One of the Dreamliners That Gave a Boeing Manager Nightmares Just Crashed

[justaprogressive]

For 15 years now, engineers and quality control specialists have implored regulators, journalists and airlines to take a closer look at the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing’s first and only clean-sheet commercial airplane designed from scratch since the company’s horrific 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. The smooth surface of the lightweight composite fibers used to construct the airframe can conceal deadly structural flaws, they warned. The non-union workforce that manufactures the jets in South Carolina is unqualified to stand up to “good old boy” bosses constantly pressuring them to ignore obvious nonconformities, install malfunctioning parts and cut every corner imaginable to get planes out the door, they asserted. Unsavory subcontractors have exploited Boeing’s lax standards to litter the assembly line with fake parts, they demonstrated.

But until today, the contrarians could always demand to know: if the Dreamliner is so unsafe, why hasn’t it ever crashed?

The late John Barnett, who died last March in an apparent suicide two days into a three-day deposition stemming from the insane practices he witnessed and tried vainly to stop as a quality manager at the Dreamliner’s final assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina, had a ready answer for this question: Just wait a bit. Most planes aren’t designed to dive nosefirst into the ground like the 737 Max. It generally takes, he’d say with audible sadness, ten or twelve years for assembly-line sloppiness to culminate in a plane crash. (Barnett personally drove everywhere in the orange truck in which he died.)

It’s too early to know exactly what caused the bizarre crash of Air India 171 in Ahmedabad, a western India city of 5.6 million people, just seconds into what was supposed to be a 10-hour flight to London. The pilot reportedly cried “engine failure” in a mayday call to air traffic controllers seconds before the crash into a guest house for doctors, and footage of the plane, which slowly sank with its nose upturned in takeoff position, suggests a sudden loss of power. The 787 Dreamliner has been plagued by engine problems partially caused by the abundance of so-called “foreign object debris” Boeing assembly line workers chronically leave on aircraft components in their haste to move to the next task.

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-06-12-dreamliner-gave-boeing-manager-nightmares-just-crashed-air-india/