Catherine Rusoff
A former quality manager who blew the whistle on Spirit AeroSystems, a troubled Boeing supplier that builds most of the 737 Max, says he was pressured to downplay problems he found while inspecting the plane’s fuselages.
For about a decade, Santiago Paredes worked at the end of the production line at the Spirit AeroSystems factory in Wichita, Kansas, making final inspections of 737 fuselages before they were shipped to Boeing.
“If quality mattered, I would still be at Spirit,” said Paredes, who told CBS News in an interview that he found hundreds of defects every day. “It was very rare for us to look at a piece of work and not find any flaws.”
Speaking publicly for the first time, Paredes told CBS News that he frequently encountered problems when inspecting the area around the same aircraft. door panel that flew off in the middle of a Alaska Airlines flight in January.
“Why did this happen? Because Spirit overlooked a defect that they overlooked because of the pressure they put on the inspectors,” Paredes told CBS News. “If the culture was good, these issues would be addressed, but the culture is not good.”
The National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation indicates that the Alaska Airlines door panel was removed during final assembly to allow a Spirit AeroSystems crew to make defect repairs, but it appears that the screws holding the panel in place were not reinstalled.
Spirit AeroSystems, not affiliated with Spirit Airlines, was spun off from Boeing nearly 20 years ago. The company has been under scrutiny since the Federal Aviation Administration imposed quality checks and halted expanded production of the 737 Max after the January groundbreaking. Alaska Airlines accident.
Paredes, who left the company in mid-2022, told CBS News that what he saw firsthand makes him hesitant to fly on these planes.
“Working at Spirit, I was almost afraid of flying,” Paredes said. “Knowing what I know about the 737, I get very uncomfortable when I fly in one.”
CBS News
“We encourage all Spirit employees with concerns to come forward, secure in the knowledge that they will be protected,” said Spirit spokesman Joe Buccino. “We remain committed to addressing concerns and continually improving workplace safety standards.”
CBS News spoke to several current and former Spirit AeroSystems employees and reviewed photos of dented fuselages, missing fasteners and even a wrench they say was left behind in a component supposedly ready for delivery. Paredes said Boeing had known for years that Spirit was delivering defective airframes.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Paredes told us. “I said it was only a matter of time before something bad happened.”
A Boeing spokesperson told CBS News that the company has long had a team that finds and fixes defects in airframes built by Spirit AeroSystems while Boeing was assembling the planes. The spokesperson said that since early March, Boeing engineers have been inspecting each Spirit fuselage as it rolls off the production line in Wichita.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said in a recent interview with CNBC that increased oversight in Kansas has reduced the number of defective airframes, or what Boeing calls “nonconformities,” arriving at the 737 assembly plant. in Washington state by about 80%. currently considering buying back Spirit AeroSystems to further improve quality. Boeing spun off Spirit, formerly known as Boeing Wichita, in 2005.
Boeing claims the 737 is a safe plane.
During his conference call this week, Spirit CEO Patrick Shanahan noted an improvement in the quality of newly implemented inspection protocols, noting a 15% improvement in quality during the first quarter.
“I think we’ve made substantial improvements in realigning all the inspections, interpreting the engineering specifications exactly so that Boeing’s eyes and Spirit’s eyes are the same,” Shanahan said.
Shanahan became CEO in October 2023 following Boeing’s discovery of poorly drilled holes in many 737 Max fuselages received from Spirit that had to be repaired by Boeing.
The “showstopper”
According to Paredes, managers at Spirit AeroSystems would pressure him to keep defect reports to a minimum. He says his bosses referred to him by the nickname “Showstopper” because defects he felt needed fixing would delay deliveries. Eventually, Paredes says, the pressure got worse starting in 2018, when Spirit went from producing airframes in the mid-30s per month to more than 50 per month.
“They always said they didn’t have time to correct the mistakes,” Paredes said. “They needed to get the planes out.”
In February 2022, Paredes said Spirit bosses asked him to speed up his inspections by being less specific about where exactly he was finding problems with the airframes. Paredes emailed his managers, saying the request was “unethical” and put him “in a very uncomfortable situation.”
“I was put in a position where, if I said no, I would be fired,” Paredes recalled. “If I said yes, I would be admitting that I would do something wrong.”
After sending this email, Paredes was removed from his leadership position on the team. He filed an ethics complaint with the company’s Human Resources department and says he was eventually reinstated after the company discovered he was unfairly demoted. But Paredes said he had had enough and resigned from Spirit in the summer of 2022.
“This costs a lot and I was tired of fighting,” said Paredes. “I was tired of trying to do the right thing.”
“Former Employee 1”
Paredes, an Air Force veteran, spent 12 years at the Spirit AeroSystems factory in Wichita before leaving in 2022 to work for another Boeing supplier. In a shareholder lawsuit against Spirit, Paredes was named as “Former Employee 1,” alleging “widespread quality failures” at the company — failures of which Paredes says his client, Boeing, was aware.
Buccino, the Spirit spokesman, calls the allegations “unfounded.”
The company asked a judge to dismiss the shareholders’ lawsuit, arguing, in part, that the fact that Paredes was reinstated after it was discovered that he was unfairly demoted following his ethics complaint is evidence that the company values quality control.
“Santiago Paredes is one of those brave whistleblowers who chose to come forward and speak publicly. His powerful story points to the need for accountability and responsibility in the aviation industry,” his lawyers Brian Knowles and Robert Turkewitz told CBS News. “The time has come to put an end to profits over safety, quality and people. Actions speak louder than words.”
Lawyers say they are working with at least 10 former and current employees of Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems who have raised safety concerns.
Paredes is not the only whistleblower to speak publicly about quality issues related to Boeing planes.
In March, John “Mitch” Barnett was in the middle of depositions related to his allegations that Boeing retaliated against him for complaints about quality flaws when he was found in his car. killed by a gunshot wound in Charleston, South Carolina, where Boeing has its 787 factory.
Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems, was one of the first to allege that Spirit leadership ignored manufacturing defects in the 737 Max. Dean testified in the same shareholder lawsuit in which Paredes is listed, alleging that Spirit “It has a culture of not wanting to look for or find problems, which has led to poor decisions about quality and manufacturing issues.”
Dean died last monthafter fighting a sudden infection.
“In a way, I think beforehand, if something happens to me, I’d rather they hear it from me than not hear it at all,” says Paredes about going public. “My cry is not to get someone in trouble. My cry is to highlight the defects that they well know are in their factories, but that they need to fix. So that their business can be successful.”
–Kathryn Krupnik contributed reporting.
Kris Van Cleaves
