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Boeing sought on Monday to reassure the general public of the protection of its 787 Dreamliner aircraft days earlier than a whistle-blower is scheduled to testify earlier than Congress about his issues relating to the jet’s structural integrity.
In a briefing for reporters on the manufacturing facility in North Charleston, S.C., the place the aircraft is assembled, two prime Boeing engineers mentioned the corporate had performed exhaustive exams, inspections and analyses of the aircraft, each throughout its growth and lately, and located no proof that its physique would fail prematurely.
The presentation got here slightly below every week after The New York Times reported the allegations by the whistle-blower, Sam Salehpour, who works as a high quality engineer at Boeing and is ready to testify earlier than a Senate panel on Wednesday. Mr. Salehpour mentioned that sections of the fuselage of the Dreamliner, a wide-body aircraft that makes intensive use of composite supplies, weren’t correctly fixed collectively and that the aircraft might undergo structural failure over time in consequence. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating his allegations.
Mr. Salehpour’s claims immediately created one other public-relations downside for Boeing, which has been dealing with intense scrutiny over its manufacturing practices after a panel got here off a 737 Max throughout an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
Mr. Salehpour mentioned that the gaps the place sections of the Dreamliner’s fuselage had been fixed collectively didn’t at all times meet Boeing’s specs, one thing that he mentioned might weaken the plane over time. The Boeing engineers disagreed together with his evaluation, with out naming him. They mentioned the aircraft had gone by intensive testing that confirmed that, in about 99 p.c of instances, the gaps met the specs. Even if the gaps exceeded the specs by an affordable quantity, they might not have an effect on the aircraft’s sturdiness, the engineers added.
“Not solely did we interrogate these airframes — we had been taking out fasteners, we had been in search of harm, we’re additionally doing the approval inspections to grasp the construct situation, and we didn’t discover any fatigue points within the composite construction,” mentioned Steve Chisholm, a vp and the purposeful chief engineer for mechanical and structural engineering at Boeing.
Mr. Chisholm mentioned the corporate had put the Dreamliner by intensive exams that turned up no proof of fatigue within the jet’s composite construction. A 787 airframe was subjected to testing that put it by 165,000 “flight cycles,” the equal pressurization and depressurization of as many flights. That determine far exceeded the aircraft’s anticipated life span and the airframe nonetheless confirmed no indicators of fatigue, he mentioned.
The 787 aircraft with the very best variety of cycles belongs to a Japanese airline, All Nippon Airways, which acquired it in late 2012, in line with Boeing. That plane has been by about 16,500 cycles, the corporate mentioned.
In an announcement on Monday, Debra S. Katz, a lawyer for Mr. Salehpour, urged warning about accepting Boeing’s assertions concerning the Dreamliner as truth.
“We can not communicate or reply to information that we haven’t seen, however Boeing has at all times mentioned ‘simply belief us’ in the case of security,” Ms. Katz mentioned. “It’s clear that normal is now not ample, and any information supplied by Boeing needs to be validated by impartial consultants and the F.A.A. earlier than it’s taken at face worth.”
Mr. Salehpour is scheduled to testify on Wednesday earlier than the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigations subcommittee. Separately that day, the Senate Commerce Committee is planning to carry a listening to with consultants who had been concerned in producing a latest F.A.A. report that faulted Boeing’s security tradition.
Boeing started investigating issues with gaps within the Dreamliner about 5 years in the past, ultimately discovering that some between adjoining elements of the aircraft’s physique didn’t meet its personal specs of being lower than five-thousandths of an inch thick. That led the corporate to pause deliveries for about 18 months because it inspected its processes and planes, making modifications the place acceptable. That work concerned eradicating hundreds of fasteners from planes in its stock and inspecting the dimensions of the hole between the 2 supplies every fastener held collectively.
The firm mentioned that about 1 p.c of all gaps inspected failed to satisfy specs. The firm additionally mentioned that analysis and testing over the previous few years had discovered that the bigger gaps posed no risk to the aircraft’s long-term sturdiness.
The firm famous that 671 Dreamliners had gone by thorough six-year upkeep checks, whereas eight had gone by 12-year checks, and it mentioned that none of these checks discovered any indicators of untimely fatigue. Boeing mentioned it didn’t consider that Dreamliners presently being flown by its clients had been in want of any modification.
