FAA Investigators Fail to Examine Jets in Question
News: Safety Check Relies on Manufacturer’s Own Review.
December 5, 2005
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Third in a series of three articles. You can read the first part here, and the second here.
When investigators for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) heard in 2002 that Boeing may have put unapproved and unsafe parts on 737s and other aircraft, they took the matter seriously. They reviewed Boeing’s quality control program. They visited Ducommun, the contractor alleged to have produced the bogus parts. Then, finding no safety problems, they put the matter to rest. But, Mother Jones has learned, they never actually inspected the airplanes manufactured with the parts in question.
The FAA’s investigation was prompted by allegations from three former internal auditors at Boeing, who filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the aviation giant, claiming that faulty bear straps, defective fail-safe chords and other components posed a safety threat to 737’s made between 1994 and 2001, and possibly longer.
According to a report subsequently issued by the Department of Defense Inspector General, these inspections were “unable to discover any evidence to support the [whistleblowers’] allegations” and that former Ducommun employees “were adamant that no knowingly defective products were sold to either commercial or military customers.”
The records of FAA’s investigation show that while agency investigators examined Boeing’s internal review processes regarding the suspect parts, and inspected components in production at Ducommun in 2002, the agency did not examine aircraft produced with the suspect components from 1994 through 2001.
Now, acting on new information from an aviation expert with FAA credentials, known as a “designee,“ the agency has since reopened the investigation it closed in 2004, as Mother Jones previously reported. At the same time, in a Wichita courthouse, Boeing and Ducommun are facing the whistleblowers’ charges that Ducommun provided unapproved and unsafe aircraft parts to Boeing, which installed them on military aircraft. Mother Jones has learned that these same parts have also been installed on at least 1,600 commercial jets, among them 737s, 747s,757 and 767s. It may take the FAA as long as a year to complete its current inquiry and the lawsuit is moving as slowly as the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Meanwhile, the case offers a window into the inner workings of the aviation industry and the federal agency charged with overseeing it.
There are millions of parts in the average commercial airplane, manufactured by some 759 companies around the country. The FAA does not have the manpower to inspect each part, and neither does Boeing, the nation’s largest aircraft manufacturer. Instead, they rely heavily on contractors monitoring themselves—and providing the paperwork to prove it. But time and money pressures sometimes keep that from happening.
In the early 1990s, for example, Boeing faced financial problems and cut ties to many of its suppliers. In the late 1990s, when orders for new planes started pouring in, this left them with a shortage of companies qualified to produce the needed parts. The bear straps, for example, which the auditors say had short-edge margins, were only made by one company other than Ducommun at the time. In the whistleblowers lawsuit, former Ducommun president Bob Hansen is quoted as saying that the company knowingly violated internal quality measures to get the parts in on time. “AHF [Ducommun] violated all of our procedures, and Boeing violated all of its procedures to get these parts on time.”
Self-inspection—and disclosure--has become more important over the past two years, as the Bush administration redoubled previous efforts to gut the agency’s fleet of inspectors. In a statement to Mother Jones, the FAA said it will lose 253 inspectors this year to attrition, to help cope with a $30 million budget shortfall. This is happening at a time when airlines are outsourcing maintenance to overseas facilities that may not have the same standards as U.S. shops.
Along with the budget cuts, inspectors say they are pressured as never before to avoid reporting any problems that might result in grounded planes. “The saying here is, ‘Get ‘em up,’” said one Midwestern FAA inspector.
Four 737s went down in the past four months. The accidents underline concerns of some experts in the FAA and outside the agency who question the easing of FAA regulations and enforcement. “The aviation makers are saying ‘Let us be self-regulating, like the auto industry,’’ says Tomaso DiPaolo, national aircraft certification representative for National Air Traffic Controllers Association. “I ask them if they want the same death rate as the auto industry.” Michael Gonzales, an FAA inspector and national assistant with Professional Airways Systems Specialists, a union representing more than 12,000 FAA inspectors and technicians, believes this is a dangerous time to be loosening the reigns on the aviation industry. “We have major airlines in Chapter 11. We have major airlines that are outsourcing maintenance all over the world, trying to get a bigger bang for the dollar. Something’s got to give.” Relax regulations under these conditions, he says, “and the fox starts chasing the hens.” But Boeing and the major airlines benefit from having filled their ranks with former administration officials or their spouses. Boeing vice president Tom McSweeny left the FAA in 2001; former deputy administrator Linda Daschle, wife of former Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle, is a lobbyist for American and Northwest Airlines, and for Boeing. When the FAA does attempt to regulate the industry, it is often met with protests that whatever it wants inspected or replaced would cost too much and hurt business.
It’s too early to tell what caused the recent Boeing 737 crashes in Greece, Nigeria, and Indonesia. (Another crash, in Peru, was blamed on bad weather). Investigators in Indonesia suspect engine failure may have played a part, while the Nigerian investigation is still in its early days. A loss of cabin pressure is believed to have been a major factor in the Greek crash, though what caused it has not yet been determined. Decompression disasters are one possible outcome from faulty fuselage parts such as bear straps and chords made by Ducommun, some of which allegedly were wrested into position during assembly because of their flaws, in a process known as “bash to fit.”
The 1988 Aloha Airlines incident, in which an explosive decompression caused an 18-foot section of the 737’s fuselage to blow off 24,000 feet over the Pacific, taking a flight attendant with it, was attributed to tiny, undetected cracks along the skin of the aircraft, which had logged more flights than all but one other 737, and spurred an FAA program to detect and fix aging, fatigued aircraft parts before they caused a crash. Aviation experts say that airplane parts that are pre-stressed by being “bashed to fit” have a greater chance of failure as they age than pieces that are made and installed correctly—making it critical that the FAA identify Ducommun’s alleged defective components.
Sheila Kaplan is Mother Jones' Investigative Editor. Frank Koughan is a New York-based investigative reporter and television producer.
