AIR INDIA CRASH LATEST BLOT IN BOEING’S HISTORY, WHISTLEBLOWERS HAD RAISED CONCERNS ON DREAMLINER

Sun 15 June 2025:

New Delhi: Though much of the media and users on social media have spent the last two days speculating, little is actually known about what caused the Air India flight leaving Ahmedabad for London to crash shortly after take off on Thursday (June 12) afternoon, leaving all except one of the 242 people on board dead. The total death toll from the tragic crash is still unknown – authorities have not said how many people lost their lives in the building the plane crashed into, a mess at the B.J. Medical College Hostel. The black boxes, which may answer some questions on what went wrong, were recovered on Friday.

One of the causes for the heightened speculation is the chequered recent history of Boeing – the company that manufactured the 787-8 Dreamliner that Air India was using. By the end of the day of the crash, Boeing’s shares were down nearly 5%. The next day, they were down another 1.68%. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has said that Air India’s Dreamliner fleet must go through an “enhanced safety inspection” with immediate effect, in addition to six additional maintenance actions on the Boeing 787-8/9 aircraft equipped with Genx engines.

This is the first time a Dreamliner has been involved in a fatal accident. However, that doesn’t mean this particular model hasn’t been cause for concern – especially when read with the company’s history of trying to get around regulators and allegedly rush through production, cutting safety corners.

Here are three reasons why questions may be raised around the company’s role.

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1. Report says whistleblowers had specific concerns about Dreamliner fleet sent to Air India

According to a report published by The American Prospect on Friday, Boeing whistleblowers including John Barnett, who was found dead last year, had raised specific concerns about the Dreamliner because of cost and quality cuts that the Boeing management was allegedly imposing on manufacturing. One of the big problems they have raised is the existence of ‘foreign object debris’ – things left inside the aircraft during production because manufacturers are in too much of a hurry to clean up after they are done. This debris is often not visible unless you’re looking inside the engine or other hidden parts of the aircraft. A Norwegian airline had claimed in 2020 that it had to replace engines on its 787 Dreamliner and 737 Max planes hundreds of times because of complications caused by foreign object debris. The 787s delivered to them “suffer from extraordinary defects and are the product of shoddy manufacturing”, Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA and Arctic Aviation Assets DAC said in a lawsuit against Boeing.

While this is a larger problem, The American Prospect has revealed that people who were part of the production had raised specific concerns about the fleet going to Air India. Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager who worked at Boeing’s Charleston plant between 2009 and 2016, has a list of 11 planes that she says “kept her awake at night” because of quality defects. Six of those planes, according to The American Prospect, went to Air India. When Kitchens had raised safety concerns with upper management earlier, one of the things she was reportedly told was that she shouldn’t worry because none of the planes would be staying in the US; they were all being sold abroad.

The 11 planes Kitchens was most concerned about were being manufactured around the same time that Al Jazeera was shooting a documentary on Boeing using hidden body cameras. The American Prospect reports:

“An investigator who worked on the [Al Jazeera] documentary told the Prospect that employees he interviewed were especially anxious about three planes they had worked on that were scheduled to be delivered to Air India during the first months of 2014. The planes all had serious flaws that required them to be flown to the union assembly line in Everett to be re-worked. The Air India Dreamliner that crashed today took off from the Everett airport en route to Delhi for the first time on January 31, 2014.”

According to CNBC, Air India currently has 34 planes of this model in its fleet (including the one that crashed), and had plans to order at least 20 more. There are currently more than 1,100 Dreamliners flying worldwide.

2. The 737 Max debacle

The most damning events in the company’s history were the two Boeing 737 Max crashes in 2018 – of planes operated by Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines – within a few months of each other. There were no survivors on either flight, and a total of 346 people. Both of these crashes were of new aircraft, the 737 Max. While the company was quick to blame pilot error for these crashes, investigations revealed that Boeing had introduced a new software into the 737 while creating the new 737 Max – and failed to tell airlines, pilots or regulators about it.

The new software, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), was designed to prevent stalls and point the nose downwards automatically if the ‘angle of attack’ was read to be too sharp. Because pilots did not know it existed, they could not turn it off or react if there was a glitch and the software was fed the wrong information, and pushed the plane into nosedive. Additionally, pilots reportedly only had 10 seconds to react before the system took over entirely and plummeted the plane downwards. This is what led to the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines accidents – though Boeing finally took full responsibility for them only in November 2021.

In March 2019, Boeing grounded its entire 737 Max fleet for 18 months as it worked on fixing the software issues that led to the two crashes.

Internal papers later revealed that the company’s aim in keeping the MCAS system under wraps was to try and avoid further pilot training requirements, and speed up US Federal Aviation Administration approval for the 737 Max. Boeing also reportedly knew about the risks of the MCAS system, especially given how little time pilots would have to respond (less than 10 seconds) if the system was triggered without cause.

Just 10 days ago, Boeing reached an agreement with the Justice Department to pay $1.1 billion to avoid prosecution for the crashes. Because of this deal, Boeing will avoid a trial that was set to begin on June 23 on the two crashes. “As part of the agreement, Boeing also admitted to conspiracy to obstruct the Federal Aviation Administration’s operations of its Aircraft Evaluation group,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

The FAA itself has come under criticism for failing to fix its oversight of Boeing, including from a government watchdog agency. The FAA has even admitted that because it did not have enough inspectors, it was relying on companies on employees of Boeing and other manufacturers to inspect their own companies – and then take their reports to the FAA. According to CNN, this practice is still in place even though the FAA has increased its number of inspectors. Boeing employees, then, are basically in charge of self-inspecting and self-certifying their work.

3. A new CEO took over last year to try and rescue the company

Kelly Ortberg came out of retirement in August 2024 to take over as the company’s CEO, after the two previous CEOs, Dave Calhoun and Dennis Muilenburg, both resigned after facing scrutiny over their handling of accidents and safety protocol. Calhoun left the company months after a January 2024 accident, where a door blew off a new Alaskan Airlines plane mid flight. At Senate hearings in June last year, Calhoun faced serious scrutiny from elected officials in the US. The company was accused of “cutting corners”, “eliminating safety procedures” and “cutting back jobs” – all while the topmost leadership continued to be paid large amounts of money (Calhoun himself reportedly received a 45% hike in the year before the hearing, and he was receiving a salary and stock options worth more than $20 million a year).

Calhoun faced even more criticism after his Senate appearance, because he said that he was proud of Boeing’s safety record.

People who worked at Boeing say the troubles began when the company merged with Mcdonnell Douglas in 1997. Former staffers and whistleblowers have publicly stated how the culture that had brought Boeing to where it was at the time was suddenly flipped upside down, and profits were given much more precedence than safety considerations. Workers’ concerns were brushed aside, former employees say on the Netflix documentary Downfall, and people were discouraged from taking their worries to senior management. This corporate culture – including alleged targeted action against whistleblowers – has reportedly continued and intensified since.

With the company trying to recover from a longdrawn crisis and loss of face, one of Ortberg’s promises has been that he will try to regain the trust the company once had and remove manufacturing glitches, bringing the focus back on safety.

This is the first big crisis Boeing is facing after Ortberg took over, and it remains to be seen how the company will handle it under new leadership. Ortberg and Boeing Commercial Airplanes head Stephanie Pope have cancelled plans to attend the Paris Air Show in light of the Air India crash.

“Safety is foundational to our industry and is at the core of everything that we do,” Ortberg told employees in a message on Thursday, according to Reuters. “Our technical experts are prepared to assist investigators to understand the circumstances, and a Boeing team stands ready to travel to India.”

Author:

Jahnavi Sen

Jahnavi Sen is Deputy Editor and Executive News Producer at The Wire, and can be found on Twitter at @jahnavi_sen. She has a BA in Philosophy from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and an MA in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva.

This article is republished from The Wire. Read the original article.