Roger Marshall Asks Boeing's Chief Engineer Point Blank About Safety Standards: 'What Went Wrong?'

Thank you for the question, Senator. Well, I'll tell you, I've been in this role at Boeing just over a year. As you noted, I've been at Boeing for well over three decades. I'm in my 37th year, starting out as an intern, going all the way through today. I can tell you that in the last several years, and I speak for the engineering team at Boeing, they are extraordinarily focused on safety. We've done several structural changes to the engineering function. We have aligned the engineering function into one organization. We now have the most engineers that ever populated the Boeing Company inside Boeing, over 64,000 engineers. We have defined functional chief engineers for every one of our functional disciplines, including human factors. We have built out and developed a robust system of what's called design practices, where we are codifying every technical learning and lesson on how we do things at Boeing.

Well, Senator, the presumption is that if you're talking specifically about the MAX, there was specific technical requirements that were an error. And to resolve those errors, we embarked on the design practice discipline structure.

From then until today, I think in that particular instance, I think that the analysis that supported the decisions that were made at the time were an error. And I can't state exactly the threads that were drawn that created that error, but we've built a system to make that much more robust today, so that will never happen again.

There's absolutely, within our engineering team, there's absolutely a culture of safety first. Whenever there's an issue or a problem, invariably the very first question we ask is, 'What is the safety determination?' We have a system called the Continued Operational Safety Program that addresses every single item coming out of our fleet every day. Every engineering leader in the company gets an email every day that identifies all problems that occurred in the fleet. They're called cost-reportable problems. We take those to our safety review boards, and we go through a very structured and rigid process that's overseen by the FAA to make safety determinations on all of those issues. Anything that's determined to be a safety issue, we go through again a very methodical process, and we've been doing this for many years, that defines what the safety implications are, what the safety remedies are.

Again, Senator, you're asking about a specific issue. I'm talking about the broad process.

Well, Senator, the door issue was an issue in manufacturing, and I'm representing engineering. The engineering design of the door is not implicated. However, the engineering actions through all of that remain, as I explained, focused on every learning that comes out from the fleet. We use the robust processes that we have in conjunction with the FAA. They're all overseen by the FAA, and implement all safety precautions in the fleet from an engineering perspective here.

Yes, sir. The MAX accidents, again, tragic. The design was wrong. The NTSB reports, all of the investigative reports, specifically identified an error with MCAS. MCAS created an environment in the cockpit at a crucial moment. And then, fast forward, now we're... Mr. McKenzie, what he refers to is about probably half our people, engineering in particular, work on the development of airplanes, and half work in support of production operations. So with respect to the accidents, where we were focused, focused, focused, and the description of the changes, and they're big and are significant across the engineering department, were focused on preventing the design problem from ever happening again. Human factors, a whole new team, a whole new approach, a set of disciplines around it, etc. Alaska, very different. That was a manufacturing miss. That is what our quality action plan is all about. I believe while there was a very discreet miss with respect to the documentation of removal of that door plug, which caused this to escape our factory, while that happened and it was a discrete instance on one airplane, we have tried to look at literally everything we do to make certain that that can never happen again. And that is what our quality plan is about, and that is what we're up to. But that's a very different process, the production process, than the development process.