john barnett, known as swampy Boeing was the place. I mean, they were the place to work, you know? And oh my God, it was amazing — when I put that Boeing shirt on, how my chest puffed out. I’d walk into a store around here, and they’re like, oh, you work for Boeing? That is awesome. And thank you all so much. And you just mean so much to this area. And it was just awesome. And it’s just — [SIGHS] we don’t have that anymore here. Nobody does. I mean, everybody I talk to in Boeing, they’re embarrassed to work there, most times. It’s just — it’s gone. natalie kitroeff Did you ever expect to feel the way that you feel about the company now? swampy Oh, absolutely not. Natalie, I still lose sleep every night. I just — I guess, I don’t know, I got a conscience or something, I don’t know. But I just — I have to get it addressed. That’s why I keep telling my story. Somebody’s got to step in and get it addressed.

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michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today —

archived recording 1 Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency says that a Lion Air passenger flight has crashed into the sea. archived recording 2 An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 traveling from Addis Ababa to Nairobi has crashed, with death reported.

michael barbaro

After the two crashes of Boeing’s 737 Max jets, regulators and lawmakers began asking questions about whether the race to get that jet built and the competitive pressure may have led Boeing to miss safety risks in the plane’s design.

archived recording The F.A.A. and Boeing say faulty sensors on new 737 Max jets can cause the plane to go into a steep dive.

michael barbaro

In reporting that story, my colleague Natalie Kitroeff began to look into whether that pressure extends beyond the 737 Max. It’s Tuesday, April 23. Natalie, where does this story start?

natalie kitroeff

In the wake of the two crashes of the 737 Max jet, we began looking into whether that frenzied pace, whether those pressures might have had an impact not just on the engineering decisions around the design of the aircraft at the highest levels, but whether it also plays out on the factory floor and affects the people who are actually building Boeing planes.

michael barbaro

Basically, is there a larger cultural issue here?

natalie kitroeff

That’s the question we were asking. Then we hear from attorneys who are representing multiple whistle-blowers who work on the factory floor at Boeing. And it turns out that these whistle-blowers have been trying to get attention to these issues, to their concerns for a very long time. And any time you hear about there being several whistle-blowers with the same concerns at a company like Boeing, you pay attention.

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[phone rings]

natalie kitroeff

So one of these whistleblowers was named John.

swampy Hello. natalie kitroeff Hey, Swampy? swampy Hey, how you doing, Natalie?

natalie kitroeff

Or Swampy.

michael barbaro

Swampy.

natalie kitroeff

He goes by Swampy. It’s short for Swamp Dog.

swampy Yeah, one day I was at work just cutting up with some guys and one of them popped off, well, hell, you’re just a damn double swamp dog from the swamps of Louisiana. And it just stuck. [LAUGHS]

natalie kitroeff

So I start talking to Swampy.

natalie kitroeff Can I ask why you decided to become a whistle-blower? swampy Wow. So that’s a lot — a lot.

natalie kitroeff

And that leads me to many other whistle-blowers.

speaker We’re not talking about cars. If your car breaks down, you can pull over to the side of the road. There is no pulling over.

natalie kitroeff

And ultimately —

speaker Then, there’s other things about the plane, the actual material —

natalie kitroeff

My colleague and I talk to more than a dozen current and former employees. And we review hundreds of pages of internal emails, company documents, federal records. We speak with the F.A.A. and with Boeing. And we begin to piece together an entirely new narrative about the way that manufacturing is done at Boeing that we never expected to find.

archived recording Ladies and gentlemen, your 787 Dreamliner!

natalie kitroeff

So it starts with the 787 Dreamliner, another of Boeing’s crown jewels.

archived recording (barack obama) This is the first commercial airplane to be made with 50 percent composite materials.

natalie kitroeff

It was unveiled in 2007. And it was Boeing’s most important offering in a generation.

archived recording (barack obama) And it looks cool. [LAUGHTER]

michael barbaro

I remember reading about this plane. This had giant windows, the kind of unusually big nose. It was going to be the next big thing in airlines.

natalie kitroeff

Oh, yeah.

swampy Oh, that was the news of the month. New airplane, new technology, state-of-the-art.

natalie kitroeff

And for a while, it was.

swampy That was our future, absolutely. That’s why it’s the Dreamliner, because it’s our future. Fully composite, carbon fiber-reinforced —

natalie kitroeff

It was a big deal.

archived recording The fortunes of the Boeing company are flying on the wings of the Dreamliner. So any word of a delay is not going to be well-received on Wall Street.

natalie kitroeff

But pretty quickly, the 787 program begins to run into problems.

archived recording 1 So it is delaying this. And Boeing’s saying, in fact, it’s not going to know, even for the next few weeks, when it is going to reschedule — archived recording 2 Well, now, the company is dealing with two new 787 incidents in the past two days. archived recording 3 Yet another delay for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The U.S. plane maker pushed back the schedule for the fourth time.

natalie kitroeff

To the point where Boeing begins to get a bit concerned about whether it’s going to meet the deadlines that it set for the program.

archived recording Elsewhere, a confident Boeing is going to build a second plant to make its 787 Dreamliner.

natalie kitroeff

So Boeing decides it’s going to open a brand new factory.

michael barbaro

And how big a deal is that for Boeing?

natalie kitroeff

This is a huge deal for Boeing. Boeing has been making its commercial aircraft in two factories in Washington. This would be a foray into a new state, a new assembly line. You’re talking a manufacturing hub that needs to be state-of-the-art, that can manufacture one of the most advanced aircraft in the world, a major investment both in real estate and in jobs.

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michael barbaro

And where they end up building the facility?

archived recording Do I even need to say it is a great day in South Carolina?

natalie kitroeff

They pick Charleston, South Carolina.

archived recording We are telling the entire world that we build things in South Carolina. We build cars. We build tires. And now we build dreams. Big, mack daddy, 787 dreams.

natalie kitroeff

The issue is that Boeing has promised to create 3,800 local jobs. But Charleston doesn’t have the thriving aerospace workforce that you would see in Washington, where Boeing has nurtured generations of aircraft builders. And they bring people like Swampy, managers from the Washington area, over to Charleston to get things started.

swampy I’m originally from Louisiana. I’m a Louisiana boy, so when they opened up the Boeing South Carolina plant, looked at it as a great opportunity, not only get closer to my family, but to help build it from the ground up. So I wanted to be a part of that. natalie kitroeff Was the culture of the factory in Charleston the same as the culture of the factory in Washington? swampy Oh, absolutely not. It’s like night and day. They hired a lot of people from the South Carolina state that really had no experience with building airplanes, and building commercial airplanes, and understanding what procedures were, and the criticality of them. So that was the big difference I saw was they just didn’t have the experience down here.

natalie kitroeff

So they are furiously trying to train all of these new workers. But they’re really far behind on the 787 program, years behind. Eventually, the plane comes out. But a couple years later, they run into a problem.

archived recording The F.A.A. suddenly announced they are grounding the Dreamliner.

natalie kitroeff

The F.A.A. grounds the fleet after a problem with batteries overheating that could cause a fire.

archived recording It’s grounded until it can prove to the federal government that the airline has fixed the problem with a battery that continues to overheat.

natalie kitroeff

They come up with a fix, but what I am learning from people like Swampy, from the more than a dozen current and former employees that we talk to, is that the batteries weren’t the only problem — that there was pressure on the factory floor that was creating a litany of other issues.

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natalie kitroeff What was your title when you moved to Charleston? swampy Quality manager, multifamily quality manager.

natalie kitroeff

So as a quality control manager, part of Swampy’s job was to check the insides of planes to make sure that, as workers are building the planes, nothing is left behind, no debris is left inside the aircraft.

swampy So I was called out to the airplane to look at an issue. And that’s where we discovered all this debris, these three-inch-long titanium slivers laying around. It’s just debris everywhere.

natalie kitroeff

And while he’s doing these inspections, he begins to notice that there are clusters of metal slivers that are hanging over the wires that control the plane.

swampy The risk here is these metal slivers will migrate into a power panel, any kind of power, any kind of electronic equipment, and short it out and cause a fire. And if it’s at 40,000 feet, that’s a problem. natalie kitroeff Is this normal? swampy No. No. Absolutely not. This is a first.

natalie kitroeff

And so he brings the issue to his managers. And he says, we need to clean this.

swampy I physically showed him the airplane. I took pictures, sent him pictures. And a peer of mine walked in on the conversation. And he was telling my peer, you need to go inspect line 230. I said, that’s what we just looked at. These are the pictures I sent you. I said, I won’t sign off on it. I won’t accept it. So I was removed from it. natalie kitroeff So you’re saying, you alerted your manager to the debris that you found on this plane. And in response, he took you off the plane and gave it to someone else to inspect. swampy Yes, that’s correct. natalie kitroeff Did that ever get cleaned? swampy It was delivered without being cleaned.

natalie kitroeff

And it’s not just the metal slivers on these planes. Swampy and several other employees at Boeing have said that there is a ton of stuff that is being left inside of the aircrafts — nuts, bolts, fasteners, rags, bubble wrap, trash, tools. And it’s not just in the build process. They’re finding this stuff on the flight line as the planes are being prepared for delivery.

michael barbaro

And when you say inside the plane, you mean inside the guts, the machinery of the plane, not the passenger parts of the plane.

natalie kitroeff

Right, it’s inside the bowels of the aircraft. So we heard this story of a representative for American Airlines who found a bolt, a stray bolt, inside of an engine. And this was on a plane that had already gone up for a test flight with Boeing pilots. We heard about a ladder inside of a tail of a plane that had also already gone up for a test flight. The workers pointed to these as examples of shoddy, sometimes sloppy workmanship. We heard, for example, of a technician who found chewing gum holding together the lining of a door. Just a cosmetic issue, but again, sloppiness. With some of the objects, though, there were safety risks, employees said. And I asked Swampy about all this.

natalie kitroeff Swampy, I think some people might hear a lot of the stuff that you saw and say, look, it sounds like a lot of that is sloppy. But maybe it doesn’t affect safety. What would you say to that? swampy I’d say, probably about 60 percent of the stuff, I would agree. It’s sloppy. But just shooting from the hip, I mean, 40 percent of this is critical stuff. I mean, look, you got metal shavings floating around the electronics equipment.

natalie kitroeff

If you’ve ever put your head against the window of an airplane, you know how much a plane vibrates while it’s flying. Imagine then, a bolt, or a ladder, or these metal shavings vibrating near wiring or near critical parts of the plane. That bolt, had it migrated inside of the engine, it could have caused the engine to malfunction.

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natalie kitroeff

So Swampy sees this pressure for speed resulting in all of this sloppiness. But he’s even more troubled by something else he’s seeing as a reflection of this culture.

swampy So let me tell you this. Let me tell you kind of what’s going on. So I was assigned to M.R.S.A., quality manager of M.R.S.A.

natalie kitroeff

Swampy, at a certain point, is in charge of the area of the factory that houses defective parts. And he says that hundreds of defective parts are going missing, with no record of where they’ve gone.

swampy So basically, they’re just gone. And we tried to figure out who took them, where they went. We had no idea where they went. We just don’t know.

natalie kitroeff

And he suspects and fears that they are ending up on airplanes.

swampy I think it’s highly likely they’re on airplanes, absolutely.

natalie kitroeff

Those fears are confirmed in a particularly troubling episode.

swampy So I was actually out of office that day. And I come in, I don’t know, it was the next day or the day after. And my team started telling me about it. One of my inspectors was telling me, hey, this is what happened. And there was three of us here. And we tried to tell him he couldn’t do it.

natalie kitroeff

Where he hears from the inspectors who report to him that a manager has come in to that area for defective parts, taken a defective, a dented hydraulic tube out of that area, given it to another manager who installed it on an airplane.

michael barbaro

A Dreamliner.

natalie kitroeff

A Dreamliner.

swampy And like three of my inspectors jumped up and said, no, you cannot do that. That’s a serious process violation. And he basically told them the same thing. Don’t worry about it. natalie kitroeff Is the hydraulic tube, is it essential to the plane? swampy Oh, yeah, because, yeah, the hydraulics is what operates your flaps, and your slats, and anything that requires hydraulic movement, which is typically all your flight control systems. Yeah, that’s where your hydraulic flumes go.

natalie kitroeff

The reason that his inspectors know that this happened is that it looks as though someone has unsuccessfully tried to rub off the red paint that is on this part. There’s red paint on the part because it’s defective. That is meant to signal, do not install this part on a plane.

michael barbaro

So someone went into that pile of red-painted, defective stuff, grabbed something out, tried to disguise it as non-defective, non-red, and had it installed in the plane.

natalie kitroeff

Boeing said that it investigated this issue and did not substantiate Swampy’s claims. But Swampy says it wasn’t just anybody that did this. It was a senior manager. Someone above Swampy has done this. And so he calls that person, he says, and he says —

swampy Hey, I’m hearing that you did this. Is it true?

natalie kitroeff

Did that happen?

swampy And he said, yup, I did. And don’t you worry about it. I got it taken care of.

natalie kitroeff

That manager said it did, and let it go. We have it handled.

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natalie kitroeff

And again, Swampy submitted a complaint about this issue to the F.A.A. The F.A.A. investigated and found that defective parts had gone missing.

swampy So now you’re getting into the culture at Charleston, right? And the culture here is push the planes out. Just find a way. Get ‘em out. Get ‘em out.

natalie kitroeff

Remember that in this factory, there is a huge amount of pressure to produce these planes as fast as possible. And if you don’t have the part that you need to finish the job, just one job on the airplane, that holds you back. That holds the whole production line back. And so, if it’s easier and faster to just go grab a defective part and put it on the plane, that might be what you do in that scenario.

swampy In fact, I had one senior manager one day tell me that — actually, there was a few of us standing around talking about inspection, and he said, we don’t need inspectors. These planes are too smart to fall out the sky. It’s like, oh my God, with that mentality running the show down here? That’s scary. natalie kitroeff And Swampy, were managers rewarded for production? swampy Yes, actually, it’s almost measured hourly at times. I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of pressure to meet schedule. natalie kitroeff And folks are getting — managers are getting judged by their superiors based on an hourly — swampy The number of jobs they get sold, yes. natalie kitroeff Based on an hourly count of the work that they’re doing, of the jobs that they complete and get approved by quality inspectors. swampy Exactly, exactly. And it’s held against them if they create defects. So there is an incentive not to report your defect that you created, because it’s going to be held against you.

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michael barbaro

What does Boeing say about this idea that there is a conflict between the safety that they proclaim and the on-the-ground pressures that you’re describing from employees to get these planes out the door?

natalie kitroeff

Boeing pushes back on the idea that there is a cultural problem. They reject that notion altogether. In response to our reporting, Boeing insisted that safety is its number one priority and said, we prioritize safety and quality over speed. But all three can be accomplished while still producing one of the safest airplanes flying today. And to be clear, the 787 Dreamliner has never crashed. It has a pristine safety record. And there’s no evidence that any of the problems that we document has led to major safety incidents. But since the crashes of those two 737 Max jets, the question that is being raised by lawmakers, by regulators, and by employees within Boeing is whether those three factors, safety, quality and speed, are always in balance — or whether sometimes, the competitive pressures that exist at the highest levels of this company are bearing down not just on the engineers as they design how this aircraft is going to work, but also on the factory floor, on the people who are responsible for assembling and manufacturing these aircraft. Does the push to produce sometimes lead senior-level managers to overlook or ignore or sometimes dismiss the concerns raised by the people who are making these planes.

swampy I just think it’s critically important that the activities going on within Boeing are made aware to the people whose lives could be affected. I mean, look at the 737 Max. I mean, those lives and those families. And as a quality manager at Boeing, you’re the last line of defense before a defect makes it out to the flying public. So as a quality manager, being the last line of defense, that’s a huge responsibility. Everything I put my name on, I’m certifying that it meets the requirements, the regulatory requirements, is in safe, airworthy condition. And I haven’t seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I’d put my name on that’s saying it’s safe and airworthy.

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natalie kitroeff

Swampy is just one employee. But he retired a couple of years ago because of the pressure that he felt to not report violations.

natalie kitroeff I think a lot of people listening to this may have flights booked on 787s. And I wonder what you would tell them. swampy Well, I would say just — I mean, what could I say? I mean, just understand what you’re getting into. I mean, understand that just because it’s a brand new airplane from Boeing don’t mean that it was built right. natalie kitroeff Would you fly on a 787 Dreamliner out of Charleston? swampy No, ma’am. You couldn’t pay me. Uh-uh. natalie kitroeff Swampy, thank you. swampy You’re welcome.

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michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

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michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording This is a very sad moment. This is a very cowardly attack. And it is not just an attack. It’s a very gross, gruesome attack on humanity.

michael barbaro