EXPLOSIVE Report: Did Nikki Haley SHIELD Boeing from SAFETY CHECKS? Whistleblowers Say YES.

after a cabin door panel blue off of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 flight earlier this month the aircraft company Boeing says it will add further quality inspections for the 737 in addition to Door plug inspections Boeing teams will add about 50 other checkpoints during the production process but new documents show that 2024 GOP candidate Nikki Haley allegedly helped Boeing kill shareholders lobbying transparency initiative which would force Executives to more fully disclose whether and how the company influenced safety Regulators according to the lever government filings show that while serving on the board of Boeing in 2020 Haley helped exterminate the initiative that was designed to force the company to more comprehensively disclose its spending to influence politicians and safety Regulators per the L news and before the Alaska Airlines debacle one of the employees at spe Spirit which reportedly manufactured the door that blew off of the plane told company officials about an excessive amount of defects and believed it was just a matter of time before a major defect escaped to a customer documents alleg that multiple former employees at Spirit warned corporate officials about safety problems and were told to falsify records according again to the lever joining us now to weighin is senior fellow for Aviation and travel at the American economic Liberties project bill welcome Bill thanks very much for having me on so first I I want to talk first and foremost about the kinds of warnings that employees tried to raise with the company against this exact sort of thing happening and why it was these defects seem to uh proliferate in the first instance well you know we've seen this movie before unfortunately and there is a long history of whistleblowers within the Federal Aviation Administration within the airlines within Boeing within the entire Aerospace sector that have you know given us warnings in advance there's an expression that's used at the FAA among the the uh the rank and file workers and within the airline industry uh that the FAA is the tombstone agency and what's meant by that is that um very often the government is uh hesitant to act until after a tragedy usually a fatal tragedy uh thankfully what happened over Portland wasn't didn't involve any fatalities but it very well could have as we all know with that hole ripped in the side of the fuselage um I wasn't surprised to hear about Spirit quite frankly and I wasn't surprised to hear about some of the whistleblowers within Boeing because uh I've been talking to whistleblowers for years and unfortunately we just don't seem to get traction ahead of these events it it takes something awful that you know becomes Front Page News to get to get the needle to move and mean I listened to you uh talk up to um on the lever's podcast actually about this a little bit and I was really shocked to discover exactly who has been making some of these parts you you explained that one of the parts of the plan had been outsourced to a surf shop can you help people understand how irregular that is and what the safety concerns raised by that sort of Outsourcing are sure sure and to be clear the the surf shop wasn't involved directly in this this incident with the m but that's the type of uh environment that we're in this is an industry that is so heavily outsourced first of all just for starters I don't know that most Americans are aware of this uh it's a big part of my book attention all passengers every airline in the United States today in 2024 without exception every single US Airline outsources some or most or virtually all of its aircraft maintenance this is work that used to be done inhouse by licensed FAA mechanics in their own facilities here in the United States with FAA oversight right nearby with um drug and alcohol screening with security background checks and now that work is being done largely in places like El Salvador Mexico Brazil Singapore China um there's Outsourcing at every level of the airline you you just I mean to put it in the most uh common terms when you walk up to an airport counter and you're talking to someone and they have an airline uniform on and a name tag and it has the airline logo on it they may very well not be working for that Airline they could be working for an Outsource company when you call a call center and then you pay a fee to talk to someone um I went to India a few years ago about 10 years ago and I I spoke to the people that were talking you know on behalf of US Airlines united American um the Outsourcing also extends to the manufacturing side to Boeing Spirit used to be a part of Boeing they have this supply chain of of uh outside companies and what you were referencing was um when I was working on my book I I tracked down uh five levels five degrees of Outsourcing an airline outsourced the maintenance to a facility the facility said well we don't have the people to do this they outsourced it to someone else to someone else and then finally um because the composite materials that are used uh we used to say metal on airplanes but now it's a it's you know sophisticated Composite Materials they're similar to what are often used in surfboards one of these outside repair stations sent an aircraft part to a a surf shop in Southern California and an FAA inspector showed up there and said do you have any aeronautical training do you have any Aviation background he no dude I'm just you know I whack surfboards he said okay well give me that part and don't ever do this again that's what we're talking about here there's you know the question is who's in control when you hear a big name like Boeing you think well okay For Better or Worse they're on top of these things and they're you know they're they're they have control over what's going on they don't there's so much Outsourcing and the scariest part of all is that the Federal Aviation Administration which is charged by Congress and is there to protect all of us they don't have a good handle on who's doing the work where the work is being done when it's being done and so we basically have a self-policing system and that's how these problems keep occurring particularly with the Boeing Max let me jump in there the last um commercial airline plane crash in the US was in 2009 there are zero fatal you said Tombstone agency no one Di no one is harmed in plane travel so all the problems you're describing doesn't sound like problems to me sounds like the airlines are getting more efficient with absolutely zero trade-off in safety whatsoever no discernable change in the danger in flying so what is your what is the downside of what you're describing what is the evidence that any of this is unsafe for American airline passengers well first of all a woman was killed when she was sucked out of a Southwest Airlines aircraft just about 5 years ago um that was a case in which an engine basically exploded on the Southwest 737 and trapnel hit the fuselage the FAA was asked to ground airplanes with that engine they didn't and then a few months later because they didn't ground it the exact same thing happened with the exact same engine type also on a Southwest 737 and this time a woman was sucked out over Philadelphia and she was killed um the fact is that you're right I mean we we all know or most of us know that we are in an era of uh unprecedented safety and and the fewest fatalities we've ever seen in history of the industry however when you talk to real Aviation safety experts the people that crunch the numbers and and and analyze these things they will tell you that while obviously the accident record and the fatal accident record those are important measurements they are not the only measurements that does not mean that we don't listen to whistleblowers that does not mean that we don't look at trends that are going in the wrong direction as one safety expert said to me uh before the deep water Horizon event in the Gulf of Mexico the day before that happened that explosion the safety record was 100% but meanwhile there were people that were saying there's a problem we have a problem with oversight in this country to rest on laurels and to say well look the accident record speaks for itself it doesn't speak for itself the fact is there is enough evidence that trend lines are going in the wrong direction there is not the same level of FAA oversight there is not the same level of attention now people were saying the same thing about the accident record outside the United States a few years ago and then we saw two fatal accidents totaling what was it 346 people with those two Max aircraft that was not on us soil but it was a US aircraft and again to just say well the the safety record speaks for itself it doesn't speak for itself it's a big measurement I'm not dismissing it but there are other factors that we need to consider and before we wrap uh how concerned should people be about Nikki Haley's role in this specifically especially given uh that she's doing better than expected in the presidential race what can we glean from her choice to intervene here it seems to uh prevent the kinds of regulations that might make planes more safe in the United States well I I for one would love to see one of the reporters following her on the campaign Trail ask her about this I don't think I haven't seen that yet um the bottom line is Boeing is a very political company it is the largest exporter in the United States I believe it's the number two defense contractor um it is so interwoven with the government um you know Nikki Haley was on the board Carolyn Kennedy was on the board um you you you underestimate Boeing's lobbying footprint you know at at your peril um this is a company that is so intrinsically bound to the US government and much of the research and development that Boeing has developed over the years has come from either the Pentagon or from NASA uh my colleague Matt Stoler just recommended the other day that boing be nationalized that um you know they are basically a monopoly here in the United States there are two effectively two large aircraft manufacturers worldwide Boeing and Airbus Europe and um we have to look at some new ways of um of addressing Boeing's political footprint because um uh Nikki Haley is it's a very disturbing development what came to light last week but it's not at all surprising to those that follow Boe uh they have a tremendous lobbying presence yeah Bill McGee thank you so much for Lending your expertise to this segment we really appreciate it thank you

Channel: The Hill

Views: 79,497

Keywords: Rising, Progressive, Progressive Politics, Democrats, Democratic Party, Republicans, GOP, Republican Party, Alaskan Airlines, Boeing, Spirit Aero Systems, Aircraft, Planes, Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, 737 Max 9 Flight

Id: -tSrvNmHOq4

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024