Broad efforts to improve Boeing’s safety culture are showing signs of taking hold, according to an internal report from the airframer’s chief aerospace safety officer.
Released on 21 May, the report details how Boeing deployed last year required safety and quality training for some 160,000 employees as it tries to distance itself from the issues of 2024 and gain positive momentum with its commercial aircraft programmes.
Boeing has maintained that the turnaround hinges on gaining buy-in across the company, not least of which from the mechanics tasked with assembling commercial jets such as the 737 and 787.
“We are doing our best to connect with each and every employee within the Boeing company,” says Don Ruhmann, Boeing’s chief aerospace safety officer.
Ruhmann says that his office, which increased its workforce by 50% over the last year, is focused simply on preventing accidents, though that involves implementing a complex safety-management system (SMS) across the entirety of the company.
“We are well on our journey with the voluntary [Federal Aviation Administration]-approved programme,” he says.
Turning around Boeing’s safety practices has been a top priority under chief executive Kelly Ortberg, who has been tasked with boosting both the safety and production rates of the airframer’s narrowbody and widebody production lines.
Production of 737s remains capped by the FAA at 38 aircraft monthly following the mid-flight rapid depressurisation of an Alaska Airlines-operated 737 Max 9 in January 2024 after an improperly secured door-plug blew out. That incident grounded most of the global Max 9 fleet for about a month.
The airframer expects to stabilise production at the 38-monthly aircraft rate over the next couple of months.
Boeing is also struggling to certificate the 737 Max 7 and Max 10 as the FAA has heightened its scrutiny of the process following the 737 Max crashes of 2018 and 2019. Those accidents killed a combined total of 346 people and grounded all Max jets from March 2019 to December 2020.
Boeing’s 777X widebody programme is also years behind schedule.
Ruhmann says the company’s investments into “new data streams are positioning us very well to affect different outcomes on safety”.
More specifically, the airframer says it has “expanded the sources and systems monitored for safety data throughout the product lifecycle, and widened the application of machine-learning to augment Boeing teams in proactively identifying and addressing potential hazards”.
He adds that the safety department has added an external executive to lead its internal audit teams.
“This is an effort where we look at our engineering design and look to see that it is [integrated] appropriately in the production system,” he says.
“We go through the engineering drawings and compare them to the build plans. We look for the detailed steps, any tooling assessments that need to be made, and then we go out to the factory floor and watch the work being performed.”
The internal audit system is a “good example of continuous learning”, he says.
“We always intended to expand our SMS system throughout our enterprise,” he adds, describing the Alaska incident as an “opportunity quickly learn about SMS in the production environment”.
Emphasising that while the outputs from the SMS are intended for internal consumption, Lacey Pittman, Boeing’s vice-president of global aerospace safety, says that the company shares critical safety information with airlines “if there has been a hazard identified in the global fleet”.
“Airlines partnering with design and manufacturing allows to come up with more holistic situations together,” she says.
TRAVELLED WORK
Boeing has shown signs of recovery in recent months, with airlines reporting more stable aircraft deliveries amid slowly ramping production rates.
And in a potential sign of an improving internal safety culture, Boeing says that use of its Speak Up reporting system, which allows employees to anonymously flag safety concerns, increased by 220% in 2024 over the prior year.
“A Speak Up item is no longer assigned to a direct manager, but to another manager, and this gives a bit of third-party impartiality to the investigation,” Ruhmann says.
Boeing has for several months focused on reducing “travelled work” on its commercial aircraft production lines, which is work that occurs out of sequence and further along in the assembly process.
“Travelled work is down on every programme,” says Doug Ackerman, vice-president of quality for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “That translates into both travelled work within the factory improvements and travelled work at roll-out improvements on every programme across the board, and those are pretty significant improvements.”
Travelled work has been identified as adding complexity and potentially confusion for line workers, therefore presenting a safety risk.
Ackerman tells FlightGlobal that, in an ideal production setting, “you have mechanics working in position with the tooling that is that position, [so] that the airplane is in a condition for them to do their work in a repeatable manner”.
Sometimes work happens out of order due to missing parts, or mechanics needing to re-open previously completed sections of an aircraft.
In those scenarios, Ackerman says, mechanics are “working in a less familiar environment, and may not have the infrastructure around them that they would have if the work was done in-position”.
“It’s an opportunity for a non-normal condition and that creates a risk,” he says, adding that travelled work is to be avoided “wherever possible”.
A previous version of this story cited Ruhmann rather Ackerman regarding travelled work, which has been corrected.
