go wrong with such aviation incompetence in QA and with such pro manufacturing bias? Everything bad.

This raises so many red flags it isn't funny. Corrupt Boeing Executive Management has wanted to build airplanes like cars since 1995 or so.

They actually modeled their moving production line on the Toyota factory model, hence they put Odisho, the former Toyota executive, in charge of all BCA production. The first problem with this? defective airplanes can't just pull over to the side of the road when something goes wrong. This is obvious to everyone except corrupt Boeing management.

The next problem? The Toyota Production Model (TPM) has one axiom--no inspection, to maximize production flow which correspondingly always decreases quality. In announcing this change, BCA CEO Kevin McAllister said, "First-time quality improves safety and flow, reduces waste and enhances regulatory compliance.” 

Not true. This neither enhances quality, safety, nor regulatory compliance. Demoting and further hobbling QA makes FAA regulation compliance impossible, not better. It also threatens safety. But notice the key thing here--he says that the changes will improve production flow.

This brings to mind the following quote from one of my reports to the FAA:

'...the (new) “Boeing Production System,”...is merely a ripoff of the Toyota Production System, one of whose mottos is “no inspection!” Where inspection is allowed, it is done by the mechanics using “Go/No Go” gauges.

I witnessed a conversation the weekend of July 12th, 2003 (last weekend as it is July 19th now) in the Flight Test QA Lead office.

Airworthiness Inspectors and their leads were discussing the ATA 757 that wanted to roll over and crash when landing. Flight Test was at that time trying to find out what was causing that problem and fix it so the customer would accept it for delivery.

A particularly boisterous inspector was speculating that the moving 757 line in Renton was to blame for the problem, and he was talking about how the father of one of the Flight Test QA Supervisors was head of Engineering for the B-29 (I believe that is what he said) program and that they had tried a moving line back then but had found it was impossible to do with aircraft for various reasons, one of which was correct alignment and rigging of parts of the aircraft, I believe. That’s when Boeing came up with the “beehive” method of building aircraft that BCAG had used up to the current “moving line” era.

He then launched into a litany of badmouthing the Vice President of Renton Airplane Programs that he said had come from MIT with the (to him) inane idea of building airplanes on a moving line. His reasoning was that they were doing moving lines despite past proven failure of it at Boeing because these current managers knew next to nothing about what it took to build airplanes and thought falsely that it was just like building cars.

It was then when Bill Young, an Approximately 37 year seniority Airworthiness Inspector Lead spoke up and said unbelievingly, “they think they are building fucking cars?” (Please excuse his “French.”)

The answer to Bill’s question is painfully obvious—yes they do believe airplanes can be built like cars—just like Toyota builds theirs--on a moving production line with no inspection whatsoever save maybe a few “Go/No Go” gauges used by mechanics if  and when they have the time. Unfortunately, they do not care to realize that airplanes cannot pull over at 30,000 feet when they break down like cars can, and that is why they are supposed to be so carefully inspected during production.'

End of report quote.

What do they say about people not learning from history? 

The noted org change just makes rollerstamping fraud formalized in the Boeing management organizational matrix. Per FAA requirements, the QA organization is supposed to have sufficient independence and authority to ensure that management of the organization they are supposed to independently ensure the quality of--manufacturing--cannot exert pressure on inspectors to not do their critical jobs with the thoroughness or integrity required.

Just when you think Boeing couldn't be more corrupt and anti-quality, they purposely devolve much further again, further endangering anyone and everyone who boards an always defect riddled Boeing airplane with the mistaken belief that the airplane has been fully inspected when delivered and is safe. Not so in the least, as you see here.

In conclusion, this shows yet again that every day Boeing airplanes aren't crashing, and even on days when they do, corrupt Boeing management is hard at work further subverting its quality and safety assurance processes across the enterprise, both legally and illegally (rollerstamping), in a quest for extra millions in profitability so more clueless investors will buy Boeing stock and increase their Boeing stock options' values.  

Again, the above shows yet again that Boeing executive management has an extreme contempt for quality assurance and inspection of any kind across the enterprise. They consider QA inspection of their airplanes, space capsules, rockets, and all their other defect riddled products "non-value added," believing that Boeing products' safety margins are so wide that QA inspections are optional, even when required by the FAA. 

They say a fish rots from the head, and the same is true at Boeing. Boeing executive management has gotten away with massive rollerstamping so long now that they don't even make an effort to make their QA department look competent or independent. 

The only QA inspectors left at Boeing are in Washington State and the few other areas where workers' job titles are set in contract language.

But be forewarned union Boeing QA inspectors, Boeing will be renaming you as well to "Product Acceptance Specialists" in the next contract so that, like former inspectors in the other non-union locations noted, you will finally know your purpose is no longer to inspect the safety critical product and find defects so they can be fixed before delivery, it is only to accept the product without any inspection, regardless of the quality of the work, just like bubba built Kentucky Toyotas. 

In closing, thanks very much to the Boeing employees that are rightly worried about these changes that reported this to me. It's nice to know some Boeing employees still care about the quality and safety of Boeing airplanes, unlike their corrupt management. 

For everyone else, remember: If it's Boeing, you and your loved ones shouldn't be going.


​Don't forget to comment on this post, if you wish to, by clicking on the little "Comments" blue link at the top or bottom of this post, or if you wish to contact me privately for any reason, click here or on the "About/Contact Me" navigation button at the very top of the page and fill out the "Contact Me" form at the bottom of the page.

​You don't have to enter your name or contact info if you want to remain anonymous to me for some reason. I'm especially interested in hearing about your own experiences with Boeing and/or FAA fraud, or their other crimes, ethical breaches, or other type of misconduct.  
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Brave Whistleblower Charles Shi's Boeing Vast Network of Fraud Story Covered by NBC's Bay Area Station, and Boeing, as Usual, Lies in Response

3/2/2018

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A few days ago, brave whistleblower Charles Shi's Boeing Vast Network of Fraud Story was covered by NBC's Bay Area TV station, as well as posted online at this link, where you can view the broadcast yourself (I highly recommend you doing so). And Boeing, as usual, lied in its response to the story several times.

The story is mainly about NBC Bay Area's excellent continuing coverage of unapproved parts, and the FAA's incompetence/negligence in ensuring their removal from the commercial and general airplane supply chain. NBC Bay Area found that, "unapproved part notifications found more than 2,800 individual airplanes that had unapproved parts discovered on them since 2011, including on U.S. commercial air carriers." You can view their previous broadcast on this issue at the same link to their new story above. 

From the article:

'FAA Acting Administrator Daniel K. Elwell told the Investigative Unit his agency is reviewing the inspector general’s recommendations while also touting his agency’s safety track record.

“There has not been a commercial passenger fatality in the U.S. in nine years. It's an amazing safety record that is borne from a collaborative approach to safety,” Elwell said.'

That's truly the FAA's longstanding tombstone mentality--saying, in effect, not enough people have died in U.S. airplane crashes recently to actually do any independent or competent oversight of the aviation industry. Sad, indeed.

And he points out the Boeing corrupted FAA's reason for not doing their jobs of being the independent regulator of the industry--he wants to "collaborate" with fraudsters like Boeing that thumb their noses at requirements and regulations, instead of enforcing FAA rules/regulations at Boeing consistently and constantly. That way, he, like FAA Associate Administrator (to Defile) Aviation Safety Ali Bahrami and other FAA personnel before him, will be able to cash in for their not enforcing FAA regulations against Boeing at a Boeing or Boeing funded position upon leaving the FAA.  

Of course, while NBC Bay Area focused mainly, as noted above, on the general issue of unapproved parts from various sources, repeat visitors here know that there is a much bigger problem with unapproved parts/assemblies at Boeing itself, where much of the supplier content assembled into Boeing airplanes, as well as the airplane assemblies, installations, and the completed airplanes Boeing almost builds itself qualify as an unapproved collection of unapproved parts. Indeed, corrupt Boeing is the biggest generator of unapproved parts on the planet.

All unapproved parts scammers on the planet cannot collectively begin to get anywhere near the amount of unapproved Boeing "garbage pushed out the factory doors" (as Boeing inspectors like me call it)  every day. They could never raid enough airplane boneyards and/or manufacture enough counterfeit parts any day to compete with Boeing's own daily fraud in pumping out unapproved (rollerstamped) parts/assemblies/airplanes, as documented on this site.

As shown in my last blog, Boeing itself commits some 40,000 potential prison years of felonious rollerstamping each day in falsifying production records that work was inspected and conforming, when it was largely never actually inspected as required. Each of those daily Boeing 8,000 rollerstamped production records that could be federally prosecuted for falsification at up to 5 years in prison each is documenting an unapproved part/assembly/installation. As a result, every airplane that Boeing delivers is largely unapproved itself. 

But back to the main subject of this blog, whistleblower Charles Shi's portion of the NBC Bay Area report (snippets from the report in quotes):

"Chinese Parts on American Planes

Officials at the Inspector General's Office aren't the only ones raising safety concerns about unapproved parts ending up in commercial airplane systems. Industry whistleblower Charles Shi, who worked for an aviation parts supplier for Boeing aircraft, believes the problem of unapproved parts is worse than the FAA acknowledges.

Shi worked as a quality control inspector based in China, overseeing parts made for Boeing aircraft."

Whistleblower Charles Shi is 100% correct, as my experience above shows. The FAA has never acknowledged the Boeing QA fraud I reported to them first in January 2002, or the same fraud "flowed down" to  many of Boeing's suppliers by Boeing. They refused to investigate at all the source of that fraud that I reported to them--corrupt Boeing management.

The NBC Bay Area report linked above cites a DOT Inspector General report, in which the FAA is faulted for "lack of recordkeeping, management control, and inaccuracies in tracking unapproved parts," which is just a sliver of the extent of the FAA's intentional incompetence as documented on this site.

As noted in my 12/16/17 blog, Mr. Shi's title at Moog was Supply Chain Manager for Far East Asia, not "quality control inspector," as the NBC Bay Area report states. Hopefully that will be corrected.

Back to the article:


'During his inspections, Shi says he found that parts outsourced to another third party Chinese supplier were made with inferior materials that were not "baked" long enough to harden appropriately during production.

“You need to bake the parts to get the hydrogen out of the parts. So the parts can still be solid with integrity. Otherwise the hydrogen goes into the parts that can make the parts thin and brittle so the parts can fail,” Shi told NBC Bay Area.

The parts in question are components in the Boeing 777 spoiler system, which allows an airplane to take off and land safely. 
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Shi took his safety concerns to the FAA. According to documents from an FAA whistleblower investigation,  officials confirmed that hundreds of parts used on Boeing 777’s were manufactured in violation of FAA standards and that documents were “fabricated” by a third party Chinese supplier to conceal the violation. Even so, the FAA still allowed Boeing to install the parts “as is.” Those parts remain on Boeing aircraft to this day.'

Here is Charles Shi's "
Part 4-2 Boeing Misleading Message to Flying Public Case Two" Youtube video explaining much more with objective evidence the Moog 777 spoiler safety sensitive parts' discrepancies that were mentioned in the prior paragraph. He says that the reality is that the violations at Moog are much worse than what little the FAA has corroborated thus far: 


​Of course Boeing and their FAA let all of the Moog supplier made/processed discrepant parts remain on the Boeing planes in question, despite the 737 NG/Max spoiler trunnion blocks being critical to safety as they are "Single Point of Failure" (SPOF) parts, which are parts that, if one fails, will stop the entire system from working, in this case a 737 spoiler system critical to landing the plane on the runway.

And Boeing and Moog apparently never considered the safety implications of their allowing the 737 SPOF and 777 non-SPOF designated discrepant parts to remain installed on hundreds of Boeing airplanes.

Apparently they think that, if a part is not individually given a safety critical note such as SPOF on the engineering drawing, that it's material, processing, and/or assembly quality doesn't affect the safety of the airplane it is installed on. By all of the information Mr. Shi has posted, I would have to say that Moog is of that belief. That is likely why they got rid of longtime employee Mr. Shi under the pretense of a layoff.

As an aside (this is going to be a very long post--get some popcorn), that's what I strongly believe happened to me at Boeing supplier Precision Aerospace & Composites in Sumner, part of AIM Aerospace, Inc., which AIM later renamed in a re-branding to just "Sumner Operations." 

From the Boeing's Vast Network of Fraud page:

"On another occasion, I made the mistake of actually looking at the engineering drawing during the inspection of a major 737 NG duct assembly they built for Boeing. This was a duct assembly that Precision had probably built hundreds of times for Boeing previously. Along with other defects I found was one error I couldn't believe had been overlooked during inspections of that assembly all of those other times.

Clearly on the drawing it called out for every fastener attaching two major ducts in the assembly to be installed with the head direction of the fastener facing one way, but the fasteners had actually been installed the opposite way. The mechanic told me it had always been done that way. That meant I couldn't just write a pickup on it to get that one unit fixed, but I had to write a Rejection Tag on it to ensure Engineering was made aware of it so all discrepant previous units could be addressed in C/A for that Tag.


These were fasteners that were all easily viewable by any previous inspector. The drawing callout was obvious. Any inspector would have been trained on what head direction callouts looked like before they were ever put on the production floor, in addition to any training they had received if they had been a mechanic previously, as many inspectors had been.

In the realm of Boeing Engineering requirements, fastener head direction isn't usually called out on the drawing unless it was to ensure no interference with those fasteners at a later assembly stage...
This rejection was not just something Precision inspectors had missed hundreds of times. It was something inspectors in PQA at Boeing had missed as well all of the hundreds of times they received that assembly, which indicts Boeing's intentionally ineffective supplier oversight as well.

Needless to say, my writing that Rejection Tag didn't make me very popular in one of Boeing's supplier's rollerstamping quality systems. Per corrupt Boeing QA Management, if the defect didn't cause the airplane to crash, documenting and reworking or repairing that defect was "non-value added," per Boeing's "Lean" cost reduction gospel. Doing so would just increase the cost of the airplane and reduce Boeing's economic profit therefrom on which the stock value was based.

So, shortly after I wrote that tag I was put on another inspection task to keep me from doing so again. I was assigned the task of doing receival inspections of Precision's purchased fasteners and detail parts. For an inspector like me, it was the equivalent of being paid for watching paint dry. Not very interesting or challenging at all. But, as I always did, I consistently did my job in every inspection required. Plus, I needed the job, obviously.

Anyway, not too long after that my manager had me report to a meeting with a few other Precision employees in the break room. He informed us we were being laid off, effective immediately. I was very surprised. Not for the reason you might expect. I knew that an inspector actually doing their job per minimum requirements could easily get you fired at any corrupt supplier in Boeing's network. And Precision/AIM was a non-union employer, who could fire you for any reason at any time. 

The reason I was so surprised I was laid off?--I was very surprised because I wasn't actually a Precision/AIM employee. I was working for a temp hire aerospace staffing company. They didn't have to fire or lay me off. They just had to call the staffing company and tell them they didn't need me anymore. That would have been it.

It was kind of a mystery. Why were they treating me so deferentially? Why were they treating me as a Precision employee? Did my infamous Rejection Tag make it to someone at Boeing who knew my name? Did they tell Precision they wanted me terminated? Who knows. I didn't have a reason to worry about something I had no way to confirm definitively. That might have explained why they treated me so carefully, when they had no requirement in any way to do so. Or maybe someone just saw "my story" with Boeing on the internet, which would justifiably scare any unethical company that employed me.

All in all, I worked there for 3 to 3.5 months. Precision was a very cost conscious company as were most Boeing suppliers, even back in mid to late 2008 when this occurred. They advertised their low labor rate as a key benefit on their website for companies looking for a supplier. And Boeing's relentless cost pressures on their suppliers 
have only increased in the years since then, with predictable effects on quality assurance across the supplier base."

So, as you can see, being an inspector or supply chain auditor (as Mr. Shi was) and daring to actually do your job anywhere at Boeing or at any of thousands of companies in Boeing's Vast Network of Fraud (supplier base) can get you laid off or terminated at any time, whether you work in Sumner, WA, United States, or even halfway around the world in China like Mr. Shi was. If you don't cut corners at Boeing or at their suppliers, your stay as an employee will be short--especially if you aren't represented by a strong union.   

Back to the main subject:

Most parts not designated "safety critical" still can cause a fire, a crash, or near crash if they don't meet engineering requirements, are improperly installed, and/or are missing. Most Boeing employees know this, even though much of Boeing and Boeing suppliers' management doesn't--especially in the roles most critical to know that fact--QA and engineering personnel.

To illustrate this, here is a portion of my 8-19-06 post, which has excerpts from my original 1-11-02 report to the FAA. It documents the pivotal meeting with Tom Nakamichi, my Boeing QA Supervisor of the time, that prompted me to give up on the possibility of Boeing reforming itself and instead write a detailed report to the FAA about Boeing QA management's subversion and corruption of Boeing's quality system to get that reform instead:  

'Since Boeing QA Supervisor Tom Nakamichi and I hadn‘t discussed that day until then, I explained what happened...I told him that the reason (name) had probably called him was because I had done the wire bundle inspection before the shakedown, as was my habit (as I knew per inspection procedure that all workable jobs had to be completed prior to shakedowns), even though other inspectors would inspect the wire bundle job during the shakedown to save time.

Nakamichi asked me how long it took me to inspect the wire bundle. I said I didn’t time myself, but I guessed about an hour. Nakamichi questioned the time. I told him that the wire bundle job was the largest job on the engine, and I told him how I inspected wire bundle jobs, how I inspected for loose clamps, damage from installation, gapped clamp cushions, breakouts riding the main bundle, loose ties, etc. Then I would get the drawings and check for clamp lobing, missing clamps, any other installation notes that I did not know about that installation.

Nakamichi asked why I looked for loose ties, as they were done at the vendor. I said no, that in pre-assembly and on installation, the shop adds ties to the bundle. He questioned my use of drawings, stating that all our installations are common across models and that I should be able to inspect without referring to them. He said that a clamp on one engine model is installed the same way on all engine models. He asked if I knew that, if the nut fell off, that each clamp was designed to stay in place. I said no.

Nakamichi asked if I knew that the engine would run without the wire bundle. I said no...He asked me how many planes have crashed due to an EBU problem. I thought for a few moments and said "at least one."

He didn’t ask which crash I was thinking of. He asked me what I thought my job as an inspector was. "To inspect", I said. He said, "No, it is to train mechanics." He said inspectors were the expert mechanics.

Strange, I thought, because some inspectors have never been mechanics, and I had seen the word "inspect" quite often in the QA manual, but I didn’t remember the word "train" once.'

End of excerpt.

So there you have it. A Boeing QA Supervisor (later promoted 4 times at Boeing) telling me that the entire collection of wire bundles that Boeing installed on the 737 CFM turbofan engine was optional and didn't require inspection by QA because the engine would function without it. Bullshit, of course. I'm not an airplane propulsion electrical engineer, but that lie puts any of U.S. President Trump's thousands of lies to shame.
 

The Boeing installed wire bundles on the engine carry all engine control signals, sensor signals, and electrical power for the engine. To my knowledge, at least when Nakamichi made this statement, no Boeing turbofan engines had much, if any, functions carried by wireless systems between the engine and the airplane. The airplane would be only a glider if the wire bundles Boeing installed on the turbofan engines were missing.

And there are thousands of other parts on Boeing airplanes that are not designated safety critical that would result in a crash if they were missing or defective in some way. A certain wing or fuselage skin, a wire bundle, a section of tubing, etc.

As Mr. Shi's case today, and my almost 20 years at Boeing itself show is that the management at Boeing don't give a damn about the quality of the airplanes they almost build. That is true of all Boeing management from Nakamichi's former QA Supervisor level, all the way up to the Boeing Board of Director's Chief Counsel.

I proved this almost 15 years ago now, when, after Boeing's FAA refused to actually investigate my report of massive Boeing QA Management fraud negating much of Boeing's quality system, I sent my FAA whistleblower report to Doug Bain, Boeing's Chief Counsel of the time, and a member of the Boeing Board of Directors. It got his personal attention, but not because of the 382 or so detailed instances of Boeing QA fraud/noncompliances within it. I wasn't the first person to report that Boeing's quality system was massively compromised with Boeing management driven rollerstamping fraud.

Here is the email from Boeing Chief Counsel Doug Bain responding to one of my emails (click link above for an easier to read version of the email):   
Picture

Boeing decided to do nothing to reform it's quality system at all as a result of my disclosure to Chief Counsel Bain of my report to the FAA of Boeing QA management fraud that the FAA only had done a "pretend" investigation of at that time and closed. In fact, QA fraud at Boeing only got worse after my disclosure to Boeing Chief Counsel Bain.

After another year of trying to get FAA management of various levels up to the FAA Administrator to act on my report and actually investigate it resulted in essentially nothing, I decided to go public with my report and the FAA's and Boeing's refusal to do anything about it. However, before I went public, I gave the Boeing Chief Counsel's office another chance to do the right thing, and investigate and end the Boeing QA management fraud detailed in my report. Boeing Chief Counsel Doug Bain essentially dropped all other Boeing legal matters he was working on at the time, and personally directed the response to my threat to go public, by immediately getting on a Boeing corporate jet and visiting my workplace. From my 6-9-06 blog: 

'Again, after another sham investigation into my report by the FAA that I managed to get launched in 2003 after Boeing Corporate's failure to act, I contacted Mr. Bain again one last time imploring him to urge the company to end the criminal activity and corruption in BCA Quality Assurance Management before my next obvious step--going public with the story to get public help in ending the corruption within the FAA, and therefore ultimately Boeing once they were under effective and honest oversight of the FAA at last.
 
Just as in 2002, Mr. Bain took my correspondence very seriously, as he obviously knew the validity of the corruption my report detailed, and the consequences it could have for the company if I succeeded in getting enough public pressure to get the FAA reformed enough to end the corruption at Boeing.

He took it so seriously that he actually traveled from Boeing World Headquarters in Chicago to my workplace, which was the equivalent, analogy-wise, of Bill Gates coming to my own house to figure out and fix personally what was wrong (hypothetically, in this case) with the Microsoft software on my computer.

It was the end of my shift on or about 10-2-03, when I hopped in my (Chevy) Tahoe in the Propulsion Systems Division (PSD) of BCA parking lot and started to drive toward the gate. I drove my Tahoe, characteristically belching a little blue smoke, by a group of three nattily dressed men facing each other talking in the parking lot as I passed the Northeast corner of the factory.

I recognized two of the three men--one was Mark Rabe (as I would later confirm, as I didn't know what he looked like and only suspected it was him at the time), and the other was Doug Bain. Of course, they obviously knew who I was as I drove by. Mark Rabe seemed amused at the situation, but Doug Bain had a "deer in the headlights" "caught with his pants down" look on his face as he watched me watching him as I drove by.

However, Doug Bain's presence at my work did not change anything. It is my belief they were only gathered at my work to gauge whether or not, by their first hand viewing of me surreptitiously (except when I unexpectedly drove right by them) at work "live," I would go public with the story of corruption at Boeing as I had said I would do if they did not act to end that corruption first.

I received a call from (the Boeing Legal attorney that Bain/Rabe had assigned to interface with me, Marie T. Farrelly. She) told me, in no uncertain terms, that they had decided to do what they had done in 2002 about the situation--essentially nothing. The attorney basically dared me to go public, telling me "you gotta do what you gotta do." I tried to impress upon her the seriousness of the situation just before she hung up on me. "This is worse than Enron," I said.'

No doubt, Boeing Chief Counsel Bain told at least the Boeing CEO of the time, Phil Condit, about my threat to go public, unless he abrogated his duties to notify CEO Condit and the rest of the Boeing Board of Directors about Boeing's most important matters that came to his attention at the time.

The above proves that the Boeing/Boeing supplier QA fraud this site is about is known all the way up to Boeing's Board of Directors, and it is apparently a fraud so lucrative, that Boeing refuses to do anything about it other than to double down on it. 

As you can see, Boeing management literally doesn't give a damn about the quality/safety of any of its products, whether commercial or military, from the Boeing Board of Directors on down. They approve of the QA fraud documented on this site, as noted. I believe they make hundreds of millions of dollars, minimum, per year from this fraud that allows massive cost reduction and production flow reduction because Boeing no longer has to plan time for the required QA inspections and repair/rework of the defects found by those omitted detailed inspections. Those required detailed and all other kinds of inspection at Boeing are mostly rollerstamped by falsification of the Boeing production records that inspections were fully done, when they mostly actually weren't.

As a result, Boeing can speed their moving lines up to speeds where the required levels of inspection of production are impossible. 

Here is a good video analogy of Boeing's resulting production lines today, as a result of this fraud:    
​​

My noted conversation with Boeing Legal's Marie T Farrelly in 2003 proves additionally that Boeing management, even at the highest levels, doesn't give a damn about the quality and safety of Boeing airplanes, or any of its other products. Farrelly was the interface assigned to me after I contacted Boeing Chief Counsel Bain. During that last phone conversation in 2003 with her noted above, she asked a question that proved Boeing management of the highest levels definitely doesn't give a damn about the quality of it's commercial airplanes and their military derivatives.

From my 2-11-2008 blog:
 
​'
During the noted conversation,...Boeing Legal attorney Marie T. Farrelly asked me if I had any additional “safety of flight” noncompliances to report to her that I had not put in my reports in their possession. I was sure at the time that she asked me that only because Boeing could say they did if I did go public—not because she or Boeing cared about fixing such noncompliances at all. I was sure (and still am now) that it was just another intentionally ineffective “CYA” effort they felt they had to perform in case I did go to the media, just as was the “corporate internal audit” she had done of only my work area (even though it was clear in my report the fraud was company-wide) that focused almost exclusively on paperwork and other matters not related to the actual quality or safety of the jet engines and engine pylons we built up and mostly just pretended to fully inspect before delivery.

That this “Boeing fixer” of the most serious legal matters for Boeing in Washington—Boeing’s “home” area—asked for only “safety of flight” noncompliances was very telling even if Boeing had no intention of investigating and fixing those problems—it was proof that Boeing Legal (and Boeing itself) was not going to do anything at all to stop the majority of the fraud in QA contained in my report—the intentional rollerstamping of inspections off at Boeing rather than actually doing those inspections—unless (perhaps and only perhaps) such obvious fraud and noncompliance with the vast majority of the FAA required Boeing Quality System could be proven to be an immediate threat to the safety of flight of an airplane. 

Never mind that the defects that such an intentionally noncompliant and ineffective quality system routinely allows to deliver to airline customers are of unknown severity by definition, and very well could be safety of flight issues, except that no one would find out about them unless they were found by accident by the airlines or the pieces of the aircraft were big enough to accurately determine that they had caused a particular crash.'


End of excerpt.

The above shows that Boeing at the highest levels doesn't give a damn about the quality and safety of it's products. I strongly believe that the only reason that she asked me over the phone for any additional "safety of flight" items was so that, when I went public, Boeing P.R. could say that they addressed all "safety of flight" items I had reported to them. It was only a P.R. move and didn't actually mean Boeing cared about safety related defects in its products. If it actually did care, they would have actually investigated and fixed all of the items in my report, as most of the 382 items touched on the safety of Boeing airplanes in some way, even though they weren't an immediate threat to the safety of flight of a particular airplane. Some, like electrical bonding inspections not being done as required only posed a threat to an airplane when it was struck by lightening about twice a year. 

I believe from first hand experience as noted that Boeing engages in the QA fraud documented throughout this site precisely because it doesn't care about the quality or even the safety of its products. If Boeing management actually cared about the quality/safety of Boeing products it would have fixed Boeing's corrupt QA management led rollerstamping fraud in 2002, when I first reported it to the Boeing Board of Directors' Doug Bain, then Chief Counsel of Boeing, as such massive fraud can never be controlled to not impact the safety of Boeing airplanes. As shown on my "Crashes because of Rollerstamping" Page, Boeing quality escapes because of Boeing QA inspector rollerstamping even as mundane as wire bundle clearances and pressure bulkhead minor repairs have manslaughtered a minimum of 750 people so far.   

More deaths from Boeing Headquarters approved rollerstamping are inevitable at this point. The thousands of tons of Boeing defect riddled airplanes aloft at any given time guarantees that. Only when Boeing's rollerstamping QA fraud based quality system across the enterprise is reformed completely and all current in service airplanes are taken out of service permanently will the threat to the public and our military personnel from the Boeing QA rollerstamping fraud detailed on this site be at long last ended. As I have warned repeatedly here, the only way you can protect yourself from this fraud is to never fly Boeing.

Again, Boeing's public pronouncements that "safety of flight was never affected" when the defect riddled quality of its commercial and military airplanes comes up in the press proves that Boeing doesn't give a damn about the quality of its airplanes, and that they only pretend to care about the safety of their airplanes publicly in such inferences by in essence effectively stating that only safety of flight quality items should be of concern whatsoever to the public, and all of the hundreds or thousands of "non-safety of flight" defects on each Boeing airplane should be of no concern to anyone.

As I have noted several times, Boeing would only begin to care about their noted massive intentional QA fraud if enough Boeing airplanes were crashing because of the resulting defects to get the attention of the public so that people were starting to choose to fly Airbus airplanes instead. Until that situation occurs, literally the bottom is the limit as far as QA fraud at Boeing is concerned. As you will see on my next blog, Boeing continues to subvert QA at Boeing further and further each day in ways that even surprise my Boeing QA management fraud jaded self.     

If you are still here, back to Mr. Shi's whistleblowing:

Boeing didn't want to pay to replace the defective/suspect Moog parts, so they made their FAA decree that the discrepant SPOF parts could remain installed as is.


This shows again that Boeing will go to extreme lengths to keep discrepant parts on in service airplanes, even safety critical parts like these SPOF 737 spoiler actuator attachment trunnion blocks, in order to save itself and/or Moog money.

This actually makes sense, in a perverse kind of way, if you are Boeing. Boeing almost always will fight, even if it knows it is in the wrong, in these situations and every other legal fight they face, as they know, if they replace a discrepant part because of a whistleblower report to the FAA, that opens up Boeing and its suppliers to potentially billions in costs, as, if a standard of Boeing or Boeing's suppliers having to pay to replace every discrepant part currently in the in service Boeing airplane fleet is set, Boeing/Boeing's suppliers could be bankrupted in short order, as so much of the content of each Boeing airplane is defective because of Boeing's and Boeing's suppliers' rampant QA fraud documented on this site. So they fight almost every time a discrepant part, assembly, or installation is found on a Boeing airplane, just like they fight every lawsuit they face, regardless of the legal merits of the complaint.

They truly believe that an offense is the best defense, and ultimately saves much more money than doing the right thing. That is why Mr. Shi has had to go to Herculean efforts to get Moog, Boeing, and Boeing's FAA to do anything at all to address his whistleblower report's well founded allegations. 


By the way, here is a picture of whistleblower Charles Shi from the NBC Bay Area report:
Picture

According to Mr. Shi, an issue not covered by the press so far is a worse violation than any of the issues the press has covered--the total loss of raw material traceability and NHJ (Moog supplier Suzhou New Hongji Precision Parts Co Ltd) and Moog fabrications that he says have placed the public at risk on some 500 Boeing 737s still in service with nonconforming safety critical spoiler actuator attachment trunnions still installed. He goes into details in the next video.

Here's Mr. Shi's "Part 3 NHJ Counterfeiting SPOF for B737 spoiler" Youtube video, so you can see the details, history, and documentation Mr. Shi has put together for the public, the media, and investigators and the FBI one day, hopefully:
​

Back to the NBC Bay Area report:
​
​'On March 14, 2016 Charles Shi filed a whistleblower complaint with the FAA alleging substandard materials and processes were used by a Chinese manufacturer to produce parts intended for Boeing aircraft.

A spokesperson for Shi’s former employer, Moog Inc., said the parts in question were tested and determined to meet specifications. “There have been no reported issues with these parts. The FAA investigated and determined all necessary corrective actions had been taken,” the spokesman said.'

Moog is incorrect. The FAA did not fully investigate all of Mr. Shi's report. That is why he has asked the DOT Inspector General to direct the FAA to go back and perform a full investigation of his report. According to Mr. Shi on his Youtube video above, "Part 3 NHJ Counterfeiting SPOF for B737 spoiler," Moog also lied to the FAA investigator looking into his report. Moog and Boeing seem to be a perfect fit together--both companies willing to do anything, legal or not, to cut costs by keeping discrepant safety critical and safety sensitive parts on Boeing's defect riddled airplanes in service. I hope that when the FAA and/or DOT OIG finally investigate all of his whistleblower report's items, that they refer both Boeing and Moog for federal prosecution for any misstatements and forged evidence they gave to the noted investigators. Mr. Shi is 100% correct that the FAA should have referred this case to the FBI already, to investigate and prosecute those at NHJ and Moog responsible for this fraud and related CYA coverup efforts. 

Mr. Shi has told me that Moog's statement above that “the parts in question were tested and determined to meet specifications" is false. He told me that Moog's so called "testing" was incorrect and fraudulent, and that the testing of the parts must be a destructive test rather than the non-destructive test they performed instead.

Mr. Shi says that Moog never tested the noted 777 Suspected Unapproved Parts (SUPs), because all were already installed on in-service 777s at the time of the test they performed--they never removed any of the actual suspect batch of parts from any of those in-service 777s to test. 

He said that the SUP parts that were installed on those 777s were delivered from NHJ to Moog before May of 2015, and that Moog's "testing" took place in October of 2015, some five months later, on parts not from the same batch as the SUP parts in service. 

Mr. Shi also said that Moog's testing of those non-representative 777 parts was a "C-ring test" which is not called out on the engineering drawing (obviously the wrong test).

He told me that Moog did plan to do an ASTM F519 test, which is the correct test called out on the engineering drawing for the parts, but Moog's supplier NHJ did not have any material of the SUP batches to make the test specimen, so the required testing never took place.

Back to the NBC Bay Area report:

'A spokesperson for Boeing said the company also found no issues with the parts in question, stating:

“The safety of the flying public is Boeing’s primary concern, and any allegation related to safety is thoroughly investigated. In late 2016, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration investigated allegations related to suppliers to Moog. Boeing cooperated fully. The FAA investigations, as well as Boeing and Moog, found no evidence of a safety risk related to these allegations. Any claim otherwise is false.”'

Here's where Boeing lies, as they always do when these reports inevitably come up. If you put out garbage quality products, you can expect complaints. 

The safety of the flying public is not anywhere near the top of Boeing's priorities. How can it be when Boeing is constantly committing QA fraud that places the safety of its never complete when delivered airplanes at risk? As noted on my "Crashes Because of Rollerstamping" page, Boeing has killed at least 750 passengers and crew by their intentional QA fraud, and they show no sign that they are bothered by that death toll due to their fraud so far.

Obvious to any Boeing employee, the primary concern of Boeing is the stock price, and the stock price only.

Their next priority is delivering their airplanes and other defect riddled products on time, regardless of their quality, conformity, or safety.

Next in line comes cost reduction. Every Boeing supplier knows this. Boeing does everything but leaving severed horses' heads in the beds of their supplier CEOs to get them to constantly cut the cost to Boeing for the parts and assemblies they deliver. This is one reason Boeing suppliers cut corners on the QA of their products, just like Boeing does as documented here, and as I witnessed myself as an inspector at several Boeing suppliers, as documented at the last link above.  

Boeing's next priority is anyone's guess, but it probably isn't the quality or safety of its products. This site shows that. As shown here, quality and safety (both closely related in aerospace) compete for last position on Boeing's list of priorities. If manslaughtering 750 people doesn't get you starting to finally ensure the quality and safety of your products, nothing will.

Boeing used to list their priorities as "QCDSM," with (Q)uality first, (C)ost second, (D)elivery third, employee (S)afety (not the safety of its products) fourth, and employee (M)orale last. That was never true. In reality, Boeing's priorities at that time were (BA)DCSQM, where (BA) is the Boeing stock price.

Come to think of it, corrupting state and federal government is probably Boeing's next priority after cost. They have captured and corrupted the FAA through such efforts as documented here, and they have captured a large portion of the DOD as well. 

Last on Boeing's list of priorities, as most Boeing employees know, is the morale of its employees. Boeing treats its employees as vermin to be terminated at the first opportunity. That is why Boeing has been largely unionized. Boeing's South Carolina union avoidance factory employees only found this out once they rejected unionization. Now the years an employee has worked at the SC plant don't matter. Only how well they can suck the chrome off of their corrupt Boeing managers' car/truck bumper matters in keeping their jobs, increasing their pay level, or getting promoted.

Boeing also lied that "any allegation related to safety is thoroughly investigated." Bullshit, as their pretty much non-existent investigation of my report that I sent to the Boeing Chief Counsel about  rampant Boeing QA management fraud and 382 or so related Boeing QA nonconformities shows. At the very minimum, Boeing should have fired my QA supervisor of the time, Tom Nakamichi, if they actually investigated my report of his efforts to get me to rollerstamp like most Boeing inspectors do. Instead, as noted, they promoted him 4 times since then, probably as long as he agreed to deny my allegations against him if I succeeded in other ways of getting my report investigated.

Boeing also said "Boeing cooperated fully (with the FAA)." Wrong. The truth is that the FAA cooperated with Boeing as Boeing directed them to, not the other way around. Boeing regulatory captured the FAA a long time ago. The FAA is effectively a subsidiary of Boeing as a result, and Boeing is the one that tells the FAA what to do, as opposed to the independent way the agency should work.

Boeing then stated in the report, "The FAA investigations, as well as Boeing and Moog, found no evidence of a safety risk related to these allegations. Any claim otherwise is false."

That's a false statement, unless you read it in a specific way. It's true that the FAA, Boeing, and Moog all decided not to find a safety risk related to Mr. Shi's allegations. But, as the FAA didn't fully investigate all of Mr. Shi's allegations, and the ones they did investigate were only partially investigated and ultimately reached the conclusions Boeing wanted them to, no claim can be credibly made that Mr. Shi's report was fully investigated, or that its conclusions are correct.

Also, it is a lie that the parts in the story, the SPOF 737 Max spoiler actuator trunnion blocks, have no safety risk associated with them. They wouldn't be designated as SPOF parts if they didn't. The only way Boeing's statement would be true is if the trunnion blocks were no longer installed on an in service Boeing airplane, and, as the story states, none of the trunnion blocks have been removed from the in service 737's they are installed on. Anyone rational in the aviation industry would say that there is never zero risk for such a part failing in service. The risk may be relatively low, but there is still a risk as long as the nonconforming part is in service.

That's a bunch of Boeing lies just in a small statement. Boeing's paid liar department really crafted a doozy this time! They should all get bonuses for packing so many lies in so few sentences. Nothing seems to get Boeing lying more than when the quality and safety of their defect riddled airplanes are rightly questioned. 

Mr. Shi has additionally told me that 
one of the biggest violation's he witnessed at Moog has not been covered by NBC Bay Area or any other press outlet. He said that Moog supplier NHJ has illicitly outsourced 11 out of the more than 30 Moog part numbers it was contracted by Moog to produce (one third of Moog business, amounting to thousands of parts) to unknown, unapproved sub-tier suppliers. He said that these parts were already assembled into Boeing planes and pose a safety threat to affected planes, endangering the flying public's lives every waking and sleeping moment.

I'm unable to verify that sobering warning, however I would trust whistleblower Shi's opinion on the threat posed by these SUPs before I would trust Moog's, Boeing's, or the FAA's. He has something they all obviously lack--unquestionable integrity.

Here is a Youtube video titled "Part 4-1 Boeing Misleading Message to Flying Public Case One" where Mr. Shi talks about this fraud that has so far been unreported by the major media:  

Whistleblower Shi believes another major Moog criminal fraud is their leaking of his confidential FAA whistleblower report information to the very suspect of that report, which he says effectively shows that Moog endorses the suspect work NHJ did--tampering and destroying evidence.

I have no idea what specific law applies here, but here is Mr. Shi discussing that allegation in his Youtube video, "Part 6 Moog Unlawful Leaking Confidential Whistleblowing Info to Suspect":
 

Mr. Shi is  frustrated not just by all of the significant crime and fraud he has uncovered and reported to the FAA which has so far been unaddressed, but also especially by the FAA's corruption/intentional incompetence in not passing his whistleblower report's allegations to the applicable law enforcement agencies for a criminal investigation as is required. This was a finding by the DOT OIG's May 30th, 2017 Audit Report that is cited within the noted NBC Bay Area report. Unfortunately NBC Bay Area did not mention this in their report, and without that publicity, the DOT OIG, who is currently supposedly reviewing the FAA's inaction in Mr. Shi's case, may not be motivated to take action compelling the FAA to work with law enforcement to conduct the criminal investigation needed anytime soon.

Mr. Shi says that his experience so far as a whistleblower in the aerospace industry is that the "tombstone mentality" is still unfortunately in play today. I agree 100% from my own experiences with Boeing, Boeing suppliers, the FAA, and the DOT OIG.

​Hopefully all of whistleblower Shi's report to the FAA and the DOT OIG will be investigated fully soon, and accurate conclusions reached. That sadly hasn't happened to this point. I intend on writing a future blog to point out why the FAA's report was intentionally deficient.
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