The Scoop: Former Boeing manager says employees mishandled parts

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Former Boeing manager says company pressure caused mishandling of parts

Boeing has had a rough go of it lately. Between a plane door falling off an Alaska Airlines plane in January to news that lapses throughout the assembly process led to critical manufacturing errors, the aerospace giant has been on the defensive for much of 2024, with CEO Dave Calhoun even agreeing to walk away at the end of the year.

In a piece for The New York Times, former Boeing plant manager Merle Meyers described a work situation in which pressures from above led to slipshod work.

Mr. Meyers said he was particularly troubled that workers at Boeing’s Everett factory felt such pressure to keep production moving that they would find unauthorized ways to get the parts they needed. That included taking parts assigned to other planes, taking newly delivered components before they could be inspected or logged, or trying to recover parts that had been scrapped. To Mr. Meyers, managers did little to dissuade or punish workers from such shortcuts.

While there’s no way to definitively tell whether any of the work Meyers oversaw led to critical issues with planes, it appears that this situation is indicative of the processes that led Boeing to the loss of public reputation it’s recently experienced.

Why it matters: Boeing could really use some good PR right now, but this isn’t going to help. Beyond the surface-level issues like the plane incidents and the scramble by the company’s comms and leadership teams to clean up the mess, this report shows something deeper and almost more concerning — that Boeing’s culture of speed trumped its desire for safe assembly.

When there are cultural issues inside your organization, if you let them fester long enough, they’re bound to become external ones. Once they get into the public sphere, it’s a lot harder to do damage control.

What does this mean for Boeing? We can’t say exactly what the strategy will be when the dust clears, but a renewed focus on safety and transparency could help prevent airline customers from thinking twice before booking a trip on a Boeing-made jet. That starts with smartly done PR with a focus on safety and awareness of issues to reingratiate the company in the minds of consumers, and as it stands now, Boeing has some work to do.

Editor’s Top Reads:

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Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.