Patric Boone doesn’t think Boeing can change.
Boone, a machinist who works in Boeing’s Everett, Washington, delivery center on its KC-46 military tanker, joined the company in 2010. He liked its generous retirement benefits, one of the few companies to offer a pension at the time.
He was surprised by the well-oiled machine he walked into. He had all the tools and equipment he needed, a cadre of experienced mechanics to help him learn Boeing’s processes and a system that recognized employees when customers were pleased with the aircraft.
Fourteen years later, Boone said the company isn’t the same one he walked into. Boeing no longer offers workers a pension. Experienced mechanics left, and thousands of new hires are struggling to get up to speed. Tools are hard to come by. Employees feel undervalued.
Boone, like most Boeing workers, has listened closely as executives listed myriad planned changes after the near-catastrophic incident in January when a panel blew off a 737 Max plane midflight — but he isn’t convinced.
That’s a common view among Boeing’s Puget Sound workforce, according to a dozen current or former employees who spoke with The Seattle Times, as well as interviews with 13 front-line workers conducted during the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the January blowout.
In those interviews, workers portrayed consistent problems on Boeing’s factory floor: The company hemorrhaged institutional knowledge during the pandemic and hasn’t yet caught up. Boeing pushes workers to move quickly to get planes out the door, sometimes ignoring the correct sequence of work and neglecting to document deviations. Upper management doesn’t want to hear safety concerns, they say.
While some employees worried about the planes still moving through Boeing’s factories, others said they trusted the product that they helped put together. Current Boeing workers found themselves caught between their desire to protect hardworking colleagues and the need to call out a company they say has let production errors spin out of control.
Boeing now faces production and reputational fallout from the Jan. 5 blowout, an ongoing criminal probe, civil lawsuits and a federal investigation. The panel blowout put Boeing back under scrutiny just a few years after two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people and eventually led to the company pleading guilty to misleading safety regulators.
After the Jan. 5 incident, Boeing promised improvements, as it also did after the Max crashes. The company this year pledged to increase training for new hires, slow the pace of production and minimize how often Boeing allows out-of-sequence work before a plane leaves the factory. It said it updated its antiretaliation policy to encourage workers to speak up.
New CEO Kelly Ortberg, who started last month and will live in Seattle, wrote in an email to employees Friday that he wants “true culture change, empowering employees to speak up when they see potential issues and bringing the right resources together to solve them.”
Katherine Ringgold, a Boeing vice president and general manager for the 737 program, told NTSB investigators the company is undergoing the “most comprehensive assessment” she has seen in her 13 years there and that it will take time to see those results.
“You have to acknowledge that the change road in front of you is not short. And that it’s an enormous ship to turn,” she said. “We have identified the areas with the deepest risk where we need to take the swiftest action.”
But Boeing employees who spoke to The Times and the NTSB are skeptical the company will commit to lasting changes.
Boone, speaking at a recent Machinists union rally, called Boeing’s past eight months of statements, hearings and news releases “window dressing.” He doesn’t think it can make its way back.
“They’re overmanaged and undersupported,” Boone said. “The house is on fire, and they’re concentrated on turning the lights off. They’re not seeing the problem.”
Learning on the factory floor
To some workers, the problems begin when a new hire walks in the door.
Boeing lost nearly 15,000 workers in Washington — roughly 21% of its workforce in the state — between 2019 and 2020 due to retirements, layoffs and voluntary buyouts, according to company data. The aircraft manufacturer was dealing with a slowdown in air travel amid the COVID-19 pandemic and a slowdown in production after the fatal Max crashes and subsequent grounding of the Max fleet.
It started to ramp up hiring again in 2022, bringing on more than 4,000 workers in Washington that year and 6,600 more last year. It still hasn’t reached 2019 employment levels.
Today’s new hires are navigating work on the factory floor without the generational knowledge that so many mechanics relied on, current employees told The Times and the NTSB.
Only about a fourth of Boeing’s workforce has more than a decade of experience, Ringgold, the 737 program general manager, estimated in her interview with the NTSB. Ten years ago, that number would have been closer to half.
“We acknowledge it to be a risk,” she said.
After the Alaska Airlines blowout, Boeing beefed up its training. It added 300 more hours of instruction and began testing new employees and those hired in the past two years. It also called on retired workers to staff its Foundational Training Center in Renton, Washington, where employees practice hands-on skills.
But, current employees don’t think classroom learning will fully prepare the new workforce.
It used to be “you did the same job over and over and over and you conquered every obstacle,” a shipside operations specialist based in Renton told the NTSB in March. The worker, whose name was redacted from an NTSB transcript, said their job was to help mechanics with obstacles they encountered, usually by connecting them with other experts.
Now, “we have a lot of people that haven’t really caught up to their standard of work yet,” said the employee, who has been with Boeing since 2015.
Even though workers are certified in some tasks, they still may not feel up to a job with the exceptionally high stakes.
“We’re trying to build up our forces again, and I think that our past experiences still kind of haunt us,” the operations specialist said. “We’re just kind of going through growing pains right now.”
To keep up production rates, Boeing requires some employees to work up to 19 days in a row, according to the Machinists union, which represents 30,000 Boeing employees in the Puget Sound region.
As Boeing struggled to hire, it turned to what it called the “green-light process.” That allowed workers to take classes after hours or on weekends to learn skills they needed to transfer roles within the company.
Before recent changes to the program, workers were “greenlighted” after training that did not include any work on an actual airplane, according to Boone and others. “It went horribly,” said one Everett-based employee who works on the flight line and asked to remain anonymous to protect their job.
Another worker, a technician who went through Boeing’s onboarding process in the late 2000s and again in 2019, told The Times the training had been significantly whittled down. The worker, who was first in Everett and then moved to Renton, asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation.
Her first training experience reduced her to tears. After a mistake with one of the rivet jobs, the instructor made her perform the task over and over.
When the technician returned in 2019, the training didn’t include those hands-on aspects, she recalled. Instead, she was asked to read a handout on what to do if she lost her badge, then was quizzed on what the handout said.
Boeing’s efforts are focused on front-line employees, but workers who spoke with The Times said the leadership ranks are also undertrained.
Some new managers have never worked on airplanes before. Others are more focused on “climbing the corporate ladder” than learning about the product, Boone said.
The technician from Renton said her managers only focused on delivering airplanes to customers on time, ignorant of what goes into the build. “They’re just ‘hurry up, hurry up, let’s get it done,’ ” she said.
“Chasing the job”
Once inside the factory, workers follow a specific sequence for getting a plane out the door.
Boeing has laid out the tasks that need to get done, when they need to happen and where in the sprawling production factories as planes are finished during 10 “flow days.” The company doesn’t expect everything from one “flow day” to happen in 24 hours, Boeing Senior Vice President of Quality Elizabeth Lund told the NTSB, though it could be possible under perfect conditions.
But the work sometimes has to happen out of sequence or deadlines will slip. Missing or defective parts, supply shortages or shift changes disrupt the prescribed flow of the factory.
For years, Boeing told workers to keep the plane moving, even if that meant leaving tasks unfinished. The company’s senior leaders want to stick to the production schedule, prioritizing moving the plane over the defined sequence-of-work, three workers said.
Internally called “traveled work,” that can lead to confusion down the line.
Employees from one flow day sometimes have to wait until much later to complete their checklist. To get that done, they may have to undo other work, meaning employees have to duplicate installations and inspections.
There is “pressure just to make miracles happen,” said the Renton technician.
Another employee, an interior seat installer in the Renton factory, estimated to the NTSB that 60% to 70% of the planes that arrive at his assembly station require additional work. Another worker, a door crew team lead, told investigators his employees were “replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.”
Boeing has been criticized for its heavy reliance on traveled work, and that scrutiny ramped up after Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. In that case, Boeing workers had to reopen a panel that had already been installed to repair five rivets. When the workers reinstalled the panel, known as a door plug, and sent the plane out of the factory, four bolts meant to hold the piece in place were missing, according to the NTSB.
Boeing now says it will minimize traveled work and has laid out “move ready” criteria to determine when a plane can move down the line and when it should not.
In September 2023, when the Alaska plane was being built, Phally Meas, a Renton manager who oversees the interior of planes, felt pressured to keep the jet moving, he told NTSB investigators.
Upper leadership called and emailed him about the status of the plane, which sat by the factory door for a week, Meas said. He reached out to other managers for help because it was holding up his job, which was then holding up other jobs.
After two years at Boeing, Meas told the NTSB he loved his job and co-workers, but the stress of managing leadership’s expectations, keeping track of traveled work and catching up when the plane inevitably gets behind schedule weighed on him. Meas declined to comment for this story.
“We have to work a lot harder than we’re supposed to,” he told the NTSB. If Boeing gets “good airplanes” from its suppliers and the jet moves without any traveled work, “every single day is going to be an easy day for us,” Meas continued. “But … currently, all the plane(s) that came to us always have issue(s).”
“Wherever the planes go, we keep chasing the job.”
Schedule over safety
There’s a story among Boeing employees that suggests the company has long had an issue with traveled work, the Everett-based flight line worker told The Times.
In the 1980s, the possibly apocryphal story goes, Boeing invited a mechanic who had worked in Japan setting up manufacturing facilities after World War II to help “fix” the company’s Puget Sound facilities.
The mechanic asked, “What is your process to stop the assembly line when you find a problem?”
Boeing’s answer: “We don’t have one.”
Forty years later, Boeing old-timers are still passing that tale along, the current worker said. There’s a lot of talk about stopping the line — including Boeing “commandments” that instruct workers to never send defects down the line — but it rarely happens.
“They travel defects constantly. The line has to keep going,” the Everett flight line worker said, echoing what two other current employees told The Times.
This spring, the Everett worker said, an airplane arrived at their workstation on the flight line that was “nowhere near ready” for the team. But, the worker said, Boeing decided “we’re behind on deliveries, we’ve got to get deliveries out, we’re going to take this plane because it’s close enough.”
“We are clearly schedule-driven,” the worker said. “They say ‘safety first, schedule second.’ Until schedule comes first and safety comes second.”
Josh Hajek, who spoke with The Times at the Machinists union rally and works on the wing line in Boeing’s Renton factory, said Boeing does not stop production to fix defects.
“Ultimately, there’s just a lot of charade,” Hajek said.
Boeing doesn’t expect to eliminate all traveled work, Ringgold, the 737 program manager, told NTSB investigators. “There is not a world where there is zero travel work. It really is about managing traveled work, restricting traveled work, applying a lens of safety to when we do,” she said.
Stephanie Pope, head of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said at the Farnborough Air Show in July that safety and quality don’t come at the expense of the schedule.
“We have to do all of these items,” Pope said. “We have to do safety, we have to do quality. We have to meet our commitments with a predictable schedule at cost. These are not competing priorities.”
Boeing executives said it will take time for newly implemented changes to take hold, starting with the Renton factory with the 737.
But despite Boeing leaders’ pledges, workers say the problems have permeated its factories for decades.
“Biggest lingering problem”
When the Everett flight line worker clocked in at 10 p.m., starting Boeing’s third shift, there was often a “garage full” of airplane parts.
But, Boeing’s digital record-keeping system showed only two or three entries matching the parts lying around, the worker told The Times. No record had been made for some pieces taken off the plane, the worker said. Without that, there’s confusion about what jobs still need to be done — or done again.
Boeing employees are “good at building the plane,” the Everett worker said. “They’re horrible at taking something back apart.”
That sort of lapse likely played a role on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, NTSB investigators have found. There was no record of Boeing employees taking off the door plug that eventually blew out midair and no record of it being reinstalled.
Those records might have prompted a reinspection, which may have found the four bolts meant to secure the door plug were not there.
“That’s where the step was missed,” Bounthavy “Davy” Phakoxay, a Renton manager, told NTSB investigators in March.
By their nature, the number of undocumented maintenance and removals is hard to quantify, but Boeing executives have acknowledged the company has an issue. Ringgold called undocumented maintenance “the biggest lingering problem in our industry.”
During a typical month, Boeing documents “thousands and thousands” of removals during 737 production, Ringgold said. With such a high volume and Boeing’s previously “burdensome” system, it is a challenge to keep track of all that work, she said.
“So our call to action is to make [documenting removals] easy, make it clear, make it simple … and hold people accountable to it,” she said during the NTSB interview in July.
In the months since Flight 1282, Boeing has changed its process for removals — simplifying the instructions, adding stickers to track unused parts and creating a checkout system that requires another co-worker to sign off when pieces are taken from or added to a rack near the airplane.
Meas, the Renton manager, told NTSB investigators Boeing now uses more orange tape to mark areas where jobs aren’t complete or need to be redone. Before, Meas said, he and others would have to “dig deep … to see what’s really the problem. Now, all the issue(s are) more visible.”
“Target on your back”
In July 2021, Jason Walior, a 20-year Boeing veteran, was fired.
Boeing said he was missing a certification, but Walior, from Snohomish County, Washington, alleges he was pushed out for raising safety concerns so often he became a “source of irritation” to management.
As a team leader, Walior said Boeing told him to guide employees with an “iron fist” and enforce a strict two-hour time limit for certain jobs. That didn’t give his workers enough time to perform the jobs safely, Walior alleged, partly because most were still new to the work.
His termination will discourage other workers from speaking up, Walior’s attorneys wrote in a lawsuit filed in July in King County Superior Court. Rodney Moody, an attorney representing Walior, did not respond to requests for comment. In court documents, Boeing denied Walior’s claims.
But five workers who spoke with The Times or the NTSB said the fear of being transferred or fired already stifles their ability to raise concerns.
In February, an expert panel convened by the Federal Aviation Administration found workers did not trust an anonymous reporting channel, Speak Up, to protect their identities and did not think Boeing managers would make the requested changes.
In March, workers told the NTSB they were divided on the effectiveness of Speak Up. The shipside operations specialist filed a report on behalf of another worker and said that employee was “actually really happy” with the resolution. The door lead said Speak Up “gives managers a chance to put a target on your back.”
A quality assurance manager said she didn’t think her English was good enough to provide feedback. A mechanic trainee said he didn’t know the name of the program but knew it was “somewhere on the computer.”
Whistleblowers have long said they experienced retaliation for speaking up at Boeing, including as recently as April.
A Boeing spokesperson said “retaliation is not tolerated” at the company.
In response to recent employee feedback, Paul Wright, Boeing’s senior director for safety management systems, told the NTSB Boeing fortified its antiretaliation policy this year.
“What we want to see is employees reporting good-faith mistakes without reprisal,” Wright said.
But NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said during the August hearing that the company’s decision to transfer two workers believed to be involved in opening the door plug to another facility has already had a chilling effect.
One of those employees, the door crew team lead, told investigators the company moved them “out of sight, out of mind” and described the new facility as “jail” and being in a “cage.”
At the NTSB hearing, Lund said the two employees were initially moved to a lateral position with the same pay, shift times and benefits, then moved to administrative leave at their request. The moves were standard practice and “in the interest of airplane safety,” she added.
Bouncing back?
On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in July, Boeing’s Puget Sound factories sat idle.
The union workers who usually kept the plants humming had taken their lunch break, traveling to Seattle to fill the stands of the city’s Major League Baseball stadium in a show of solidarity amid contract negotiations with the company.
Thousands of workers donned Machinists union T-shirts, waved white towels and held signs demanding that Boeing offer employees more than they have in the past decade.
Union leaders told those in the stands that Boeing wasn’t going to change on its own. The workers would have to force its hand. But even as they cheered on union leaders in favor of higher wages, a restored pension and other concessions to make sure workers felt valued, many employees said they were optimistic about the company’s future and their own longevity there.
Many who spoke with The Times said Boeing could still be “the best damn aerospace company in the world,” as union leader Brian Bryant told the crowd that day.
Seven workers said they believe Boeing’s airplanes are safe, while acknowledging that “mistakes” are bound to happen at a factory that produces dozens of planes a year. What’s more important is “how we bounce back,” said one worker who started at Boeing in February, after the panel blowout, and said he experienced months more training in response to the incident.
Hajek, who works on the wing line in Renton, said he knows the planes are safe because he helped build them. He trusts himself and his colleagues.
Over his five years at the company, he has helped to build nearly every Max 8 and Max 9 plane that has rolled through Boeing’s Renton factory. He expects he also worked on the Alaska Airlines plane last September.
Though he sees his colleagues working extra cautiously now to “build the way we’re supposed to,” he said he was frustrated as he learned about what led to the panel blowout and disappointed that all his co-workers didn’t share the level of attention to detail that he saw on his team.
The past eight months have “been tough, but we work hard,” Hajek said. “I’m proud of the work we put out there.”
He recognizes many of Boeing’s recent pledges as the same things the company considered after the fatal Max crashes in 2018 and 2019. Five years later, he doesn’t expect anything different.
“In some instances, with Boeing, it’s just a move to show they’re trying to change,” he said. But, “It’s Boeing. They haven’t changed.”
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