Yoda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is a summer special of The Front Page, The Ends At Herald's daily news podcast. While the Front Page is on summer break, we're taking a look back at some of the biggest news stories and top rated episodes from the podcast in twenty twenty four. New episodes will return on January thirteenth. It's safe to say that in recent years Boeing has gone through a
patch of turbulence. In twenty twenty four alone, we saw a door plug blow off mid flight on an Alaska Airline's Boeing seven three seven Max nine in January, while closer to home, a Latame Airline's flight from Sydney to Auckland plunged mid air, injuring at least fifty passengers. In October twenty eighteen, Lion airflight six ' ten crashed into the Java Sea in Indonesia with one hundred and eighty
nine people on board. It was a Boeing seven three seven Max, and barely five months later, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing Max aircraft crashed, killing one hundred and fifty seven people. One of those people was Graziela de Luis Yaponts, a United Nations interpreter. Her brother is MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics lecturer Javier de Luise. He served on the US Federal Aviation Administration's panel that reviewed Boeing's safety practices
last year. We spoke to Haveavier in March about what's gone wrong and what should change at Boeing. The latest issue on the Latam flight is one in a series of issues that have popped up for Boeing in recent memory. Javier, what's going on here?
Well, Solsey, I think it's important that we split the issues that come up into two buckets.
Okay.
The first bucket is the issues that arise from laws in the design, laws in the manufacturing, mistakes that are made, et cetera, et cetera. Among those issues would be things like the mcast system that crash the two planes five years ago, the problems with anti icing, and the engines that if it's left on too long, the engine that sells could crack. Those kinds of things, the mis drilled holes.
Then there are the other ones that are sort of one of the things, you know, mistakes happen, and maintenance mistakes, happen because someone bumps into a switch or something like that, which is apparently what the last time thing was due to.
And those, I mean, I.
Don't want to say that they're okay and that they're normal, but they're not as fundamentally problematic as the first kind. The first kind really shouldn't happen and when identified need to be corrected as soon as possible. The second kind, well, things are going to have happen. And we're now focused on anything having to do with Boeing and the Max and any Boeing airplane. Very spotlight is on, so we clearly are paying more attention to them. But airplanes run
off runways all the time. There are hydraulic failures all the time. They're not supposed to happen, but when they do happen, if an airplane is properly designed, they should be able to deal with it, and for the most part they do. For the fundamental flawed ones that that's a different animal altogether.
Yeah, and I hope you don't mind me mentioning as well, But you lost a loved one in a Boeing incident, didn't you.
Yes, my sister was on the Ethiopia crash for the Max five years ago. It was five years ago last Sunday Action, and you know, since then, I've sort of I've been working with a bunch of families that lost people on that flight to try to make sure that this kind of stuff doesn't happen again. And my background is I'm an aerospace engineer. I spent my career in
aerospace engineer. I have a doctorate from am IT and here in Cambridge, and I've been trying to sort of help the families understand the technical side as much as I can, and also trying to win able. I'm trying to have input into how changes that are getting made in order to prevent this from happening. Just recently, I completed work on an FAA expert panel that was set up by Congress that went in and looked at Boeing's safety culture and the way that they are manufacturing airplanes
and how they're being inspected. My fellow panels and I spent about a year looking at this, and we just submitted the report to Congress two weeks ago.
Boeing's seven three seven Max production process has dozens of issues with quality control. That's according to the New York Times, reporting on Monday on an audit from the Federal Aviation Administration. The paper said the aerospace giant failed thirty three out of eighty nine product tests for the Max, including checks on the component that blew up the jets, known as a door plug.
I mean, the report seems like it's highly critical of Boeing's safety culture and a number of fronts. Hey and found a lack of awareness of safety related metrics on kind of all levels of the organization. How did Boeing respond to that and to the panel's recommendations.
Well, the FA administrator gave them ninety days to come up with the plan.
They said they appreciate the work, you know, they said the thing that you would expect them to say. We'll
have to see whether they implement the recommendations. I think the biggest recommendation that we had, or the biggest finding that we had, I should say, is that we saw a disconnect between the words that are being said by upper level Boeing management and what is being really perceived and believed at the ground level, at the worker level, at the engineer level, you know, they hear, yes, safety is our number one priorities, Safety's job one, and they
say yeah, until we fall behind on the line and then they's just pushing on the door. They stay here, Oh, you should report things we want to hear about problems. You won't be punished.
And then they.
See, well, yes, but my buddy brought up an issue and now he's been let go. And those are the stories that we heard and talking to people and the surveys that we conducted. And that's problematic because you know, it's not words, it has to be actions.
And the words are fine.
They're being told safety's job one and report things that are wrong, et cetera, et cetera. But if if the people that work for you don't believe you, that's a real fundamental problem and that has to be addressed.
In terms of safety measures with Boeing as well. I mean, they're essentially left by regulators to self police, right, so they get to kind of choose what their safety measures are and how they get up to scratch. I guess is that a flaw that's.
Not quite correct.
For decades, the FAA has sort of deputize, let's call it deputized BOI personnel to act on behalf of the FAA in the engineering, design and manufacturing process.
And the reason that they do this is because the FA doesn't have enough people to do all this.
They could obviously hire more, but you know there's federal budgets and all that sort of stuff.
So for decades this has been the way it's been done.
The problem has been that over the last fifteen years or so, more and more functions have been delegated over to boying personnel, and that pendulum swung way way in that direction and the interest of you know, efficiency and competitiveness.
And clearly during the development of the.
MAX for example, that the FASIO reports that came out of Congress and the FAA investigations all showed that there was what we referred to as undue influence on these people that are supposed to be acting on the faas in other words, on the public's behalf. In other words, they were supposed to, you know, review a design and if they found a flaw in the design, they someone would come up and say, hey, you want don't you take a look at that again, and you know this
is important. Maybe you can see it a little differently, and you know, there's the sort of pressure that was applied and that's obviously not good, and so now the pendulum is beginning to swing in the other direction.
And we saw that there.
Were improvements when compared to what it was prior to the MAX crashes. But yet still there was opportunity for retaliation when it came time for salary raises or rankings in your division to see, you know, if there were layoffs, who would get laid out first.
For all those sorts of things, there was still an opportunity.
For these deputized personnel to be retaliated against in case they made decisions and they made findings that went against Boyante's interests.
New information in the death of Boeing whistle blower John Barnett, A close family friend of Barnett, says he predicted he might wind up dead.
I think somebody didn't like what he had to say and wanted to shut him up.
Jennifer knew he filed an extremely damaging complaint against Boeing. He says the aerospace giant retaliated against him when he blew the whistle on unsafe practices.
So that's a problem, and that was one of our major findings in our report. So the regulations are set by the FAA. Boeing personnel have to are responsible for checking the analyses and the tests to make sure that those regulations are complied with.
Isn't that something that's happened within the last fifteen years.
Well, No, that deputization that I've been referring to has been around since the nineteen twenties. It was done more on an individual basis up until about fifteen years ago. Up until about fifteen years ago, it was individuals at Boeing that we said, you you missed an engineer. You are going to now work for the FAA. Even though your paycheck's going to be from Boeing. You're going to talk to the FAA and you're going to report to
the FAA. And that's the way it was. And about fifteen years ago it changed to be more organizational instead of individuals. It's the Boeing with organization within Boeing that is now responsible for doing things. And what the previous reports found after MAX crashes was that there are too many opportunities for mischief. There, there's too many opportunities for undue influence.
And the law was.
Changed to require the FAA to delegate less activities and to pull back somebody's functions and to split make more clear that the people that are working as designies as delegates for the fa are working for the FAA, not for Boeing. That has to be clear, and for the most part, our panel found that people understand that the problem was that there's still opportunities for retaliation and influence and those have to be cleaned up if the system's
going to work, those have to be cleaned up. Now they're talking now about bringing in a third party, another organization to act as the people that would be checking the requirements and things like that, and that would obviously be better in terms of ensuring independence, but that doesn't happen overnight, and that's a long term process.
Is part of the problem also that there's not much competition, only really two major airplane manufacturers. We've got Boeing and Airbus. So even if people are concerned with Boeing, I guess airlines don't easily have the option of changing who they work with. There's not that competitiveness to make a product that is elite.
That's exactly right.
If you're starting up an airline, you go and try to buy an airbus, your delivery will be like five six years down the line. I mean, there is such a backlog in terms of manufacturing that there is no competition. You basically go to air Bus, go to Boeing, and you take what they give you. So if people wanted to steer away from one or the other, they would be looking at schedules that would be five, six, seven years in the future, and that's just not economically viable.
So people go and buy what they can get, and they pretty much will sell any airplane that comes off the line because there's such a huge demand for airplanes in the post COVID era as the world opened up again. That's all we're seeing. But you know, Boeing has lost their lead, right They're no longer the leading commercial airplane maker in the world. It's now Airbus by quite a margin.
And we'll see whether how long Going continues to hold the second place position because there are other competitors coming up to line.
How is your experience losing your sister, I guess merged with your expertise in aeronautics. You mentioned before that you've kind of taken the role of explaining kind of the technicalities to the families, which I'm sure that they are very grateful for given the complexities of it and your experience and your expertise is quite an interesting juxtaposition in a sense, right, And has it guided how you go about your research into Boeing.
Yeah, it's been quite difficult. I should say that I've tried to help the families, and initially that's what was my role.
Since we started, we've been joined by several other engineers that used.
To work for the FA, used to work for Warning, that are much more knowledgeable than me, and so they've really been great in helping us understand what's going on. But as far as I'm concerned, I often say that I'm sort of cursed with knowing a bit too much. I know how this stuff happened. I know how it should have happened. I can clearly see that there's no excuse for the kind of stuff that we saw on the Max or the kind of stuff that we're still
seeing on the MAX. It seems like the first response whenever there's any engineering problem is to ask for an exemption from the rule, and that's not right. The first response when there's an engineering problem, there's a manufacturing problem, should be to fix it, not to say, oh, it's okay, it's just as safe as if we had complied with the rule. That really bugs me because FAA regulations, there's
a saying that FAA regulations are written in blood. Someone died, some other people figured out why they died, and then we wrote rules so that no one dies again, and to not comply with the rules, and they keep asking for exemptions as an insult to the people that died and to the people that did all the work to find out what happened so that.
It wouldn't happen again. So that really upsets me.
Apart from the personal loss of losing my sister, that just really upsets me that that's the path that seems to be the preferred path for this company as it built there.
And as you say, there's obviously manufacturing and safety faults within some of these instances. But going back to the Latam flight that happened here from Sydney to Auckland obviously plunged mid air, which would have been absolutely frightening for those passengers on board.
Apparently the plane dropped over five hundred feet in an instant. It was almost like getting to the top of a roller coaster then you're headed down. At that point, I thought this is it. There was chaos going on all around us.
And mister Jocko, when he was getting off the plane, he saw the pilot and he approached.
The pilot and said what happened?
And the pilot said to him, my gauge is just blacked out.
I lost all of my ability to fly the plane.
I now think it may have been. Yeah, you mentioned like a switch or something. I mean, I'm obviously not an aerospace engineer or I have any business in building airplanes, but I would kind of make sure that a switch like that couldn't be bumped.
That's exactly right.
And you bring up an excellent point, which is that sometimes when these sort of accidents happen, you know, you got to look for why did it happen? You know, why did four bolts get not put onto a door at the point back? Why did that happen? And you can say, well, a mistake was made, someone forgot to do it, But well, I would ask, as an engineer, I would ask, why are those bolts able to be removed from that door in the first place? Why aren't
they captured? Why aren't they hanging there so that anybody that's doing it would clearly see that these four boats are not attached. Right, what you would just mention is the same thing. You would think that if a switch can be easily bumped, then the right answer isn't to say to the flight attendants of the pilots, don't bump the switch. The right answer is to move the switch, or put a cover on the switch, or do something to prevent somebody from bumping it. And that is the
overwhelmingly preferred solution. It often happens to be the more expensive solution, which is why a lot of times when these things happen, all you get is a notice to airman or whatever, a notice that says, hey, don't bump the switch, and that's not right. It should be a fix that makes it impossible to bump.
The search.
And as part of the FAA's panel obviously you mentioned days Boeing has to kind of get it back together. What happens then do you go in and check what
kind of processes they've done. I don't know what it's like in the US, but sometimes recommendations go out to say big companies here, and the recommendation might be, you know, to better enhance safety procedures, and then they go back in six months and see that there's been a training in place to better safety procedures, and they go, oh, well, tick, is that something that's likely to happen over there?
That was actually one of our recommendations is that there'd be a periodic six month review of where they are and what they've done and whether they're implementing the changes that we recommend that.
I don't think it'll be us that'll do it. I think it would be the FAA that will be doing.
Our panel or sort of cease to exist when we submitted the report, but that was one of our recommendations that we're hoping will be followed.
Thanks for joining us, have youer? That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzedherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Siles with sound engineer Patty Fox. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.