Episode 24: Boeing Has a Plan to Speed Up Production - Stop Inspecting the Work.

(upbeat music) Welcome to Warning Bells. Today, Joe Jacobson and I welcome Randy Cloud to the Warning Bells podcast. Randy is a highly regarded safety professional with extensive experience in aviation safety. Randy served 21 years in the Navy, holding positions as a P3 patrol plane commander pilot, T-44 instructor pilot, catapult and arresting gear officer, aviation safety officer, and safety department head. He worked for United Airlines as a pilot flying both of 727 and 737 models. He's taught human factors in aircraft crash investigation classes as a part-time, embryo, brittle, adjunct instructor. He's also served as a safety consultant in a variety of high hazard industries. Randy currently serves on the board of advisors for the Foundation for Aviation Safety, and he's also the editor of the Aviation Watchdog Report. The Foundation's monthly newsletter. Randy, Joe, thank you guys for joining me today on Warning Bells. I really appreciate you bringing your years of experience to bear and a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and I think a near and dear to everybody that boards a Boeing airplane. Randy, as a pilot, we're looking at your perspective, and obviously you've been a safety consultant for many years, so we want to get that full exposure to your experience. And then Joe, from a aviation safety engineering perspective, obviously that's really critical for us to see what's going on here. Before we get started, I wanted to just read a couple things. The first thing I want to read from is a Senate report that came out on September 24, 2024. This was the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, currently chaired by Senator Johnson, and also Senator Blumenthal, is the ranking member now. And I want to read something that is in this report about quality inspections. We talked about quality inspections and the removal of quality inspections in the past. But today we want to go deeper. We want to look into what we learned after the Alaska accident and what's been happening in the last year. And this is a paragraph right out of that report. And the title of it was "Quality inspections may not always be performed by qualified and independent personnel." And again, this is the Senate reporting, talking about Boeing. And it says, "Quality inspections are legally mandated and critical to the safe manufacturing and performance of airplanes. FAA regulations require aircraft manufacturers to maintain a quality management system that ensures that each product and article conforms to its approved design and is in a condition for safe operation. Among other requirements, that system must include procedures for inspections and tests and procedures for documenting the inspections and test status. Importantly, after manufacturers establish and secure FAA approval for these procedures, they are required to maintain the quality system in compliance with those established procedures. Those procedures usually involve employees on quality teams performing inspections and ultimately formally signing off once they are comfortable that work on the aircraft is completed correctly and in conformance called acceptance. Because each airplane produced must conform to the FAA approved design, quality inspections are crucial to mitigate and risk that manufacturers could sell airplanes that vary from the approved design to potentially unsafe ways." Now, it also says in this report that problems with Boeing's quality inspection system date back years. The FAA identified quality inspections deficiencies at Boeing as early as 2017. I want to also just real quickly just back up a second and talk about the code of federal regulations. In the law of the United States, the code of federal regulations is the codification of the general and permanent regulations promulgated by the executive departments and agencies of the federal government. And the code of federal regulations is divided into 50 titles. And Title 14, Joe, right, is what covers the aeronautics in space, correct? Yes, that's correct. So I want to just, again, state right up front that what we're about to talk about is in the code of federal regulations under Title 14. And again, these investigations that occurred are occurring. A lot of this is stemming from last year's January blowout accident of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. From what we've been able to piece together, is that in about 2017, the Boeing company decided that they were going to try to remove a lot of quality control inspections and the logic being, if you can remove these inspections, you can expedite the production of the airplanes. And they embarked on an effort, what many would say was a relentless effort to remove quality control inspections. And I worked in the factory. And the plane goes down the assembly line. This isn't a bunch of robots. These are people that are building the plane. And as that plane goes down the assembly line, there are thousands of employees that are working to build these planes. And they all have jobs to perform. And in the course of doing their jobs, they have places where they have to stop and call out a quality control inspection. This is how it's always been done for decades at the Boeing company. But something started to happen in 2017. They were looking at increasing the rate of production. And as these inspections occur, things slow down. If an inspector sees something brandy, you didn't get your job done properly, you need to fix it and call me back when you got it done right. And you would do your job and redo the job. And the executive saw this as unnecessary slowdowns in a lot of cases. So they embarked on this effort. And the best way to describe it, it's been described as the word puzzles or word games. And before I get into that, Randy, from a pilot perspective, what do you expect when you go fly a plane and you think about how the plane is manufactured and maintained? Frankly, and I think a lot of that is taken for granted. When we sign for an airplane, you always see the maintenance history, but it's just the most recent maintenance history. So you might see the last five, 10 days, what has gone wrong on the airplane and what's been fixed. So you're familiar with that. But beyond that, the assumption is, everything else on the airplane is working perfectly. That there are no problems. That you're not gonna see something completely out of the ordinary or unexpected. Your average pilot out there assumes that the airplane was built well, built correctly, built within standards that all laws were followed in that the airplane they're entrusting you to go fly. And in fact, carry hundreds of passengers is gonna work the way it's supposed to work. So I can tell you that flying the line, I never really even thought about how this airplane was manufactured or who was looking at it. I was concerned about the latest maintenance and that when I was satisfied that was taken care of, we go flying. - Yeah, but the trust you're talking about there is almost a blind trust. Joe, can you tell us a little bit more about the importance of when somebody says it conforms to the design of the plane and what your impression is and the importance of quality control inspections from a aviation safety engineer perspective? - Yeah, from an aviation safety perspective, we assume that everything is done absolutely correctly. We do this system safety analysis and that assumes that everything is correct, that there's no latent or hidden failures or defects. So all of that safety analysis is based on the fact that the airplane's built correctly, there aren't these hidden defects as a result of manufacturing. So it's a baseline that everybody expects. - So the plane, the max airplane, for example, the design started back in what 1967. And so the designs have developed over time, but as Boeing receives what's called a production certificate from the FAA, which authorizes the company to build and actually sell the airplanes, it's very important. I wanted to read part of the code of federal regulations, it's title 14 and it's called changes in quality system. And it says after the issuance of a production certificate, A, each change to the quality system is subject to review by the FAA and B, the holder of a production certificate must immediately notify the FAA in writing of any change that may affect the inspection, conformity or airworthiness of its product or article. So it's pretty black and white right here in the code of federal regulations that you can't make changes to the quality system without notifying the FAA. And what we've seen and what we've been able to piece together with the help of some other people is that the company started to remove these inspections, but actually it sounds like it started in South Carolina where the 8/7 airplane is built. And so there was a decision to have manufacturing employees certify their own work and actually do the jobs and instead of calling somebody out another set of eyes to look at the work, they basically look at it and can give it a thumbs up on their own. But Randy, what do you think about that? When you hear about an airplane being built and the person who's building it, basically having the authority to approve the work that they just perform? I look at it as a violation of the fundamentals of aviation as we've all heard aviation isn't inherently dangerous, but it's extremely unforgiving. And this is an example of taking a process that has worked over many years, the second set of eyes, the quality assurance, you and I both saw it in the military. We have a QA department that their only job is to ensure that all the maintenance operations are checked. And to say that a person who does the job can also inspect the job, it's just counterintuitive. And that's not just an aviation, that's an everything. My wife QA's me on everything and she finds all kinds of mistakes. Right. We understand a job, we do it, but we're human beings. We do make mistakes. And or perhaps our training isn't quite up to snuff or we've never done this before, or done it a few times. So having a second set of eyes just makes perfect sense that someone else will come in and actually inspect what you have just done to make sure that it is within standards and within the procedures that are required. It's just I don't understand how that could be removed. And anyone have confidence that is actually going to be a successful endeavor. Right. We recently joined Axon and victim family members in Congress as they talk with legislative staff about the loss of their loved ones. And there's real cost to these kinds of errors and decisions. And I wanted to read something that and I want to then get your thoughts on this Joe in context of the list of known engineering and manufacturing defects that we're tracking. This is a paragraph out of another Senate PSI report, this one dated June 17th, 2024. And it's describing Boeing's quality system and the its effort to remove inspections. And it says one year later, Boeing's effort to remove quality inspections apparently continued despite the October 2018 Lion Air 737 Max crash, which took the lives of 189 passengers and crew. In January 2019, the Seattle Times reported that Boeing aimed to eliminate a total of 900 inspector positions across their Washington State factories in 2019 and 2020, a nearly one-third reduction in inspector headcount. At the time, Boeing claimed that new automated tools were so accurate that they made quality inspections unnecessary. I can assure you that those tools that they're talking about didn't exist back then and any kind of a large quantity. The union, Boeing's manufacturing union District 751 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, on the other hand, argued that Boeing had artificially depressed the number of recorded defects in order to justify eliminating inspections by pressuring inspectors to approach mechanics informally to repair defects rather than formally document them, essentially masking defects. So this is a situation where not only are they removing inspections, but the union is saying that the company is deliberately telling their employees not to report defects. Now, Joe, why don't you tell us a little bit about this table that we shared with the congressional staffers recently that you've shepherded in terms of the 737 MAX airplane? Okay, yeah, we've got this list that we started as soon as the airplane went back into service. We were told that this is the most comprehensive recertification in the history of aviation from Steve Dicks and the FAA administrator at the time. And so what we've done is we've started to log all the problems and these are airworthiness directives where the FAA determined that there's an unsafe condition. There are also exemptions which indicate that the engineering was incorrect. And we've got a long list. I think we've got 30-something items now. Some of them are extremely serious. Others not quite as much, but there's also many that are tied to what appear to be just basic manufacturing defects. And so that's a snapshot of what's in this table. So prior to 2017, Boeing is doing these inspections like they're supposed to be doing it, right? They're documenting it. They're being done by quality inspectors who have the proper training and controls. And what they mean by controls is they actually have the quality stamp that says that they're certified to be a quality control inspector. They've had all the proper training and they have the experience, et cetera. But then between 2017 and 2019, Boeing attempted to remove these inspections and replace those inspections with what they call manufacturing verifications. Again, the idea of having the employee who does the manufacturing work sign off on their own work. The FAA rejected this outright in November 2017. They told Boeing you can't do that. You can't remove inspections and have manufacturing employees do them and then call them verifications. This is part of the word salad that the Boeing company is using to hide their intent. So it went from inspections to these verifications. Then in January 2019, two years of Boeing continuously attempting to remove inspections. In January 2019, Boeing implemented what they called verification optimization or VO. And again, they removed the quality inspections from quality inspectors and they wanted to assign the conformance decision to Boeing manufacturing personnel. So this is another use of words. It went from inspections to verifications to verification optimization to a conformance decision. But it's all the same thing. It means all the same thing. And in May in 2021, the FAA finally rejected Boeing's numerous attempts saying that manufacturing employees don't have the training in the controls. And they issued an EIR. It's an enforcement investigation report. It was dated May 18, 2021. This is from the FAA to the Boeing company. And I want to make a note, this is after 346 people died. Right. This is after that. And one of the encountered conditions that the FAA found in their inspections when they checked on these whistleblower complaints about the removal inspections. They said that Boeing product inspection authority was given to manufacture and personnel without qualification or authorization. The FAA found evidence that Boeing inappropriately delegated inspection authority to manufacturing personnel. Do not have the appropriate training or certification. When the FAA says they found evidence that Boeing inappropriately delegated inspection authority to manufacturing personnel who don't have the appropriate training or certification, they're not talking about a couple employees. They're talking about delegating inspection authority to thousands of Boeing factory workers over the course of several years who in turn proceeded to produce more than a thousand new airplanes that are now in service around the world. The different words that Boeing has used in the new programs the company has created to justify the removal of longstanding quality control inspections is admittedly confusing. This is intentional. To continue removing inspections, the company couldn't call it what it really is. Boeing's plan to speed up production by removing quality control inspections before and after the max disasters. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Alaska Airlines accident, Boeing is understandably trying to reassure the public and their airline customers that the company's quality control program is sound and complies with the law, but the data proves otherwise. Compelling proof of this is the long list of engineering and manufacturing defects that Joe just mentioned concerning max airplanes. Boeing rationalizes their self-certification policies by saying frontline employees are qualified to certify their own work. Here's what Boeing's VP of quality Elizabeth Lund told the NTSB last summer during the Alaska Airlines flight 1282 hearing when she was asked to explain the training provided to quality control inspectors. Miss Lund fails to mention the flood of quality control defects that have surfaced on Boeing's airplane since Boeing's policies authorized manufacturing employees to self-inspect their own work, claiming those employees had the appropriate level of training and certification. And it's dead tells the NTSB the exact opposite that Boeing's quality control inspectors have a higher level of training than mechanics due to their inspection responsibilities. Can you speak to the differences in training for inspectors and quality personnel? Yes, when mechanics come in everyone goes through sort of a foundational training where to ensure they know how to read a drawing they know how to access the systems this kind of a thing. For mechanics at that point they peel off so that it's really more about their job their job function that they've hired and chew. For inspectors we have a higher level of training for things like our process instructions, our BPI's, it's important to us that the inspectors have that higher level of familiarity with all of our BPI's, our requirements that they can pull product data. We call that pulling the drawings, the specifications, etc. That they have more familiarity with those kinds of activities and our training is set up around that. We also have some additional specific training inspectors or the people who write rejection tags. We work with them on that. We have a training element for how you correctly identify the location we call it a three point location on an airplane. How you identify a three point location on an airplane, things like that are included in a quality inspector training. What's really stunning is that the FAA is getting warned throughout these years from 2017 up till today. They're being warned by whistleblowers that the company is illegally removing these inspections in the violation of their production certificate, the FA finally they slap Boeing on the wrist and then they finally issued this long very clear enforcement document basically telling Boeing you can't do this. Joe first of all I got to ask you what the heck is going on? How come the FA is not aware of this and why is it taking repeated efforts by whistleblowers to have to write these things up and it takes months for the FA to go out and inspect and confirm this stuff. And meanwhile they're pumping out airplanes. Can you explain that at all? Yeah that's the pattern that you see with the FA quite a bit which is you can't do that, you can't do that, you can't do that. Okay I guess you can do that. We're trying to do a correction but it's a slap on the wrist as you described it and then they roll over in the end and this exactly what's going on this time. They eventually rolled over. You can't do that, you can't do that and then roll over and it's something that should never happen. If you were acting like a regulator you would never let that happen. You would enforce what you've said before and you would make sure that those things get corrected and in this case it did not get corrected. Randy there's thousands of pilots out there who are unaware of this. Is that accurate to say? Oh absolutely, absolutely. I think if pilots were really aware of the manufacturing issues that you just described they would be horrified. Speaking of horrified. During the NTSB hearing on the Alaska accident everybody was all of a sudden aware that Boeing manufacturing was really quite a mess and we want the company to be successful. We want the FAA to be successful but this sloppiness, this capitulation, this not willing to do your regulatory oversight job and just to roll with whatever Boeing wants is just not helpful. It doesn't make for safe planes. There was an individual who was interviewed during the NTSB hearing and he was a union representative that was a quality expert and they asked them they said the union has been fighting this the entire time. Yes, it's been an ongoing battle because the company continues to try to remove inspections and the union is saying this is stupid. Why are we doing this? This is making things worse. It's leading to more defects. It's putting more people at risk and at one time one of this union rep mentioned that because of a lot of the effort the Boeing union went through to try to claw back, that's what they say claw back these inspections. They eventually started to return many but not all of these inspections. In fact, a large numbers of them and we're talking to numbers of thousands were not returned and he mentioned nothing done to address the airplanes that were built without those inspections. When the FAA was called to task on this by the Senate, they were called to explain what they've been doing and what kind of oversight. This is from the Senate June 17, 2024 PSI report. In 2021, two years after the Seattle Times reported on the push to reduce inspections that Boeing came to call verification optimizations, after another 737 Max crash, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 led to the loss of 157 lives in the replacement of CEO Dennis Mullenberg with Dave Calhoun. The FAA issued a letter rebuking several elements of verification optimization. They went out and they found that the company had been doing this not allowed. Again, this is all before and after the disasters and it's leading up to today and the latest I have on this is a statement right out of the other Senate PSI report September 24, 2024. The FAA told the subcommittee that Boeing completed FAA approved corrective action that resolved the alleged deficiencies including the FAA's prior allegations that quality inspections were being performed by unauthorized personnel. Since the FAA's involvement, Boeing has established a risk assessment process that a quality organization must follow before assigning inspections of manufacturing personnel, the outcome of which must receive secondary approval. In short, the FAA, get this, the FAA told the subcommittee that with respect to assignment of quality inspections, it didn't identify any subversion of the rules. That's the FAA told the subcommittee that no action was taken with respect to aircraft and service that underwent inspections carried out by non-qualified personnel during manufacture. Joe or Randy, are you guys seeing this like how ridiculous this is? The FAA is saying, hey, now that we've looked at it a couple years late, we realized that they shouldn't have done it, but we don't think there was any subversion of the rules. This is a script for a very bad movie. It's rather pathetic that you can try to enforce the law as you see it or as it's written. Then you can backpattle and let the company do whatever they think they need to do. Then you can back up and say, there really wasn't any problem here in the first place. Nothing to see here. Complete lack of integrity. Yeah, it's a typical pattern that you see. A lot of times, if there is some either violation of the regulations or even a mistake, a lot of times what they'll do is they'll go back and they'll do some sort of this risk assessment. We screwed up, but it's really not that bad and it's still low risk. That's the pattern that I've seen over and over again. I think it's a dangerous pattern and I think they need to stop doing that at the FAA. Joe, explain to me something though. When it comes down to the rules, the law doesn't talk about verification optimizations or risk analysis and lieu of inspection. I don't understand. How can the FAA basically tell the Boeing company, go ahead, you don't want to have quality control inspectors that have the proper training and qualifications and controls. Just delegate that to the manufacturing employees. Joe, the table, tell us a little bit more, this table of defects, these manufacturing defects that come to light because I want to connect this with the Alaska accident, with RAN, these assistance in a minute. With regard to the removals of inspections and this long and growing list of defects, how do you explain to people this list that we're creating, when did it start? It started right away. Right after the airplane went back into service, we started seeing some of these problems. For example, a couple of months in, we saw that there was an electrical bonding issue and they actually grounded some more airplanes while they fixed that. We've seen a long list of these type of problems. We've seen electrical bonding problems. The initial AD was in April of 2021 and we saw another one. We've seen some engine antihysic, exhaust duct fasteners that weren't properly torqued. That was an air-worthiness directive. You would think that would be an inspection that maybe got removed. There's sealant andhesion within the center fuel tank that was done incorrectly. Again, that sounds like an inspection issue where that was an air-worthiness directive. There was an AD on the loose bolts in the rudder assembly. Then of course, there was the door plug blowout. Recently, we had one where it's clip-on nuts within the fuel tanks. They were the wrong coating. Instead of dispersing a lightning strike by being conductive material, it created a little spark plug within the fuel tank. That's the latest air-worthiness directive where it again looks like a lack of inspection. Some people may not be familiar with the recertification of the airplane, but just to remind people the first Max plane crash in October 2018 and the second one crashed in March of 2019. There was a 20-month, basically, a two-year recertification of the airplane. What did the FAA administrator, how did he characterize that, Joe? He said it was the most comprehensive recertification in the history of aviation. Yet here we have, on the heels of that, all of these defects. If you want to see this list, you can go to the foundation for aviation safety.org website and look under reports. Just imagine that this long list of engineering and manufacturing defects are everything that occurred after the plane was supposedly recertified after the crash. Joe, what does the say about the recertification of the Max airplane after the crash? I was part of that recertification and it was very narrowly focused. They said, "You can look at MCAS, you can look at pilot training." That was the focus, if you will, and any attempt to go outside of that focus area was met by FAA managers saying, "You need to stick to MCAS pilot training. You need to stick to the things that cause directly cause the crashes without looking outside at all the other potential issues." There were a lot of them. There was the crew alerting system, it doesn't mean current regulations, things like that. We should have revisited, but we're not allowed to. When the FAA administrators talk about tough love on Boeing, what the heck does that mean? I have yet to see that tough love. So waitin', I'd love to see it, but I haven't seen it yet. Yeah, because it's certainly seems like a love fest to where the FAA just basically rolls over plays dead whenever the Boeing company wants it to. This word games that has been described to explain this removal of inspections. This is the kind of things that needs a thorough investigation, a federal investigation needs to look into this because I'm quite confident that the airlines are unaware of the removal of these inspections. There's no evidence that they were being told by Boeing that, "Hey, we're going to remove inspections." And then to put things in, again, to remind people, a typical 737 MAX has about 14,500 inspections. And they removed thousands of inspections, in fact, the Ethiopian plane that crashed in March of 2019 had over 3,000 quality control inspections removed from it. From previous airplanes inspected earlier built in that assembly line, you're probably wondering how does that have thousands of inspections. It's almost unfathomable. But in an assembly line where you have hundreds of people working on a single plane, each with four or five jobs to do, and they have to stop at various times to get their quality checks, those inspections add up. Randy, I don't know if you know this. I guess you do, based on some of our discussions, but it was a lot of discussion about the Alaska blowout accident. How could the manufacturing employees have made such a horrible mistake? And how could they have not noticed that the bolts were missing? The chaos that was going on in the factory as evident in the ship side action tracker report that came out that was discussed during the two days of NTSB hearings in August. There's something that people may not know is that there was an inspection that had been removed. One of these inspections that had been removed could have actually identified those four missing bolts. Randy, are you familiar with this particular inspection I'm talking about? Yes, I am, Ed. And you're absolutely right. It's, again, goes back to what I said earlier. We're all people. We make mistakes. And then you're put into a chaotic environment where you're pushed for production over everything else. And it's fairly understandable how one person could make a mistake like that. I'm not justifying the mistake. I'm simply saying it is conceivable and understandable how it could happen. And thus the reason for inspections. Have a second set of eyes. Look at it. So we have understand that the door plug was installed at the vendor. It came to Boeing. A lot of other things were done. It had to be removed. There was an insulation blanket that reinstalled that was supposed to have an inspection before that was done and it wasn't done. It would have caught the fact that there were bolts missing from that door plug. Had it done the way it should have been done. So what seemingly was a insignificant inspection that somebody thought we can cut that out. Let's remove the okay to install insulation blankets inspection. Have they had that and not canceled it? They would have seen likely the four missing bolts and the other issues with the plane. It is concerning because there's other inspections that have been removed that we've seen. Joe, do you remember the issues about the vertical fins? Yeah, they found cracks in those vertical fins in these dagger fittings that connected to the rest of the airplane. There were bows. There were mistrialed holes in pressure bulkheads. There were mistrialed holes in various parts of the airplane. There's been a long list of manufacturing defects that have escaped the quality process. So I would chalk that up to probably removal of inspections in most cases. Yeah, so is it really worth it? Is it really worth it? You save yourself a little bit of time. We're still listening to financial analysts. The financial analysts are still leading the discussion, which is wrong. It shouldn't be a discussion about how many planes can the Boeing company produce, but really how many quality planes can they produce? The rush to try to help the company financially is actually going to just harm it. I think Mike Dostard said it best when he says, "The FAs are going to love Boeing to death." They keep allowing the company to do stupid things like this and authorizing the removals of inspections. The next time you get on a plane, you've got to ask yourself, is this one of those planes that had thousands of inspections removed? Passengers shouldn't have to worry about this. This is the trust that you talked about, Randy and Joe from a pilot engineering perspective. The passengers are even putting a much greater level of trust. Here they are getting on these planes, not aware that these planes have defects. The 8/7 had, recently had excessive gaps in the material. This was one of the things that Wissablor Sam Salaport was talking about when he testified back with us in April, Joe in 2024. I'm at a loss here, guys. Help me explain, Randy, what's the leadership logic here? What do you think in what would cause the company to make these decisions? Joe, what would cause the F8 to just not do their jobs? From a leadership perspective, nothing has gone right here. You figure if we're going to focus 100% on profit, we're going to put everything under planes out the door. That's our job. That's what we're going to do. We're going to push employees to do their job quickly. We're going to remove some inspections so they can do it even more quickly. All that does is demotivate your staff, puts them under pressure, makes them work over time. You produce a product that is actually less safe, less reliable, which is going to cause problems down the road by the end user. You're going to get bad press because of all the problems that have happened. You're going to make more mistakes to try to dig yourself out of a deeper hole as they say the only way to get out of a hole is to stop digging. Unfortunately, Boeing hasn't heard that analysis before because you just create more problems. You end up with, oh, I don't know, losing $20 billion or so. Your overall goal that you just focused on being more profitable so you can please all the investors and all those people that care about money. That all goes out the window because you've actually done the opposite of what you should do, which is focus on your employees, focus on their jobs, what they do well, how can we help you as senior leaders to do the job better? What do you need in the way of tools and personnel and time? Then we're going to create a good product that everybody can be proud of. Then we'll go out the door, yeah, maybe it'll be a little bit later than you would desire it to be, but it's actually going to serve the public well and serve the year lines well. Then you're going to get more sales. Instead of focusing on sales, as I've heard people say the road to bankruptcy is lined with companies that are focused on nothing but profits. That just does not work. This is such a glaring example of this, that leadership needs to focus on the people that work for the company. That trickles down all the way from senior leaders through VPs, through managers, through directors, to the floor supervisors, to the people doing the work. This is the message. You need to build that airplane the right way. There's nothing else that's acceptable because the end result, the end liability that we have is just too valuable, too tremendous. We've got people's lives depending on us doing this the right way. Clearly that's not been the case here. Joe, before you answer, let me read to you another quote from the Senate report. It's almost just listening to this makes you sick. In May 2024, an FAA official told the National Transportation Safety Board that when Boeing initially sought to remove quality inspections, the FAA spent time telling Boeing, "We don't care who inspects. We just want it inspected." But personnel newly assigned to perform inspections were not at the same level of skill as their predecessors. Another FAA official told the NTSB that Boeing's actions to eliminate quality inspectors and inspections in 2019 and 2020 could have been impactful to the safety or quality of the airplane that's being produced. Joe, I know as a former FAA person, I don't mean to ping you with all these FAA related questions, but Whiskey Tango FOX trot, what the heck, what is wrong with the FAA leadership? I think some of it goes back to, there was a pretty long stretch where things were going well. Then there was this push to delegate more and more to industry and industry complained that FAA was regulating them too much and getting in their way and slowing them down. What happened is then there was this push for delegation. That was the beginning of the end. They pushed for delegation and then in addition to that push for delegation, there was this initiative basically or this peer pressure that was used. So, me as an FAA employee, if I asked too many questions, usually what would happen is my boss would call me into their office and say, "We're getting complaints that you're asking too many questions. Why are you not delegating this area to them or something to that effect?" Why are you doing your job as the gist of it? Why are you doing your job so well? Because to me, that's what our job is to ask questions, to drill down, to push, and get answers, and that was not what if a management wanted. What they wanted was basically to let Boeing drive the ship and steer it, and we were to get out of the way because they built such great airplanes, was the narrative, right? So unfortunately, that's all ended. Now they're not building great airplanes, and we've had airplanes crash, and we've had airplanes grounded, and so we've got to completely recalibrate and start over and go back to what got us success in the past, which is things like, that's the reason that the regulations are the way they are. That's why inspections are required, and so we need to get back to that. They always say regulations are written in blood, and Joe, you're talking about, here we are on this journey where people, and we heard this in Congress, when we met with the staffers and the victim family members, is that everybody's hearing the old statistics about how safe aviation is and all that, and they forget that the reason that happened is because there was decades of hard work. They weren't dismissing and downplaying issues. They were taken incidents seriously. They wouldn't look at defects and just try to ignore them or delay fixing them. So we've got ourselves in this terrible rut, and Randy, we've talked about people who are just going along with things because they don't know what else to do. You've had, I think you correlated this to the road to Abelene story. Could you elaborate on what you're thinking there? Yes, sure can. But it's called the Abelene Paradox or the Road to Abelene, and it comes from a psychology professor who describes the problem of people not being able to disagree. We've all heard about groupthink, where suddenly people all start to agree with each other on whatever the topic is because they're all together and it all seems like a good idea, and they all go off and do their thing right or wrong. That can certainly be a problem, but this is really the opposite of that. It's a group of people who all think that this idea, whatever it is, this path that has been proposed by someone, including the person who proposes it, really isn't a very good idea. Yet they look at each other and one says, "Yeah, that might be something we could do as long as you think it's okay." And the next person says, "Yeah, I agree. I could do that." And before you know it, the group has agreed to take a path in the story that is told from the psychology professor is his visit to a small town in Texas, and the family is very comfortable sitting on the back porch in a very hot day, and someone suggests they take a trip to Abelene for dinner. And as the long story goes, they all decide that, "Sure, that's a good idea." They get in the car, and of course it is a long, miserable, hot trip, and no one has a good time, and the food is awful. They're exhausted and sweaty and nasty by the time they get back, and someone finally says, "Why did we do that?" And someone says, "I did it because you wanted to do it." And they say, "I didn't want to do it. I thought you did." So the human nature is such that we can often fall into this trap, where a person of authority who says, "We should do this," is looked at with some respect. And even though everyone thinks it's not a great idea, including the person who suggested, but he's probably being pushed from somewhere above, he doesn't really think it's a good idea either, but if he can get his team to agree to it, then maybe they'll all go along, and it'll actually be good in the end. And before you have an entire group doing something that they know is wrong, that they know isn't comfortable or the thing that they should be doing. And I think you could make the case that Boeing is on the road dabbling, for sure, almost every one of them. There are people out there on the floor who want to do the right thing, and they understand what's happening is not right. And you mentioned the labor union rep to testify to this, that the union fought back, because they knew this was not the right thing to do. But in the end, that's what's happening, and everyone has somehow gone along the ride for this, just for what end? To satisfy senior management's desire to put out X number of airplanes every week or every month, and it's leading to a disaster. And you've described it as a ticking time bomb. Is it going to happen again? We certainly hope not. But if history is something that we should be learning from, I think Boeing, certainly in the FAA, certainly has dropped the ball here. Yeah. Yeah. Joe, what do you think? I want to be positive, but the steps that we've seen being taken by our regulatory authorities, namely the FAA and the DOT, and to some degree, the NTSB, and I'll say something about that. Joe, when we sat there side by side, these victim families who lost loved ones, and they really wanted to show a face and not a number, because they hear all the stupid statistics, and they talk about complacency, and they talk about how people forget, and just like Randy said, and they're all just going along, and we know things are not right. And I wanted to get your, give us some positive energy here, man, I'm looking for some positive energy. Do you see that might be some good signs on the horizon, perhaps? My message when we were meeting with the family members and with some of the congressional folks was Boeing is broken, FAA is broken. So that's not very positive, but if we can actually recognize that they're broken and take concrete steps to fix things, then we're on the right road. And so that was my message, I think that was your message and the family's message. We don't want to hear about this complacent attitude, is all we've got the safest airspace system in the world. Things aren't looking that great right now. We just had a couple of fatal crashes, and we've got this ticking time bomb of 737 Max problems, that what we talked about was there's three open NTSB investigations right now on the Max. And one of them is another design flaw, right? This load reduction device on the engines were smoked, pours into the flight deck or into the cabin of the airplane after a bird strike. And that's a design flaw. And so we've got to take really aggressive steps to fix these things. And there's just an article just came out in the Seattle Times about that. Dennis Taser weighs in and said, this is unacceptable. Also, Sully weighs in and said, this is unacceptable. And so I think we need, we're at the point where we need a reset. We need a reset of Boeing. They need to start telling the truth and not hiding these things. I haven't heard anything from the CEO about this long list of problems, not a word. And so we need to start hearing that from Boeing recognition of the problems. And then for the FAA, they need to start regulating. They need to hopefully the new FAA administrator will actually come in and use things that matter. The last one was like, oh, we're going to limit the number of airplanes to 38 a month. We're going to put this cap on. They haven't been producing that many airplanes at all anyway. So it's a meaningless cap. That smacks of just, I don't know, cluelessness or you're trying to make put a smiley face on something that's not very happy. I don't think I did a very good job of giving you some positives there. Well, you gave us, you made something, I think you did Joe in a way because we're really already crossroads. And when we met with some of those congressional staffers, we described it as kind of ocean waves. Where all of a sudden there's a wave of something incident or accident, something that comes out about aviation safety and there's a big bunch of media interests. And then there's a bunch of promises and a flurry of activity and then the wave goes out of the news cycle and kind of retreats. And then it gets back to complacency. And we've seen this and the family members have discussed this and they've seen that the actions that were taken are really woefully inadequate. And one of the recommendations that we did have, which DOT Secretary Sean Duffy has expressed some initial support for, is this idea of an interagency task force that representatives from DOT, NTSB, FAA, DOD and a couple other federal agencies that would work around the clock 24/7, Randy in the military, we call these cat teams, crisis action teams or tiger groups, tiger teams or red teams working around the clock full time, recognizing the urgency of this, not trying to work these problems nine to five, take the weekends off, but really have a focused effort to identifying problems, analyzing the problems and coming up with recommendations for these executive leaders because we all know the executive branch agency leaders are swamped. They get stuff coming in and out every day is urgency and we think a dedicated team of people working around the clock. This is one of the recommendations that is being given to Congress to encourage DOT Secretary Duffy to sponsor a team like that. And this isn't a group of people that are inexperienced or interns. This is gonna. to be those really knowledgeable individuals that know those organizations, they know their policies, they've been around for years, they really have contacts, they can pull in people as needed to analyze these problems, but it really is like a rapid think tank type idea because our current processes that we're following are not working. And it is the definition of insanity, right? To think, keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. I'm gonna ask you guys in closing, actually before I get to that, let me tell you there was one other topic that we did talk about, Joe, you recall, and that was when we met with the staff, obviously the focus was on these issues with the max airplane that are still out there, these defects that have not been addressed that are public and flight crews are unaware of. That needs to happen and that needs to happen with urgency, that LRD issue you talked about is just one of many defects on that list. But the other thing we brought up was the fact that the NTSB had received documents, that were passed along to the NTSB, about the plane that killed these people's loved ones, these people in the ET302, that lost their loved ones on this flight. And these records are evidence showing that both Boeing and the FAA knew that plane had electrical problems in it when it was being built. And even after it was delivered in the first month of operation. And those documents, Joe, correct me if I'm wrong, but the NTSB has an international obligation to share those with all the parties to the accident investigations, right? Because this is crucial information that's relevant that could explain a lot of the reasons we're having all these electrical and electronic defects today, right? That's right. That's the thing that should happen. No, that is NX13 information that should get passed on to all the international investigative authorities. NTSB needs to pass that on. That's part of their responsibility. These things, if information is not shared, if there's no transparency of people are hiding information, sitting on information, that's when the problems continue to grow. So we need to get that turned around and hopefully we'll get that turned around soon. - Yeah, so we ask everybody out there, please contact the NTSB, contact your congressional leaders, show your support for an immediate urgent effort to focus on these aviation safety issues, to make sure that these kinds of documents are shared like they're supposed to by the NTSB and not withheld by the NTSB. But I'm gonna turn it back to you guys for closing comments. So let's start with Randy and then go back to Joe. Randy, what's your thoughts after we've had this discussion? I know this is just a short discussion on a complicated topic, but we wanted to let people know that this topic is real and it has real ramifications for the safety of commercial airplanes. Randy? - It certainly is real, Ed. It's been a good discussion. It is a complicated situation. And I think there's a difference between the risks that everyone takes flying an airplane. We all know if we were meant to fly, we'd have wings, right? We'd have hollow bones, we don't, and we're not meant to fly. So technology has allowed us to do so and with that comes a risk. And we know that, everyone accepts that, getting on an airplane. But what we should not have to accept is blatant disregard of safety, of manufacturers or of regulators, just refusing to do their jobs, refusing to accept the responsibility that they have to make the safest product and to ensure that manufacturers are making the safest product. That's something that we can control. Once you're in the air with an airplane, there's thunderstorms and crosswinds and a bird flies into the engine, all right, we've got some issues. We gotta take care of it. We're well trained and we can do it. There's risk involved in that. But if the airplane has problems before it ever leaves the factory, that's just completely unacceptable. And something that we do have, should have, complete control over. So my closing thoughts are, we do have to get a handle on that. And if that means for the max airplanes specifically, if that means putting 5% of them out of service for a period of time by the airlines to do proper inspections to make sure that we fix what we find and then do another 5% and yes, it'll take time and it'll cost money. But in the end, that's absolutely the right thing to do. And it's actually long term gonna save money. 'Cause we know how expensive it is to have these things go wrong. Well, I am optimistic that can be done if enough pressure is put on the people in power to make it happen. So you're suggesting to call your congressman to get involved, to ask questions. I think that's good advice. And the effort of the foundation and the family members of the victims of those crashes has been inspiring. I'm impressed with what's been done. And I think it'll make a difference if we continue it. - Thanks, Randy. Joe, over to you for your closing comments. - Yeah, I would just say that I'm a football fan. So there's a famous quote by Don Shula of the Miami Dolphins. He was the old coach and he said, "Uncorrected mistakes multiply." And I think that's exactly what we're seeing. We've got this idea that we could remove inspections which was a flawed idea. So now we've cranked out a bunch of airplanes that are showing problems in service. So now we've got to fix every airplane that's out there. We've got to fix the design and the manufacturing that's going on right now. So we don't put more airplanes out into service that have defects. And it continues to multiply. So the sooner we fix it, the better off we'll be. And so I'm hopeful that Boeing FAA DOT will all understand that and it'll aggressively face the music and fix this stuff. - Yeah. You guys, thank you for the straight comments. It'd be easy to sit back and just say, "Everything's fine and pat ourselves on the back and let that complacency kick in." But we know what happens when that happens. You guys have outlined some good recommendations and thoughts and appreciate you guys taking the time to talk about a topic that's not easy topic and there's no easy solutions. But you guys have really appreciate the time you gave us today. So thank you very much. Thank you, Ed. It was a pleasure. - Thanks, Ed. (upbeat music) For more information about the foundation for aviation safety, please check out our website at foundation for aviationsafety.org or follow us on social media.