New Boeing whistleblower claims he was pressured to hide plane defects – days after death of second insider

A former quality manager for Spirit AeroSystems, Boeing’s largest supplier, and which builds much of the 737 Max aircraft, has claimed he was pressured to play down any defects he found when inspecting fuselages on the plane.

Santiago Paredes has gone on record as Boeing’s latest whistleblower, speaking days after another whistleblower and employee of Spirit AeroSystems unexpectedly died from a fast-moving infection.

Spirit AeroSystems and Boeing have both come under scrutiny after an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9’s door plug blew off in mid-air in January. That caused the grounding of all 171 MAX 9 jets by the FAA and instigated an investigation.

Speaking to CBS and the BBC in an interview, Mr Paredes said he worked on the end of the production line at Spirit AeroSystems for around a decade in Kansas, doing final inspections on 737 fuselages before these were shipped off to Boeing. He claimed he was used to finding “anywhere from 50 to 100, 200” defects on fuselages that were due to be sent to Boeing.

“I was finding a lot of missing fasteners, a lot of bent parts, sometimes even missing parts,” said Mr Paredes, who left the company in 2022.

“They just wanted the product shipped out,” he claimed. “They weren’t focused on the consequences of shipping bad fuselages. They were just focused on meeting the quotas, meeting the schedule, meeting the budget. If the numbers looked good, the state of the fuselages didn’t really matter.”

The former quality manager claimed that he felt under pressure from managers to keep his reports of defects to a minimum, and was even given the nickname “Showstopper” for slowing down the production and delivery process when he wrote reports of defects that needed repairs.

Spirit told the BBC that it “strongly disagree[d]” with the allegations and is “vigorously defending against his claims”. Mr Paredes is speaking up shortly after Joshua Dean, who worked as a quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems, died in hospital following the onset of a fast-progressing infection.

Another whistleblower, John Barnett, a quality control engineer at Boeing for 32 years, was found dead at a hotel in March, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Mr Dean and Mr Barnett, along with two other people, came forward alleging that corner-cutting in the manufacturing process of the MAX 9 was causing safety risks.

There was another incident with a Boeing plane yesterday when passengers used escape chutes to flee a burning 737-300 after it aborted take-off and veered off the runway in Senegal.

Footage of the incident at Dakar’s Blaise Diagne airport showed passengers screaming as they fled the plane and flames arose on one side. Ten among the 79 passengers, two pilots and four cabin crew were injured, officials said.

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