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Boeing sought Monday to reassure the public about the safety of its 787 Dreamliner plane, days before a whistleblower is scheduled to testify before Congress about concerns about the plane’s structural integrity.
In a briefing for reporters at the North Charleston, South Carolina, factory where the plane is assembled, two top Boeing engineers said the company had conducted extensive testing, inspections and analysis of the plane, both during its development and in the future. recent years, and found There is no evidence that his body would fail prematurely.
The filing came a little less than a week after The New York Times reported the accusations by the whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, who works as a quality engineer at Boeing and will testify before a Senate panel on Wednesday. Salehpour said the fuselage sections of the Dreamliner, a wide-body aircraft that extensively uses composite materials, were not properly joined and that, as a result, the plane could suffer structural failures over time. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating his allegations.
Salehpour’s claims instantly created another public relations problem for Boeing, which has been facing intense scrutiny over its manufacturing practices after a panel detached from a 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
Salehpour said the gaps where sections of the Dreamliner’s fuselage joined together did not always meet Boeing specifications, something he said could weaken the plane over time. Boeing engineers disagreed with his assessment, without naming him. They said the plane had undergone extensive testing that showed that, in the vast majority of cases, the spaces met specifications. Even if the gaps exceeded specifications by a reasonable amount, they would not affect the plane’s durability, the engineers added.
“We weren’t just interrogating those fuselages, we were removing fasteners, we were looking for damage, we were also doing clearance inspections to understand the build condition and we didn’t find any fatigue issues in the composite structure.” said Steve Chisholm, vice president and chief functional engineer of mechanical and structural engineering at Boeing.
Chisholm said the company had subjected the Dreamliner to extensive testing that found no evidence of fatigue in the plane’s composite structure. A 787 fuselage was subjected to tests that subjected it to 165,000 “flight cycles”, the pressurization and depressurization equivalent to as many flights. That figure far exceeded the expected service life of the plane and the fuselage still showed no signs of fatigue, he said.
The 787 aircraft with the highest number of cycles belongs to the Japanese airline All Nippon Airways, which received it at the end of 2012, according to Boeing. That plane has gone through about 16,500 cycles, the company said.
In a statement Monday, Debra S. Katz, Salehpour’s attorney, urged caution in accepting Boeing’s claims about the Dreamliner as fact.
“We can’t speak or respond to data we haven’t seen, but Boeing has always said ‘just trust us’ when it comes to safety,” Ms. Katz said. “It is clear that the standard is no longer sufficient, and any data provided by Boeing must be validated by independent experts and the FAA before it is taken at face value.”
Salehpour is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Separately that day, the Senate Commerce Committee plans to hold a hearing with experts who participated in the production of a recent FAA report that criticized Boeing’s safety culture.
Boeing began investigating problems with gaps in the Dreamliner about five years ago and eventually discovered that some between adjoining parts of the plane’s body did not meet its own specifications of being less than five thousandths of an inch thick. That led the company to suspend deliveries for about 18 months while it inspected its processes and aircraft, making changes where appropriate. That job involved removing thousands of aircraft fasteners in its inventory and inspecting the size of the space between the two materials that each fastener held together.
The company said about 1 percent of all holes inspected did not meet specifications. The company also said that research and testing in recent years had found that larger spaces did not pose a threat to the plane’s long-term durability.
The company noted that 671 Dreamliners had undergone comprehensive maintenance checks every six years, while eight had undergone 12-year checks, and said none of those checks found signs of premature fatigue. Boeing said it did not believe the Dreamliners its customers currently fly would need any modifications.
