Fish in a Barrel

**June 18, 2024: Hearing on Boeing’s Broken Safety Culture**

I saw something funny last week; On June 18th, Dave Calhoun, soon-to-be former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Boeing, sat before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations (HSGAI) Subcommittee. (Aren’t big title words impressive?) I didn’t physically watch the hearing, which has the attention-grabbing attraction of watching continental drift, but I caught the highlights in the news. The hearing was aimed at addressing (fixing) Boeing’s ‘broken’ safety culture. The old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” didn’t apply here because, “If it doesn’t exist, ya can’t fix it.”

Excuse the cynicism; I worked for the government and recognize a fish-in-a-barrel fishing trip, when I see one. It’s hard to respect both the fish and the fishers in this show. This hearing took place because our elected officials were inspired into action by 2024 election year posturing that produces election year fund-raising. It doesn’t matter if there’s a ‘D’, an ‘R’ or an ‘I’ (or any other letter) after an elected official’s name, the term ‘safety culture’ only means the answer to a crossword clue for 17-Across: 13-letters, two-word term for ‘how to assure workers and, as a result, customers are safe’.

What is a safety culture? To be brief, it is a work environment that promotes safety practices. What it’s not is an environment where people feel safe from mean people; that’s the job of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). That’s what Boeing has been promoting in place of a safety culture.

To expand, safety culture is a serious commitment to ensuring that quality control measures are in place and used to the Nth degree; that safety is an evolution, one that improves from change to change; safety developed as Boeing advanced from the 737-100 to the 737 MAX. Risk analysis is employed to identify risks and analyze those risks before generating corrective actions and implementing them. This process is accomplished forever, in aeternum, supremo, in perpetuum … or longer, if need be. Safety culture must be built into a business; like Boeing, in its products, continuing services, customer support, technologies, and engineering. It’s what prevents things like doors from flying off airplanes in flight.

More important is that safety culture comes from the top, as in senior management, and is communicated down to the floor – never the other way around. Senior management must believe in the safety culture, not just when it’s convenient, as in a shareholders’ meeting. Everyone must be a practicing participant, especially senior management’s safety by example.

Reading about the hearing, it wasn’t clear what was more duplicitous, Calhoun’s scripted apology to victim family members for those killed in Boeing-related accidents or that the HSGAI Subcommittee staged the apology. The families sat in the gallery complete with victim pictures on white posterboard, tear-stained faces, and emotion-filled looks. Calhoun stood, turned around to face them and tried for sober words to ease the pain of losses that occurred under his watch and the previous CEO Dennis Muilenburg. When he sat down it was with an inconspicuous wipe of the brow as he checked the box on a pad of paper in front of him. “Apology with grim face? Check!”

Look, maybe he did mean it. The whole scene looked contrived; HSGAI members continued to glare at him, perhaps adding a slight shake of the head. How theatrical everything was. In the end, it was an emotion-packed distraction from the job at hand: Safety Culture. What happened to it? What happened to the oversight of Spirit Aerospace? Is the unhealthy amount of contracting work outsourcing what killed the safety culture? Did Boeing lose control of the contracted work? Did it ever have control?

The safety culture at Boeing didn’t just … disappear; it never made the leap from 1990s Boeing to 2020s Boeing. Why? One reason is … Boeing contracts out to companies with their own safety culture problems; there are layers upon layers of safety cultures that don’t exist. That’s what we in the Quality industry call a Root Cause: Boeing and its contractors have no safety cultures to build from.

If you’re on the HSGAI committee, you may want to write this down.

That’s why this HSGAI hearing is so pathetic. Bureaucrats fastened onto a buzz term: safety culture. They determined only HSGAI members can save us from Boeing. Someone even ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to work on Boeing’s safety culture, which is ironic because the FAA let their own safety culture ISO 9001 quality system die on the vine. An agency with a failed safety culture will now require one from Boeing … and the airlines. Do we see the problem here? Complacency has killed safety.

After this exercise in futility was concluded, Calhoun went into forced retirement. He won’t fly on a Boeing or Airbus … ever; his golden parachute will guarantee private jets for the rest of his life. All he had to do was sit for a few hours acting humble, wringing his hands while he withstands the slings and arrows of yet another clueless subcommittee. And Boeing will load another CEO with no safety culture priority; he or she will continue with business-as-usual until the next safety event, maybe a multiple fatal accident. And in four years we’ll be back in the same old congressional room doing this again.

The media ate it up. “Senator So-and-So really Fill in the blank (grilled, blasted, crushed, decimated) Calhoun”. After the hearing, elected HSGAI members got their official tally of funds raised and checked how many times they were quoted; their interns corralled as many salivating media persons as possible to take direct quotes and observe fist-pounding accentuations of their points.

I do hope the victims’ families receive peace for the loss of their loved ones; I’m not confident they will. Though these are Senate hearings, they don’t carry the weight of a court of law; there’s no judge; these elected officials aren’t gathering evidence for a criminal case, they’re just bloviating; they’re shooting fish in a barrel for the cameras. Calhoun’s apology? In law, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. Nobody was seeking the truth because they couldn’t define the truth; it’s never been about safety. Why? Because the HSGAI and every other government organization, from the FAA to the to the top of the Department of Transportation should have recognized Boeing’s safety culture problems years ago.

Does anyone remember when former FAA Administrator Steve Dickson left the FAA in February 2022? Before he retired the FAA found Boeing engineers tasked with dealing with safety issues, “… struggled to demonstrate an understanding of FAA certification processes.” Dickson repeated these comments made four months earlier. To be clear, some Boeing engineers were unqualified to approve Boeing designs. The comments were made just two years ago. Those were pretty strong words Dickson spoke over his shoulder as he departed. Yet the HSGAI folks somehow missed that news story. Maybe they thought, why ask Calhoun about unqualified engineers when we can ask more important questions, like “What’s your salary and retirement bonus?” Are two years too late considered ‘better late than never’?

The good news is if we wait another two months, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will hold their hearing on the Alaska Airlines B737 door departure. NTSB board members will act just as appalled, frustrated, and confused as the HSGAI guys, but they’ll be doing it seven months after the fact … not five. We are to believe they needed all this time to properly study a door that they found; against an airplane that was sitting at the airport; using paperwork they have a legal department to subpoena records from Boeing and Spirit Aerospace for. How is this taking seven months to prepare when the airline industry needed to know in February? Were there other accidents the NTSB was investigating? Was there an investigator shortage? Was the B737’s aircraft door frame somehow inaccessible to non-destructive testing, metallurgy inspections, visual verification, or maintenance practices reviews? Did the NTSB forget hearings are fact-finding events? Does the NTSB even have investigators who know and worked maintenance to understand how that played into the incident?

Where’s Buttigieg? Is he dressed like Waldo and lost in a background of yellow and red? Is he going to testify? Maybe he’ll explain how DEI hiring practices are working at Boeing. Perhaps he can enlighten us about how DEI is leading Boeing and the airlines to promising leaps in safety. Or maybe Buttigieg can be truthful, admit DEI is a failure. Heck, he can even point to Calhoun sitting down from him and blame Calhoun for DEI.

Hmmm! “Point finger at CEO? Check.”

This circus has got to stop. Many of my colleagues, serious about aviation safety, who are present and former safety inspectors, investigators, instructors, mechanics, pilots, and flight attendants all know this hearing went nowhere. No safety culture will spring from whole cloth; nobody’s going to be inspired by rainy day politicians with a sudden case of ‘The Concerns’. Some in industry will be fooled; many in the media will try to convince others that the HSGAI hearing is progress. But it’s not. It’s theater.

So, let me save everyone a little time so you can spend the remaining hours of the day constructively. 1 – Calhoun won’t go to jail, or be fined, or feel remorse. 2 – The NTSB will have a hearing in August, though by that time no one will remember why. 3 – Buttigieg will be a no-show due to a/an _____________. 4 – The HSGAI members will sing their own praises but will not remember what they did. 5 – The media will be generous High-fiving each other. And 6 – Safety won’t be improved, not … one … little … bit.

Now, turn off C-Span and go out and get some sun. You’re welcome.

Hours

Experienced

… Professional

… … Safety-Focused

AMSP