I’m afraid to fly on Boeing planes: a former employee of the company exposed the poor quality of American airliners

“I’m afraid to fly on Boeing planes,” a former employee of the company, who exposed the low quality of American airliners, made another exposure of the aviation giant, or rather the largest manufacturer of Boeing spare parts in the British press. According to the publication, the former quality inspector of the largest supplier said that he was pressured to hide defects found in the airline’s spare parts.

This was told by Santiago Paredes, who worked as an inspector at Spirit Aerosystems, the largest manufacturer of Boeing spare parts, for more than ten years. “I was not surprised when the lack of door bolts led to the fact that in January an entire 737 Max door plug flew out in the air of an Alaska Airlines plane. Why did this happen? Because Spirit missed a defect that the company did not notice because of the pressure they put on inspectors,” he said.

According to him, he regularly fixed hundreds of defects in parts and constantly received problems and reprimands from his superiors, as he often slowed down production due to his inspections. “They always made a fuss about why I found it, why I watched it. They just wanted the product to be delivered. And they didn’t care about the consequences of sending bad fuselages,” the former Boeing inspector added.

Judging by his stories, the same struggle for reporting, “postings” and “cutting” flourished on the American giant. “They were just focused on meeting quotas, schedules, budgets… if the numbers looked good, the condition of the fuselages didn’t matter much,” he stressed.

According to him, it got to the point that he was threatened and even demoted for his good work. However, in the end, he first recovered at his workplace, and then quit the company.

After that, Mr. Paredes said: he is still afraid to fly because of what he had to go through at the Boeing subsidiary. “I had never met people who were afraid to fly until I started working at Spirit. And then, being at Spirit, I met a lot of people who were afraid to fly — because they saw how the fuselages were being built,” he said.

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