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Workers at Boeing and supplier Spirit AeroSystems reported a culture of immense pressure to work quickly resulting in confusion and low morale, documents released ahead of a two-day hearing on January’s door plug blow-out have revealed.
The testimonies were shared Tuesday at the beginning of the hearing, in which the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating Boeing over safety issues.
The NTSB has interviewed many workers at Boeing and Spirit since the incident in January, which it says was caused by four missing bolts meant to secure the door plug.
One worker, named as a Door Master Lead at Boeing, said his team experienced huge pressure to replace doors after problems were discovered but were not given special training on door plugs, leaving them in “uncharted waters to where… we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.”
What have Boeing workers said about their work culture?
January’s blow-out event triggered an investigation from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which had also launched earlier investigations into Boeing’s safety culture after two fatal crashes involving Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in 2018 and 2019.
An FAA inspector told NTSB investigators that while they had “heard of pressure,” they hadn’t been able to substantiate the claims.
Other workers at Boeing made similar claims in their testimonies, with one employee responsible for door assembly and installation suggesting high workloads made mistakes inevitable and unavoidable.
“As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” the worker said in their interview with the NTSB. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.”
According to one testimony from a Boeing team captain who worked at the 737 factory, the culture and workload resulted in low employee morale and retention.
“We have a lot of turnover specifically because, you know, this can be a stressful job, you know,” the Boeing team captain observed.
The worker added that there was a major gap between the work Boeing expected its staff to deliver, and the knowledge and skills available on the team to execute the work.
“What the company wants and what we have the skills and capabilities to perform at the time sometimes that doesn’t coincide, and so some people get disgruntled; they feel like they’re being overworked; they feel like, you know, that we might be getting taken advantage of,” he said.
Communication breakdown & cultural division at Boeing
The testimonies further revealed difficulties with communication and cultural harmony on the Boeing factory floor, similarly highlighted in previous investigations by the FAA into the fatal 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019.
The door plug was manufactured by Spirit, and although four bolts were in place when the part arrived at the Boeing factory, repair work was needed to rivets by the door, leading to the plug being removed.
One of the documents released ahead of the hearing included an interview with a Spirit employee, who told investigators that communication between Boeing and Spirit workers on the factory floor was poor.
“Well, basically we’re the cockroaches of the factory,” they stated, suggesting a low-quality relationship between co-workers at the plant.
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Boeing has said the workers who removed the door plug and bolts to fix the rivets did not file any paperwork; and when a separate team put the plug back, it was only a temporary fix, and that paperwork would show the plug and bolts would need to be properly reinstalled before the craft was air-worthy.
Without the paperwork in place, the confusion and breakdown in communication seemingly led to no assembly line worker being aware that the door plug had missing bolts that needed replacing.
Following the completion of the hearing, the NTSB has confirmed it will “use the information gathered to complete the investigation, determine probable cause, and make recommendations to improve transportation safety.”
Many of these recommendations may well demand improvements to the cultural and operational practices at Boeing, including the culture in which factory workers operate and the communication between teams.
