There Were Over 100 Defects So Supplier Fired Me Another Boeing Whistleblower Sounds The Alarm

➡ A third whistleblower has raised concerns about the quality of Boeing’s planes, specifically the 737 MAX. The whistleblower, who worked for Spirit Aero Systems, a key supplier for Boeing, claims to have found numerous defects daily. Despite these issues, he alleges that his managers pressured him to minimize the defects to avoid delaying deliveries and costing the company money. This raises serious safety concerns, as the two 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019, which resulted in 346 deaths, were not blamed on problems at Spirit, but the whistleblower believes they should have been a wake-up call for quality control.
➡ There are concerns about the safety of Boeing’s 737 planes due to alleged manufacturing issues. Two whistleblowers who raised these issues have died, one of them after being fired for his claims. Despite these concerns, Boeing insists their planes are safe and have reduced defect issues by 80%. The company is currently under scrutiny and has been given 90 days by the FAA to address quality control issues.

Let’s talk about Boeing y’all. I want to talk about Boeing and this whole whistleblower thing because I’ve been paying attention to that and I think that that’s an important thing for us to be able to tackle. So make sure you hit a like for the algorithm, subscribe to the channel, and turn on your notifications and then last but not least make sure you join the Patreon. Link is in the description as well as pinned to the top of the chat. Let’s get into this conversation about Boeing. I’m a little scared and reluctant to talk about it but there’s a third whistleblower that worked for a supplier that puts together these planes and he’s saying that they got huge quality issues.

Let’s make sure he don’t disappear. Whistleblower is speaking publicly for the very first time about quality concerns over a key Boeing supplier. Kansas-based Spirit Aero Systems builds a bulk of the Boeing 737 MAX. We all remember when that door panel on the 737 MAX blew out during an Alaska… What up, Quinn? Quinn, I’m expecting to see you on the live panel tonight, big dog. An airline’s flight back in January. Well, this whistleblower says he often found issues near similar door panels on other aircraft fuselages. Chris Van Cleve sat down with him in a CBS News exclusive interview.

If quality matter, I will still be Spirit. For about a decade, Santiago Paredes worked at the end of the production line at one of Boeing’s largest suppliers, Spirit Aero Systems, doing final inspections on 737 fuselages before they’d shipped to Boeing. How often did you find issues? Every day. I’m finding over a hundred defects in every day. Not every day. Hold on, let me back that up for a second. Not every day. Not over a hundred every day. Every day. I’m finding over a hundred defects in every day. Findings he says his managers pressured him to keep to a minimum.

Even, he says, referring to him by the nickname Showstopper because repairs he identified delayed deliveries, which he says cost Spirit money. They always said they didn’t have time to fix the mistakes. Didn’t have time because they needed to get the planes out? They needed the planes out, yep. While the two 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019 were not blamed on problems at Spirit, Paredes hoped they would have been a quality wake up call and I felt responsible in a way. I came home. I cried to my wife.

I was like, this is so frustrating. I was like hundreds of people’s have already died and they’re not changing. Let me tell you something, uh, protectors, man. I think he needs to be saying out loud. Hey, listen, I do not want to harm myself. I am not suicidal at all. Here’s the question that you need to ask yourself because we’re talking about Boeing in this instance, right? And we’re talking about a video where another whistleblower is basically saying, hey, listen, they got quality issues. This is a life and death situation. What’s the price of a body? Is that too blunt for y’all? Let me ask you again.

What’s the price of a body? Because we all do it. We all take inventory every single day of what the price of a body is and how much we willing to sell it for. Well, in this instance, you can say it’s a big deal because it’s people that travel on planes every day. But in reality, we do it with every single thing that we do. We do it with our talking points. We ruin people’s lives. We do it with the food that we eat. These restaurants and these manufacturers of food, they know that it’s killing us.

They know that it’s going to be a lower life expectancy. They know they’re throwing all of this trash in these preservatives. Listen, one of the things that I’ve learned in traveling outside of the country was that our food, because we all hear it, we see the Netflix documentaries, we read about it. But when you actually taste the food in a different country, such as Tokyo, and it tastes different, your body starts to react to it differently. When y’all go to the grocery store, y’all don’t even read what’s on the package no more.

Plastic, preservatives, all kind of junk that’s in that junk. Low quality this, low quality that, and so what they did was, at every step, they’re taking into consideration, what’s the price of a body? The manufacturing process when it comes to cars, defects, recalls, what’s the price of a body? The paint, inhaling, quality issues, air quality control, the deaths that’s being manufactured, the unsafe jobs. They know, for example, these linemen, and shout out to linemen, one of the reasons that linemen make so much money, you know, the people that get on the lines of the electrical stuff and put stuff back together, they know that it’s a strong possibility that it’s going to be so many injuries a year, so many deaths per year.

When you think about police officers, and they don’t know where these police officer deaths are going to come from, but I’ve been talking about it every single year, that every day a police officer get hit, injured, or they die. And the question that you ask yourself is, what’s the price of a body? What Boeing basically is doing, according to these whistleblowers, is taking into account what the price of a body is, or their suppliers, or whatever it is that you want to say. What’s the possibility of this thing failing, and are we willing to take a chance, and what’s the, what’s the price of the brick? Because the people are ultimately the ones that pay the biggest price, and so when you get people like this inside of a corporation, then this is when capitalism goes bad.

It’s profits over people. It’s profits over people. And that’s basically what he’s telling you. He’s saying that these companies care more about their profits than how it is that they affect you, and they’re going to leave up to you whether or not you want to actually travel this way, and then that’s where your responsibility comes in. I was like, and they’re not changing. He says quality issues persisted. CBS News spoke with several current and former Spirit employees and reviewed photos of dented fuselages, and a wrench they say was left behind in a supposedly ready-to-deliver component.

Were these defects that, if they weren’t fixed, could be a safety issue down the line? Some of them were, because some of them were missing fasteners. And a fastener holds parts of the plane together? Yeah. Boeing confirms it’s long had a team that finds and fixes defects in Spirit products after delivery when Boeing is assembling the planes. It’s a recipe for disaster, really. I said it was just a matter of time before something bad happened. In February 2022, Paredes said his bosses asked him to speed up inspections by being less specific about where he was finding issues.

He emailed his managers writing the request was unethical. What happened to you? They took my team lead away. They stripped me from my leadership position. After filing an ethics complaint with HR and contacting the company’s CEO, Paredes eventually was reinstated, but says he’d had enough resigning that summer. It takes a toll on you, and I was— It’s called nagging you out. And so we’ve learned this practice, and I actually was taught this practice in a sales position that I had shortly after 2008. And so after 2008, there was so many people that was looking for jobs that I learned through some of the people that was leading some of these companies that I was having a conversation with that they would implement a practice called nagging out, right? And nagging out is you don’t necessarily fire the person because then you would become liable, you want to avoid lawsuits, and you want to avoid being able to pay some sign of severance or unemployment package or something like that.

And so what they would do is they would put you in the worst possible positions or they would bring you back, but they would do everything up to a certain point in order to try to discourage you from wanting to be there. And then you would want to say, you know what, I quit. I can’t take this more. I can’t take this no more. I’m ready to get up out of here. And so they nagged you out. They forced you out by giving you such high expectations and little support. And they basically are pushing you out without having to pay you because they don’t want you there because you’re affecting what’s happening on the bottom line.

Until now, Paredes, an Air Force veteran who spent 12 years at Spirit’s Wichita plant, was known as former employee one in a lawsuit brought in December by Spirit shareholders, alleging widespread quality failures, something Paredes says Boeing was well aware of. For many years, they knew that we’re getting defective fuselages. He says he frequently found issues near door panels similar to the one that blew out of a 737 MAX mid-flight in January. The ongoing NTSB investigation indicates that door panel was removed during final assembly to allow Spirit contractors to make defect repairs. It appears the bolts holding the panel were not reinstalled.

Working at Spirit, I almost grew a fear of flying. There’s about two or three units that is in the back of your mind that you know that you would never want to fly. You think there are planes out there that you wouldn’t want to fly on. Knowing what I know about the 737, it makes me very uncomfortable when I fly in one of them. Spirit Aero Systems declined our request for an on-camera interview but says in a statement the claims in that shareholder lawsuit are unfounded and it remains committed to addressing concerns and continuously improving workplace safety standards.

Since March, Boeing has been inspecting every fuselage as it rolls off the line in Wichita. Boeing’s CEO says that has cut defect issues by about 80 percent. Boeing maintains the 737. It’s a safe airplane. Of course they’re going to say that it’s a safe airplane, but I fear for the whistleblower’s life because the first whistleblower that we talked about that was taken out allegedly, they say that he killed himself. It was a second whistleblower just a few days ago, just a few days ago that they complained and they say, hey man listen, we don’t know how this accident just so happened to happen to this second whistleblower.

Check it out. Good morning and welcome back. Here’s an eyebrow razor, a second Boeing whistleblower now dead after experiencing a brief illness. This comes after Joshua Dean expressed concerns over manufacturing issues with the company’s 737 Max planes. Madeleine Rivera is live with very quickly the 45-year-old Dr. T.J. Aperin agonizing two weeks in critical condition rather. His aunt tells the Seattle Times Dean started having trouble breathing. He was intubated, got pneumonia, and then MRSA. Before he died, doctors were considering amputating his hands and feet, but he was too weak for surgery. His attorney says Joshua’s passing is a loss to the aviation community and the flying public.

He possessed tremendous courage to stand up for what he felt was true and right and raise quality and safety issues. Dean used to work as a quality inspector for Spirit Aero Systems, a Boeing supplier. He was fired in April 2023. He said it was in retaliation for flagging safety concerns regarding the 737 Max plane. Dean was mentioned as part of a shareholder lawsuit against Spirit in which he alleged Spirit would throw pizza parties to celebrate a drop in the number of problems, but he said Spirit undercounted the defects instead of actually reducing them.

The death of Dean comes just weeks after the death of John Barnett. Barnett was a Boeing whistleblower who local authorities say shot and killed himself March 9th. Barnett was also in the middle of a lawsuit claiming he was wrongfully terminated by Boeing after accusing the company of covering up defects with a 787 Dreamliner. Boeing and Spirit are under a lot of scrutiny after a door panel flew off an Alaska Airlines plane in midair in January. In March, the FAA gave Boeing 90 days to come up with an action plan to fix quality control issues.

So it’s not good to be a whistleblower over at Spirit Manufacturing, which is completely separate from Spirit Airlines. There are two different companies. Spirit is an airline company. Spirit Manufacturing is a manufacturing company, which is completely separate from that that makes the fuselage for a Boeing 737, apparently, or they’re a supplier. And it’s not a good day to be a Boeing whistleblower. So be very, very careful. I’m gonna keep my eyes on it. And as usual, we always keep you guys up to date on what’s going on out in these streets.

All right. [tr:trw].

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